We’ve arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting — profoundly depend on science and technology. It’s a possibility, you know. Those who possessed poorly programmed brains eventually did not live long enough to reproduce. It’s hard to understand how “conservatives” could oppose safeguarding the environment—that all of us including conservatives and their children—depend on for our very lives. Those two seemingly contradictory attitudes are, though, in some tension. 3. “Not at all,” he shouted back. Instead they say, “No, no, no! He was told that "sex offenders often repressed memories of their crimes. From an evolutionary point of view this would be quite extraordinary: why should it have evolved if it had no function? A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. What exactly is it conservatives are conserving? If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Week 3. Why can’t the gods leave well enough alone? ), Mars and the Mind of Man (with Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Murray, and Walter Sullivan) (New York: Harper and Row), Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man (with Richard Berendzen, Ashley Montagu, Philip Morrison, Krista Stendahl, George Wald), The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (with P. Morrison and 14 others), The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution ofHuman Intelligence, Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (with Frank Drake et al. If we seek… nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. “The World Needs Carl Sagan Now More than Ever.” The Verge, The Verge, 24 Jan. 2017, www.theverge.com/2017/1/24/14368306/carl-sagan-science-prediction-trump-2017. The Demon-Haunted World: Reflection 5m. The next fallacy is known as begging the question. …to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky, to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. End of Module 2 Quiz 15m. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a 1995 book by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, in which the author aims to explain the scientific method to laypeople and to encourage people to learn critical and skeptical thinking. …It’s a little bit like the rich imposing poverty on the poor and then asking to be loved because of it. With the use of this "baloney detection kit" it is easier to critically think and find the truth. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate — with the best teachers — the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. Nearly all our problems are made by humans and can be solved by humans. Sagan suggests an addition of scientific television programs, many of which would take a look at believed hoaxes of the past and encourage viewers to engage in critical thinking to better represent science on popular television. If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? In the best of them a few decades. Consumer skepticism makes quality products. It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. with T. Page), The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, Communication With Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETD (ed. Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid. That’s what their beliefs come down to. The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten. One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? “Book Review: Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan.” Book Review: Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan | University of Phoenix Research Hub, research.phoenix.edu/news/book-review-demon-haunted-world-carl-sagan. The search for patterns without critical analysis, and rigid skepticism without a search for patterns, are the antipodes of incomplete science. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen’s wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can’t say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” he returned. …in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. Take a good long look at it. Two men will rise from the past … the great bear … the world will be at peace. When we consider the founders of our nation: Jefferson, Washington, Samuel and John Adams, Madison and Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine and many others; we have before us a list of at least ten and maybe even dozens of great political leaders. Sagan indicates that therapists can contribute to the growth of pseudoscience or the infusion of "false stories". But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. Ballantine Books. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. But science is also self-correcting. (Chapter 25, “The Amniotic Universe”). This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. Continuing with concepts relevant to the 'dragon in my garage' story, Sagan writes about a patient of John Mack who claimed to have scars on her body which were from encounters with aliens. It should not be impossibly difficult. Experiments must be reproducible. If we keep on with business as usual, the Earth will be warmed more every year; drought and floods both will be endemic; many more cities, provinces, and whole nations will be submerged beneath the waves—unless heroic worldwide engineering countermeasures are taken. They wrote their own speeches. ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Religion frequently asks us to believe without question, even (or especially) in the absence of hard evidence. Many people have inherited their religion like their eye color: they consider it not a thing to think very deeply about, and in any case beyond our control. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. Birds—whose intelligence we tend to malign—know not to defile the nest. Sagan shows how scientific thinking is both imaginative and disciplined, bringing humans to an understanding of how the universe is, rather than how they wish to perceive it. (, Chapter 9, “Knowledge is Our Destiny: Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Intelligence”). The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. Witches, Satanism, and an Exorcism: A Tour Through the Rightwing Psyche The demon-haunted world continues to afflict those on the right: Top story on Gateway Pundit this weekend: EVIL: Lil Nas X and MSCHF Release Nike Shoe Dedicated to Satan with a … …if Hammurabi had merely said, “Here’s what I think everybody should do,” he would have been much less successful…. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. And what if all of you are wrong? My own view is that it is far better to understand the Universe as it really is than to pretend to a Universe as we might wish it to be. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe—both the outside and the inside universe—without studying it. There is a popular contention that half or more of the brain is unused. Or if he hadn’t made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would’ve listened to him more. But it does indicate, if a demonstration were needed, that near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted. The visitor suggests spreading flour on the floor so that the creature's footprints might be seen, which Sagan says is a good idea, "but this dragon floats in the air". (Chapter 5, “Night Walkers and Mystery Mongers: Sense and Nonsense at the End of Science”), Scientists, like other human beings, have their hopes and fears, their passions and despondencies—and their strong emotions may sometimes interrupt the course of clear thinking and sound practice. Like “The universe is a pretty big place. Projected upon the natural world… is the idea of privilege. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. I must, of course, admit that if such an. For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations. Just how far along we are in working the various prophesied planetary catastrophes is still a matter of scholarly debate. Sagan tells us to compare our own hypothesis with others to see if we can find reasons to reject our own hypothesis. There is a very stunning range of studies… of interstellar organic matter… the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Imagine. He continues to counter every proposed physical test with a reason why the test will not work. And it has the additional and important virtue—to whatever extent the word has any meaning—of being true. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star. …at different distances from the Sun, different materials will condense out, because they have different vapor pressures or different melting points. The fact that religions can be so shamelessly dishonest, so contemptuous of the intelligence of their adherents, and still flourish does not speak very well for the tough-mindedness of the believers. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. If we are not graced with an instinctive knowledge of how to make our technologized world a safe and balanced ecosystem, we must. The Los Angeles Times describes Sagan's book as "a manifesto for clear thought", with the main issue being the length of eight chapters. No social convention, no political system, no economic hypothesis, no religious dogma is more important. 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