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by
Carl Sagan
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October 2 - October 8, 2017
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have. ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955)
Hippocrates wrote: “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.” Instead of acknowledging that in many areas we are ignorant, we have tended to say things like the Universe is permeated with the ineffable.
We can pray over the cholera victim, or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every 12 hours. (There is still a religion, Christian Science, that denies the germ theory of disease; if prayer fails, the faithful would rather see their children die than give them antibiotics.)
Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better: It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
This is one of the reasons that the organized religions do not inspire me with confidence. Which leaders of the major faiths acknowledge that their beliefs might be incomplete or erroneous and establish institutes to uncover possible doctrinal deficiencies? Beyond the test of everyday living, who is systematically testing the circumstances in which traditional religious teachings may no longer apply? (It is certainly conceivable that doctrines and ethics that may have worked fairly well in patriarchal or patristic or medieval times might be thoroughly invalid in the very different world we
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An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth—scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books—might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?
A Hubble Space Telescope image of Titan in the near-infrared shows clouds roughly configured to make a world-sized smiling face.
The astronomy of the Milky Way also is replete with imagined likenesses—for example, the Horsehead, Eskimo, Owl, Homunculus, Tarantula, and North American Nebulae, all irregular clouds of gas and dust, illuminated by bright stars and each on a scale that dwarfs our solar system.
[A]s children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror … LUCRETIUS, On the Nature of Things (ca. 60 B.C.)
When I was a boy, our house was filled with monsters. They lived in the closets, under the beds, in the attic, in the basement, and—when it was dark—just about everywhere. This book is dedicated to my father, who kept me safe from all of them. Maybe the abduction therapists should be doing more of that. Part of the reason that children are afraid of the dark may be that, in our entire evolutionary history up until just a moment ago, they never slept alone. Instead, they nestled safely, protected by an adult—usually Mom. In the enlightened West we stick them alone in a dark room, say goodnight,
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There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness. THE ISA UPANISHAD (India, ca. 600 B.C.) Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion. THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan (1651)
Obsession with demons began to reach a crescendo when, in his famous Bull of 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared, It has come to Our ears that members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurations,
they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women
“The giving up of witchcraft,” said John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, “is in effect the giving up of the Bible.” William Blackstone, the celebrated jurist, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), asserted: To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages of both the Old and New Testament.
Innocent himself died in 1492, following unsuccessful attempts to keep him alive by transfusion (which resulted in the deaths of three boys) and by suckling at the breast of a nursing mother. He was mourned by his mistress and their children.
William Tyndale had the temerity to contemplate translating the New Testament into English.
piously defending Christianity by preventing other Christians from knowing the words of Christ.
We still use the word “pandemonium” (literally, all demons). A crazed and violent person is still said to be demonic. (Not until the eighteenth century was mental illness no longer generally ascribed to supernatural causes; even insomnia had been considered a punishment inflicted by demons.)
In a 1992 “spiritual warfare manual” called Prepare for War, Rebecca Brown informs us that abortion and sex outside of marriage “will almost always result in demonic infestation”; that meditation, yoga and martial arts are designed so
unsuspecting Christians will be seduced into worshiping demons; and that “rock music didn’t ‘just happen,’ it was a carefully masterminded plan by none other than Satan himself.” Sometimes “your loved ones are demonically bound and blinded.” Demonology is today still part and parcel of many earnest faiths.
So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition …
Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs, but it just as quickly filled the vacancy with aliens having the same functions. Only the extraterrestrial outer trappings are new. All the fear and the psychological dramas for dealing with it seem simply to have found their way home again, where it is business as usual in the legend realm where things go bump in the night.
Despite this apparent variety of extraterrestrials, the UFO abduction syndrome portrays, it seems to me, a banal Universe. The form of the supposed aliens is marked by a failure of the imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Not a single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a cockatoo would be if you had never before beheld a bird. Any protozoology or bacteriology or mycology textbook is filled with wonders that far outshine the most exotic descriptions of the alien abductionists. The believers take the common elements in their stories as tokens of
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A credulous mind … finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such. SAMUEL BUTLER, Characters (1667–1669)
“memories of an event more closely resemble a story undergoing constant
revision than a packet of pristine information.”
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. SHERLOCK HOLMES, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia (1891) True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality. GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Strange Pilgrims (1992)
Consider these five cases: (1) Myra Obasi, a Louisiana schoolteacher, was—she and her sisters believed after consultation with a hoodoo practitioner—possessed by demons. Her nephew’s nightmares were part of the evidence. So they left for Dallas, abandoned their five children, and the sisters then gouged out Ms. Obasi’s eyes. At the trial, she defended her sisters. They were trying to help her, she said. But hoodoo is not devil-worship; it is a cross between Catholicism and African-Haitian nativist religion. (2) Parents beat their child to death because she would not embrace their brand of
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[M]agic, it must be remembered, is an art which demands collaboration between the artist and his public. E. M. BUTLER, The Myth of the Magus (1948)
first two pages of chpt
Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
John Mack, “There are phenomena important enough to warrant serious research, and the metaphysics of the dominant Western scientific paradigm may be inadequate fully to support this research.
Clement of Alexandria, a Father of the early Church, in his Exhortations to the Greeks (written around the year 190) dismissed pagan beliefs in words that might today seem a little ironic: Far indeed are we from allowing grown men to listen to such tales. Even to our own children, when they are crying their heart out, as the saying goes, we are not in the habit of telling fabulous stories to
soothe them.
As Tom Paine warned, inuring us to lies lays the groundwork for many other evils.
What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true.
ad hominem—Latin for “to the man,” attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously);
non sequitur—Latin for “It doesn’t follow” (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was “Gott mit uns”). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;
post hoc, ergo propter hoc—Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by” (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: “I know of … a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.” Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons);
excluded middle, or false dichotomy—considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., “Sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.” Or: “Either you love your country or you hate it.” Or: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”);
WILLIAM K. CLIFFORD, The Ethics of Belief (1874)
Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry.
Mark Twain wrote The power which a man’s imagination has over his body to heal it or make it sick is a force which none of us is born without. The first man had it, the last one will possess it.
Baloney, bamboozles, careless thinking, flimflam, and wishes disguised as facts are not restricted to parlor magic and ambiguous advice on matters of the heart. Unfortunately, they ripple through mainstream political, social, religious, and economic issues in every nation.
To be sure, the vast majority of people who are untrained can accept the results of science only on authority. But there is obviously an important difference between an establishment that is open and invites every one to come, study its methods, and suggest improvement, and one that regards the questioning of its credentials as due to wickedness of heart, such as [Cardinal] Newman attributed to those who questioned the infallibility of the Bible … Rational science treats its credit notes as always redeemable on demand, while non-rational authoritarianism regards the demand for the redemption
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[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. CHARLES DARWIN, Introduction, The Descent of Man (1871)
Nothing is too wonderful to be true. Remark attributed to MICHAEL FARADAY (1791–1867) Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth. BERTRAND RUSSELL, Mysticism and Logic (1929)
As I’ve tried to stress, at the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.
This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking, working together, keeps the field on track. Those two seemingly contradictory attitudes are, though, in some tension.
