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neculara 's review for:
The Demon-Haunted World
by Carl Sagan
This is a wonderful, important and scary book that has not aged much at all. I was made aware of its existence in a rather unconventional way: through a video game called The Witness.
In The Witness, you explore an unreal and mysterious island, solving maze puzzles that gets more and more complex as you go along. Scattered around the island you'll find audio logs containing quotes on science and religions from around the world and across time, and these sometimes gives you abstract hints on how to solve the puzzles. If you dig deep enough into this game you might discover an area containing audio logs were the creators of the island talk about the purpose of the island and discuss the choice of content for the other, easier to find, audio logs. And this is where I first heard about Demon-Haunted World and Sagan:
So next I want to present this problem. Which is that I don't think we have enough smart representation of materialist atheists, physicalists, anything in that neighborhood of ideas. And I've been trying to do something about that, but it's hard. The problem is that most coherent atheist screeds are focused on defeating some specific idea of God or are angry about the historical activities of organized religions - rather than say, from first principles making a good case for the impossibility of any concept of God, which would be more like what we are after.
[...]
there is a large contingent for present day real scientists who believe in some form of atheist materialism and whose beliefs have been carefully considered. So we need to ensure that we respect that viewpoint.
[...]
Carl Sagan has a good piece in, umm, Demon-Haunted World?, where he talks about science as a profound source of spirituality. But he doesn't mean mystical spirituality, he means ... this pure dedication to truth, and the development of a wise perspective on our place in the world. It's nice. And it's a picture of atheism that isn't hostile or contemptuous.
The quotes above describes Sagan's project very well. He tries very hard not to just make fun of weird things people believe in, but to discuss them properly. That includes looking into how the human mind works, and he underlines the importance of understanding that our perception of the world around us is highly subjective, that evolution has shaped us to be afraid of the dark and of the unknown, and how our brains are hardwired to see faces and meaningful patters everywhere - whether they are there or not. Astrology is just one example:
No stuffy dismissal by a gaggle of scientists makes contact with the social needs that astrology - no matter how invalid it is - addresses, and science does not.
It's completely understandable that most of us wants our lives and our place in the world to be important somehow - that our existence is not mere chance, that is has meaning. In addition to that, religion promises an afterlife - which obliterates the consequences of death. We want to believe in something, not only because many of us are raised religious, but also because facing the world as an atheist is difficult. Many of us passionately prefer to be the personal handicraft of God than to arise by blind physical and chemical forces over aeons from slime. But we can't believe in something just because it makes us feel good, safe, comfortable or entitled.
In this context, science is a system that can help us navigate the world, and understand when we are (probably) right and when we are (probably) wrong:
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 ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error correcting machinery at its very heart.
With this mindset, Sagan approaches and dissects some of the myths of our time, with a main focus on alien abduction stories, crop circles, and astrology, and he does it very convincingly. By drawing lines back to the Inquisition witch hunts, and other stories from the past that turns out to have a lot in common with alien abduction stories, he shows us the fallacies of both (the book also contains a baloney-detection kit, by the way). Sagan also scrutinizes several examples of how therapists and the legal system sometimes fail because they don't apply a scientific mindset or understand the research available to them.
I really enjoyed all the psychology and anthropology in Demon-Haunted World, these are fields of study I find utterly fascinating. Sagan shows us how, and under what circumstances, science and technology can be developed - and what has historically prevented or hindered this from happening (not all societies are equally suited). And in doing so, he also enters into the political sphere. This, more than anything else, ensures that this book is still relevant today.
Sagan investigates moral issues within science, how it can be both dangerous and arrogant, as well as the shortcomings of the U.S. educational system and the dangers this pose. This constitutes the scary part of the book. A well educated public and a free press that wants more than just to make money on entertainment, is paramount to preventing a democracy from degenerating into totalitarianism. If power corrupts - and it does - we need other forces to keep our leaders in check. The poorer quality of education people have, the less they can contribute to maintaining free democracies.
Demon-Haunted World left me with the feeling that science is a very fragile field, at the mercy of much bigger forces in society that might topple or corrupt it. The book is extremely informative, but most of all it works as a warning. We consider ourselves to be enlightened, civilized people, safe in our modern world. Sagan shows us that that's not necessarily true, and that the world moving forward is not something automatic or matter of course.
What I loved the most about this book was the broad strokes. Sagan shown us the place of science and critical thinking in history, what shapes it, was hinders it - on a very large scale. This gives us a much deeper insight than if he had focused on a narrower field.
In The Witness, you explore an unreal and mysterious island, solving maze puzzles that gets more and more complex as you go along. Scattered around the island you'll find audio logs containing quotes on science and religions from around the world and across time, and these sometimes gives you abstract hints on how to solve the puzzles. If you dig deep enough into this game you might discover an area containing audio logs were the creators of the island talk about the purpose of the island and discuss the choice of content for the other, easier to find, audio logs. And this is where I first heard about Demon-Haunted World and Sagan:
So next I want to present this problem. Which is that I don't think we have enough smart representation of materialist atheists, physicalists, anything in that neighborhood of ideas. And I've been trying to do something about that, but it's hard. The problem is that most coherent atheist screeds are focused on defeating some specific idea of God or are angry about the historical activities of organized religions - rather than say, from first principles making a good case for the impossibility of any concept of God, which would be more like what we are after.
[...]
there is a large contingent for present day real scientists who believe in some form of atheist materialism and whose beliefs have been carefully considered. So we need to ensure that we respect that viewpoint.
[...]
Carl Sagan has a good piece in, umm, Demon-Haunted World?, where he talks about science as a profound source of spirituality. But he doesn't mean mystical spirituality, he means ... this pure dedication to truth, and the development of a wise perspective on our place in the world. It's nice. And it's a picture of atheism that isn't hostile or contemptuous.
The quotes above describes Sagan's project very well. He tries very hard not to just make fun of weird things people believe in, but to discuss them properly. That includes looking into how the human mind works, and he underlines the importance of understanding that our perception of the world around us is highly subjective, that evolution has shaped us to be afraid of the dark and of the unknown, and how our brains are hardwired to see faces and meaningful patters everywhere - whether they are there or not. Astrology is just one example:
No stuffy dismissal by a gaggle of scientists makes contact with the social needs that astrology - no matter how invalid it is - addresses, and science does not.
It's completely understandable that most of us wants our lives and our place in the world to be important somehow - that our existence is not mere chance, that is has meaning. In addition to that, religion promises an afterlife - which obliterates the consequences of death. We want to believe in something, not only because many of us are raised religious, but also because facing the world as an atheist is difficult. Many of us passionately prefer to be the personal handicraft of God than to arise by blind physical and chemical forces over aeons from slime. But we can't believe in something just because it makes us feel good, safe, comfortable or entitled.
In this context, science is a system that can help us navigate the world, and understand when we are (probably) right and when we are (probably) wrong:
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 ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error correcting machinery at its very heart.
With this mindset, Sagan approaches and dissects some of the myths of our time, with a main focus on alien abduction stories, crop circles, and astrology, and he does it very convincingly. By drawing lines back to the Inquisition witch hunts, and other stories from the past that turns out to have a lot in common with alien abduction stories, he shows us the fallacies of both (the book also contains a baloney-detection kit, by the way). Sagan also scrutinizes several examples of how therapists and the legal system sometimes fail because they don't apply a scientific mindset or understand the research available to them.
I really enjoyed all the psychology and anthropology in Demon-Haunted World, these are fields of study I find utterly fascinating. Sagan shows us how, and under what circumstances, science and technology can be developed - and what has historically prevented or hindered this from happening (not all societies are equally suited). And in doing so, he also enters into the political sphere. This, more than anything else, ensures that this book is still relevant today.
Sagan investigates moral issues within science, how it can be both dangerous and arrogant, as well as the shortcomings of the U.S. educational system and the dangers this pose. This constitutes the scary part of the book. A well educated public and a free press that wants more than just to make money on entertainment, is paramount to preventing a democracy from degenerating into totalitarianism. If power corrupts - and it does - we need other forces to keep our leaders in check. The poorer quality of education people have, the less they can contribute to maintaining free democracies.
Demon-Haunted World left me with the feeling that science is a very fragile field, at the mercy of much bigger forces in society that might topple or corrupt it. The book is extremely informative, but most of all it works as a warning. We consider ourselves to be enlightened, civilized people, safe in our modern world. Sagan shows us that that's not necessarily true, and that the world moving forward is not something automatic or matter of course.
What I loved the most about this book was the broad strokes. Sagan shown us the place of science and critical thinking in history, what shapes it, was hinders it - on a very large scale. This gives us a much deeper insight than if he had focused on a narrower field.