I read this book many years ago and it made a big impression on me.
His view is that normal, rational, intelligent people... can have fictional stories in their heads about how things work. It takes energy and focus and research to fix these wrong stories, so often we live with them or don't recognize them.
Many times I've been casually talking with someone, say something, then realize that doesn't make any sense. My wrong story made sense in my head, but not when I speak it out loud.
By practicing the scientific method, we can gradually weed out the wrong stories in our heads.
Now I'm going to re-read `The Demon-Haunted World`
I believe we all carry massive mythologies that are tough to displace.
My Kagi-fu fails me. Its by an environmentalist who says any, say "avoid poisoning fish" advice stands against a massive "the line must go up" mythology. He compares it to the geocentrism of the Church; how the Sun, Moon and starts rotate around us and provides for humanity; and how heliocentrism also had to stand up against this massive mythology.
Depth psychology would suggest that mythology is an emergent phenomenon of the psyche; there is no removing it.
Better to understand that it is there and how it works. It is precisely due to this myth-making faculty that in the absence of a legit mythos (i.e. that of Christianity, which was the dominant cosmo-conception / worldview in the west for most of our history) the vacuum of power that is left by the absence of a God figure will be replaced by the nearest approximate/surrogate the psyche can find. This is how we elevate celebrities like Trump to the status of a God-king who can do no wrong.
> "This is how we elevate celebrities like Trump to the status of a God-king who can do no wrong."
I've long wondered about that even as I've watched the shift intensify over the decades, but in the context you describe, the MAGA death-cult starts to sorta come into focus a bit more. As they've abandoned "God" (as evidenced by so many of their actions going directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus in their own bible) they need a replacement god-figure to worship (one more in-line with the baser desires that they're choosing to embody).
I still find it genuinely insane that their worship of one man leads them to fully embrace the downfall of civilized and thoughtful interaction so completely that it becomes a literal existential risk for humanity.
> "Better to understand that it is there and how it works."
This is the way to overcome / work around so many of our basic human "design flaws". Understanding and being aware of those things allows you to take actions to adjust in beneficial ways. This is one of the "special things" that truly separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom; Our ability to outright defy our "baser instincts" (at least some of us, anyhow).
Thats the actual term and its missing from public debate and school curricula.
Most people that consider themselfs atheists are actually undecided, so more of a skeptic then a strong believer in none-god. Questioning your beliefs is the crucial skill skeptics practice and some "rationalists" lack.
I feel like the current generation of young people don’t have anyone like Carl Sagan to bring a sense of wonder to science and exploration. It makes me sad.
> "I feel like the current generation of young people don’t have anyone like Carl Sagan to bring a sense of wonder to science and exploration. It makes me sad."
The closest I've seen in modern times is maybe [Neil DeGrasse Tyson][1].
Oh yeah, duh! I totally forgot about YouTube... Tons of great science communicators on YouTube! I should know better. I've learned truck-loads of great "sciencey" skills and knowledge from YouTubers.
Your reply is not very HN, but you have a point. Many things cannot be settled with a scientific argument because we rarely disagree about the mass of an electron or the spectrum of Helium. In our daily discussions, almost nothing can be decided by science. Most of it boils down to different values, and different ways to think about the world (Weltanschauung). Finding common ground in those cases is hard work which requires inderstanding, openness and fairness of both sides. Or the acceptance of authority.
Everything is subject to fallibility, even things that appear true by definition (if they attempt to say something about reality). Not only matters of worldview, moral values, and philosophy, but science too. It's not simply adding bricks to an edifice that is permanent and final. It's all wrong stories, of quite steadily improving similarity to reality. The goal at any point in time is to be wrong in the next way.
That's understood. Science is never the definitive answer, but I added the "authority" bit for a reason: if you don't know what the mass of an electron is or how you could go about finding out, you end up having to accept authority. But there are many things that are (currently) not open to a similar objective scientific approach. And those are our daily concerns, and the most contentious topics. The scientific method isn't going to help there.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Chapter 13:
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. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Chapter 25:
In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.
My only question is was this slide orchestrated or is it the natural tendency of humanity to slip back to ignorance when all their needs are met, like the Eloi in The Time Machine? Someone made lots of money from this slide, I just don't know if it was random chance or a scheme that worked.
This quote has always stuck with me and I think about it often, perhaps one of the main quotes that have steered my life.
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”
The answer is more often than not alternative c) all of the above.
Development may be a random walk, but there are plenty of people with interest in a certain outcome, and when they get the opportunity they will take it and try escalate the process. That's true in most things.
I also tend to believe that it is not a coincidence that so many societies right now flirt with authoritarianism, for example. We influence each other, even more so now that information is global and electronic.
Alan Moore is a deeply philosophical person who does a lot of research in general, and as part of his writing process. Here's the source for the quote,
However to fully put this into context you also need to understand that Alan Moore is an occultist, so he views both power and chaos (in the social context as well as the metaphysical context) through that lens.
It just makes me think he is a lunatic. I don't think the same person can be deeply philosophical and an occultist at the same time. I recently adopted a practice of reading the author's wikipedia page before reading the book, to make sure the author is an actual expert in the field, and not just a clown.
Say what you will about Moore (though he's the author of Watchmen, widely considered not only the greatest graphic novel of all time and a biting indictment of the entertainment industry and the military industrial complex... no small feat)
But -- I'm an occultist and a philosophical person, so I can tell you from first hand experience that occultism and philosophy are inextricably bound. Any pursuit of metaphysics is occult in nature. Occult simply means "hidden"; it is the domain of those things which can not be perceived directly, but have to be reasoned or intuited out via the mind.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by metaphysics and occultism? Do you believe in mysticism, casting spells summoning creatures from other realms, etc? Or some other kind of occultism? It is my best understanding that Alan Moore is into this stuff.
My own views on these things have no bearing on the definitions of those words. Occultism is an extremely broad catch-all umbrella of domains of knowledge that all share in the essential trait of having to do with something that is normally hidden from us. The set of all things which lie outside of the realm of our direct apprehension.
Metaphysics, in that sense, is a subset of the Occult. Metaphysics itself is an extremely broad field, dealing with things like ontology, mathematics, physics, onieriology, cosmology, and so on.
One need not identify as an occultist to study a field which would fall under the label of the occult. Many things are occult and people do not realize it. Psychology, by virtue of the fact that our own psyches are largely hidden from our purview, is widely accepted as an asepct of the Occult, for example.
As for my own beliefs, I do not consider them beliefs, as once you know something to be true, does it make sense to still consider it an article of faith?
The "crystals and horoscopes" part is such a cheap jab that's going to alienate a lot of the population. Astrology is a harmless introspective process for most people, they just like having a framework to characterise their beliefs and feelings. You find very few people who feel that it's prescriptive and limits their life.
Contrasted with very rational people who are chasing magical, unmoored valuations in the stock market for instance. We buy and sell equity based not on future cash flows, but on confidence there will be a bigger sucker down the line. This untethering of "value" from any productive work is a greater contributor to the hollowing out of the US economy than anyone buying a piece of amethyst.
The verbs are not the issue. America has been hollowed out by political propaganda, offshoring and growing wealth inequality. Sagan fails to identify any of these and instead dunks on harmless folk superstitions. Show me where the Fed rate or IBM's quarterly earnings or a Fox News chyron were determined by a horoscope.
The real enemy is the belief that value can be created from nothing, such that an economy of infinite growth can exist. Once you've exhausted all the externalities - exploiting people overseas, domestically, pillaging natural resources - you're left in a zero sum game.
> Sagan fails to identify any of these and instead dunks on harmless folk superstitions. Show me where the Fed rate or IBM's quarterly earnings or a Fox News chyron were determined by a horoscope.
It's in the same paragraph...
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority
Yeah he correctly identifies the outcome, but like I said he misattributes the cause. And his rhetoric is not helpful in getting "common people" around to his cause. It comes across as elitist and condescending.
Some research in neuroscience suggests that potentially the majority of our actions happen primarily in the limbic regions of the brain and then later our pre-frontal cortex makes up a logical story for why we acted this way. This is really trippy and can cause you to rethink your own sanity if you think about it long enough. It’s quite possible I don’t know why I do much of what I do… but I am good at making up a story to explain to keep me sane. Crazy to think about.
I think that may be something that LLMs are lacking. They've got the make up a story bit but not the limbic system.
I've got a theory that the experience of consciousness is down to something like that - different systems in the brain interacting, like it being a bit of the brain that brings together info from the senses and memory recall and thinking outputs and then makes up a story/model of it.
"While asleep I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of results in elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing..."
> Back when I was at university, a friend mentioned to me that he wanted to read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. I had been a fan of Sagan since my teenage years, but had put off reading that book. Asking him if he’d read any of Sagan’s works, he said “No, but this book is often present in skeptic reading lists.”
> Many years later, I finally read the book. I’m surprised with it being recommended by skeptics, as it has a lengthy criticism of skeptics.
...
Quotes taken straight from the book:
"And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is in its polarization: Us vs. Them—the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, you’re beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the skeptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted."
...
"In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped."
It is indeed a great book. I would caution folks here that it is not particularly representative of Carl Sagan's books. If you loved/hated this book, it doesn't mean you'll love/hate his other books.
I have no idea why you'd be surprised the skeptical community adores this book, its basically the clearest statement of the core fundamental principles, a plea to be open and empathetic is not hostile. It's just wisdom, and the majority of people who think of themselves as skeptics believe that its important. At the same time, sometimes you want to be around people who share and build community with the same ideology as you which should be perfectly ok.
> I have no idea why you'd be surprised the skeptical community adores this book,
The details are in the blog post. Basically, every skeptic community I've looked at has espoused the very behavior that Carl Sagan criticizes in the book. Very dismissive and arrogant folks. There's a reason he explicitly calls out the skeptic community.
I did put this disclaimer though - I don't want this discussion to degrade into a no true Scotsman fallacy:
> Or at least, visible and vocal skeptics I run across on the Internet. An argument could be made that these are the minority and not really representative of the majority of people who ascribe to skepticism.
I read those Sagan quotes as a criticism of capital "S" Skeptics, those for whom skepticism is an identity perhaps more than it is a means to an end. I feel that Sagan's ultimate goal is to foster skepticism (or at least a refined version thereof), and that he is merely offering a warning about tribalism and ego.
> I feel that Sagan's ultimate goal is to foster skepticism (or at least a refined version thereof),
I agree, yet I will note that he goes out of his way in the book to label skepticism and then criticize it. He did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic. The Descartes quote is in the book as well.
Put another way: He was a skeptical person, but he did not ascribe to "skepticism".
One thing I was pleasantly surprised to find in the book was an inclination to believe certain things to be true that many skeptics will refuse to entertain due to the lack of evidence. The only example I can recall was that back (and other) pain is often entirely psychosomatic. He didn't invoke John Sarno, but he showed clear openness to believing it. It wasn't a simple "I must have an open mind, so I must consider this as a possibility", but an actual assertion of his belief in it given recent findings. He gives a rationale on why it is a reasonable thing to believe.
(Sidenote: I have a lot of pain, and Sarno's approach did nothing for me)
You originally expressed surprise that skeptics hold this book in high regard. I just find your surprise a bit difficult to understand. If, on the whole, the work advocates for skepticism (among other things), wouldn't endorsing it be the consistent choice for skeptics? I would never throw out a programming textbook if it criticized and emphasized the too-common tendency of programmers to over-engineer solutions.
> He goes out of his way in the book to label skepticism and criticize it.
Respectfully, I disagree, his criticism reads to me primarily as a criticism of dogmatism. First and foremost he seemed to identify as a "scientist", but he also maintained that you can't have effective science without skepticism.
> He did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic.
I would just differ by saying "He did not wish to be thought of only as a skeptic," I am not sure if that is a complete departure from your intent.
Yes, in my interpretation, though not in isolation.
> It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas.
Sagan really nailed something that needs to be said around certain human beliefs with these specific arguments.
I happen to follow the history of supposed UFO encounters as a personal hobby since years ago. I personally try to view it with a solid dose of careful qualification and skepticism that avoids preconceived biases and this means reading both the reports themselves, their analysis by those who are convinced they were somehow paranormal or inexplicable at least, and analysis by skeptics and people who style themselves as debunkers.
To start with, from the two extremes representing on the one end UFOlogist types and on the other end, hard skeptics and the above-mentioned self-styles debunkers, there's no shortage of emotional reaction, irrational thinking, preconceived notions and confirmation bias.
As for me, while I can't absolutely claim my own objectivity to be perfect and free of biases of one kind or another (by definition this is hard because if one were capable of such a thing, they wouldn't have a bias in the first place) I try to keep an open mind that's not dismissive of those who sincerely and with no evident reason for lying or hallucinating, claim to have seen strange things in the skies, but also try to recognize that people do misinterpret things, especially if they're not trained observers, or sometimes just lie.
However, what I have noticed from many in the skeptic community in particular (and from the debunkers especially) is exactly the thing that Sagan notes. A harsh, extremely condescending attitude to any suggestion that any strange UFO sighting type incident be anything but perfectly explicable. More damningly, because they go into analyzing any such thing with a mind that's already decided on such things not being possible, by default they always feel they must debunk. It has basically become for them a default response.
In some UFO sighting reports, where the details truly are baffling and even include very trained, sober observers (Air Force pilots, police, scientists etc), I've seen reviews by skeptics in which the contortions they make to justify the event as some mundane thing are almost more absurd than simply admitting that X group of people saw something that can't be explained (without having to say that this means it was a UFO by the way).
This is not skepticism. It is instead a dogmatic logic, one based on emotion and irrationality disguised as hard boiled seriousness and being combined with a distinctly arrogant attitude around professing to be the one who is really the rational thinker, it comes across as even more absurd.
From UFO investigators, the same happens in the other direction of course, but on the other hand, I've frequently seen reports in which they themselves have the flexibility to say that some particular case was indeed mundane. I have yet to see a serious skeptic, say, a Philip Klass type, who ever admits something to be inexplicable no matter how hard they need to stretch reasoning to avoid doing so. In some cases, some of them also simply delve into outright character assassination and claiming a witness to be an idiot or implying that there's something wrong with them.
Again, Sagan's warning about compassion comes to mind. On this, he really nailed it while arguing for the importance of skepticism.
Why is the book so expensive (in Britain)? I found a picture online of the back cover showing ISBN 0-7472-5156-8 and £7.99, but the prices I see for ordering it now are ... discouraging.
I once lent my copy to a friend of a friend prone to conspiratorial thinking, who professed to be open-minded and interested in my viewpoint. A few years later, after many reminders, he returned it to me. I asked him what he thought of it. He said he never read it, but it made for a great paper weight. This was the first of many realizations for me that magical thinking cannot be altered with logic.
I like how everybody thinks this applies to others and they should change.
When in fact this entire genre should be read and addressed exclusively for oneself.
It reminds me how I was passionately discussing sth like this with a (former) friend and it seemed we agreed on the principles. When suddenly through some offhand remakr or turn of phrase it turned out he was thinking of others while I was thinking of myself
Meaning, he thought how easily others were misled (naturally, he himself was perfectly immune, his worldview correct) while I was talking about how I needed to protect myself from being seduced by agreeable nonsense.
Again, this genre applies to the reader, it is not a lecture material for you.
We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and cope.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
Assessing other peoples’ beliefs and ideas is, in my experience, one of the best ways to stay sane and learn. Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them. I feel like it is people with unfounded ideas (religions, historically) that try mightily to stop other people from critically assessing them.
> Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them
That's a nice thing to believe. I disagree.
The difference between good people and bad people literally is the things they believe. Nazis aren't born evil, they are made evil by naziism. Its not only OK, it's necessary to your survival to judge them by that metric.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
A kinder way to say "judging" is perhaps discrimination. As humans we must discriminate between the good and bad opinions of others, and even good and bad people, or we are doomed.
If you were to learn only from your own mistakes, or try to pretend that there is no such thing as a bad person, you would live a short and brutal life of victomhood.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
I agree with you except for this part here, because what other people believe can, and does, materially impact you when they vote. There's an incentive to try and influence others' beliefs when they're harmful to you or your communities.
Sure but then it also pays to be clear what you are doing: It it not about "truth" or epistemology but about influence/propaganda/persuasion/pick your own euphemism.
And the literature on this is completely difft and, more to the point, vastly more effective than the one on philosophy of science or striving for truth.
Not saying one is better than the other. My point is only those are difft and Sagan is not a good guide to make masses of people vote or act how you want.
> What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and cope.
In a world with bad faith & ill-informed missionaries (meme-ssionaries?) this is an inadequate political/societal perspective. We should all have the humility to be wrong but the conviction of our current beliefs and tomes that represent them
It's more you can't get someone to change their thinking by giving them a book if they don't want to change or read the book. My mum gives me books on the Baha'i faith but that doesn't work well either because I'm not interested. It's more about whether the person is motivated to change than about logic I think.
Logic itself is a kind of magical thinking. There's no way to get from logic to epistemology, and yet people think they will get to epistemological high ground if they keep to a logic asceticism strictly enough.
It's not a nice thought - how much of human thinking is just down to wiring. Pre-set connections somewhere in the big switchboard of human mind.
How much of whether you're right or wrong on a given issue is not down to knowledge, intelligence or rigor - but to pre-set biases that happen to be set the right way or the wrong way. How the same knowledge and intelligence that can guide you to truths can instead lead you to be more entrenched in wrongs, and just how hard it is to know the difference.
You can try to be better than that, but even if you do, you aren't going to escape your own nature. And most people don't even seem to try.
People here are taking an overly cynical binary stance. It's not that logic cannot reach such people, but that there are barriers to them thinking and accepting your logic. Once you remove most of the barriers, most of these people are happily logical.
The important realization I had is that this is true even for fairly rational people. If you've ever encountered someone who tends to listen more to one source than others, they are exhibiting the exact same behavior this thread is complaining about. And in my experience, this happens to everyone, even the most rational people I've met.
"Once you remove 97% of human nature, what remains is quite logical and reasonable."
That's what I'm talking about. That one person who seems way more rational than most might be 95% irrational - just outperforming the "97% irrational" baseline. And those 2% that make up the difference? How much of this is teachable skills, things you and me could learn and apply, and how much of it is just some weird brain wiring?
That appearance of reason may be deceiving too. You'd expect an atheist to outperform the average by a lot - but is this true? How many atheists are atheists because they carefully examined the case for God's existence and found it lacking - and how many are instead atheists because of something like an innate contrarian streak, or just because of conformism paired with non-religious upbringing?
I happen to remember the reason why I ended up an atheist quite well. I just didn't like the idea of God existing, at all. I didn't get there by being reasonable - I got there by being lucky.
Those barriers often exist as survival mechanisms. It could be quite rational to not even give a hint that one will even consider the logical viewpoint if some of the consequences involve losing one’s status in the community, losing one’s job etc. The overly “rational” loners have something broken with this survival instinct.
The worst is we don't know what we don't know. That sounds trite, but in fact the scientific method is about generating a consensus among "rational, educated, intelligent people."
That doesn't mean it's correct. It doesn't even mean it's objective. The best you can get is a consensus among a subset of humans that certain things happen because of certain other things, and certain models can predict some of these things with limited accuracy.
This turns out to be useful for human experiences, as far as it goes. But we literally can't imagine what connections we're not aware of, what formalisms and models we can't create because our brains are too limited by their evolutionary wiring, and what experiences we're not having because same.
You could argue that these invisible imperceptible things can't affect us, by definition. But we don't know that's true. There could an entire universe of influences and abstractions we're not aware of.
And there probably is. Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe?
What we think of science is more like the gap between the smartest 1% and the rest of the population. Science is a good way to make those 1% insights sticky and useful to everyone else.
But it's highly presumptuous to assume that human cognition has no limits, and the universe fits comfortably inside our brains.
> Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe
My belief on this is not entirely rational, of course, but it seems to me that there's probably a sort of Turing-completeness for intelligence/understanding, where as soon as a mind starts being able to understand abstraction, given enough time and resources, it can probably understand the entire universe.
It would also be presumptuous to say that brainfuck is equally powerful to every other programming language that exists, and yet we know it to be true. The fundamental reason we can prove that Turing-complete languages are equivalent to each other is that we can build the same abstractions in both, so intuitively it feels like a similar principle holds for human intelligence.
Carl Sagan just might be my favorite non-fiction author. As Richard Dawkins said, he was incapable of constructing a bad sentence.
One of my favorite parts of this book was the essay "The Dragon in my Garage". The essay argues that if you can't provide any testable or falsifiable evidence for a dragon's existence, then its existence is no different than the absence of a dragon.
Mentioned it in my blog -
"The promise of an afterlife is a cornerstone of many religions, offering comfort in the face of mortality. However, this promise often hinges on the existence of an all-powerful deity, whose nature and existence remain subjects of debate. Central to many afterlife beliefs is the notion of an invisible, immortal soul or spirit capable of experiencing emotions, enabling the concepts of reward or punishment. Yet, no empirical evidence has been found to confirm the existence of such a soul. Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven."
My other favorite books from him are -
1. Pale Blue Dot - That "look again at that dot" might be the most poetic thing I've read.
For the unaware, or for those who want to read it again, here's the full quote -
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 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.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
2. Cosmos.
3. BILLIONS AND BILLIONS - the part he described coming to know that he had cancer was beautifully written.
4. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are with Ann Druyan.
I never read that fiction book he wrote - Contact.
But, man, I'm going to add one of his books to my To Be Read list again lol.
>Carl Sagan just might be my favorite non-fiction author. As Richard Dawkins said, he was incapable of constructing a bad sentence.
And Sagan was just so personable and seemingly humble. While Sagan basically agreed with Dawkins on most points as to the importance of science and reason and the dangers of magical thinking and religion, he lacked the arrogance and smugness that Dawkins has that often rub people the wrong way. I wonder what Sagan would have written had he lived into the early 21st century "New Atheism" period.
> While Sagan basically agreed with Dawkins on most points as to the importance of science and reason and the dangers of magical thinking and religion, he lacked the arrogance and smugness that Dawkins has that often rub people the wrong way.
He didn't merely lack it - he opposed it. A quote from the book:
"In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped."
...
"whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted."
I dislike the "pale blue dot" speech for assigning importance to a big empty universe just because it's big, and then accusing us of all sorts of hubris despite acknowledging that this is the only known place where anything's of interest.
> Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the [irrelevant empty space with nothing going for it except size] ...
I don’t disagree with your point. The earth is pretty special as the only known location for intelligent life. However:
1) Most people haven’t internalized at all how big and empty and terrifying the universe is. This is a rhetorical device to make that point.
2) Carl Sagan also famously said “We are a way for the universe to know itself” so I think you may be straw-manning his overall position just a little bit here.
He plainly says "the folly of human conceits". It's nice if he does a u-turn on this elsewhere, but the speech is still gleefully wallowing in putting down humans as big-headed ... for what? And why are "superstar" and "supreme leader" in quotes like that? Those superstars and supreme leaders on earth are the actual genuine ones. I know of no others elsewhere, do you? I mean OK important people may tend to be pompous, but some people are indeed important. Sagan, for instance, was a celebrity, meaning that he was celebrated by other people on account of his being some good. I don't need him to deny it, and I don't need him to make this speech vicariously denying the importance of everybody else.
This is pretty flakey reasoning. First, the only reason “internalizing” the size of the universe would have any relevance here is if you were going to use that to draw the bad inference of insignificance. That was the context. Otherwise, it is, at best, an interesting fact that can be equally interpreted as awe-inspiring (I do not see why it would be terrifying; I think it is grand and wonderful).
I think Sagan was, in his clumsy way, perhaps trying to recover something lost in the loss of religion, a kind of reverential humility that recognition of God previously inspired. The closest thing he could find was the universe. Naturally, this leed toward a kind of pagan materialist pantheism (which likely explains his interest in Hinduism).
It is indeed a silly claim. Size has nothing do with significance. There is no logical inference that says Man must occupy a certain amount of the universe to be significant.
Perhaps Sagan should have devoted more effort to examining his rather amateurish assumptions. Like Dawkins, he was terrible at philosophy.
Sagan (like Dawkins) was way out of his depth where philosophy and theology are concerned. I don’t know if he was just lazy or presumptuous or had an agenda or somehow managed to pass through life criticizing things he didn’t understand without ever thinking to himself “gee, maybe I should actually familiarize myself with these views I keep criticizing”, but he seemed to be completely unaware of the actual work in this space. He was incredibly amateurish, the sort of person unintellectual people think is “an intellectual”. He was sort of a watered-down logical positivist/advocate of scientism mired in misconceptions and stereotypes who wasted his time jousting with straw men.
Talk about hubris, and a comically unsophisticated sort. There are much more intellectually interesting atheists out there (in recent history in the Anglosphere, someone like Thomas Nagel, for example; Nietzsche, of the historically most famous ones). Sagan, Dawkins, the New Atheists are lightweights.
You say "logical positivist/advocate of scientism", but what I'm hearing is "he liked science, and I don't". I'm mischaracterizing your viewpoint, I hope? What do you specifically mean, how were his arguments scientistic?
(For bystanders who don't know the term, scientism is like when an advert says our shampoo contains hilyironic acid which nourishes the growing hair or some similar sciency-sounding nonsense, maybe with 3D graphics of molecules, to sell you on a thing just by association with science.)
I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion. I value true science, I appreciate science, but for what it is, not what it is not. A robust philosophy of science helps in this regard, as it allows us to examine and to understand the nature of science, its methods, its limits, the nature of the knowledge its gives us, and so on. Scientism is incoherent from the start, as its basic proposition is self-refuting, as it is not itself a scientific claim.
W.r.t. Sagan, it is the general character of his work that it privileged science (and I mean this in the modern sense of the term, i.e., “empirical science”) to the exclusion of other rational modes of knowing. Indeed, if anything is paradigmatic of rationality, it is philosophy, not empirical science. And Sagan’s insistence on evidence of does not square with things like his views on mathematics (never mind some of the superficial commentary on numerical representation) or what proofs for the existence of God can consist of.
Sagan’s views were also often guided by sentiment rather than reason. The first that comes to mind if the childish and fallacious inference involving the tacit assumption that size is proportional to significance. But of course, they were presented as if they were reasoned.
My point is, whatever his merits as an astronomer and the practice of astronomy (I have heard varying opinions), he was a mediocrity in areas like philosophy and theology. He should have had the humility to recognize the limits of his knowledge.
Wow, you've really got it out for Carl Sagan (of all people)! Why is it required that he be something other than a "mediocrity" in philosophy and theology? He was an astronomer and (more importantly in my opinion) an incredible science communicator. That doesn't necessitate also being an expert in the study of religion, faith, and philosophy.
> Why is it required that he be something other than a "mediocrity" in philosophy and theology?
Because as a general rule, if you're going to engage in commentary of a subject matter, you should know what you're talking about. Many people, including many scientists (certainly among the vocal ones), fail to mind the bounds of their narrow domain of expertise and tread unwittingly into philosophical territory, all the while believing their views are scientific in nature. This happens all the time with materialism, which is not a metaphysical position entailed by science, but nonetheless is often presented as if it were and sold to the public as a package deal. Sagan was certainly guilty of that, that and his whiggish view of history.
> I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion
By guessing, of course! Gotta start somewhere.
You still haven't supplied details of exactly ... ah, don't worry about it, I suppose I'll just bear your observation in mind when I come to read a Sagan book. Or a Dawkins book. But I don't remember Dawkins sidelining philosophy? It still sounds kind of like "oh he should have said something apologetic about religion because of metaphysics instead of being so damn certain", the kind of thing any wet agnostic would like - not because there's quality philosophy being overlooked, just because wishy-washy people want their spirituality placating.
I think you have a good deal of odd baggage that's clouding your judgement. You seem to believe that anyone who is critical of any kind of intellectually flaky stance toward "religion" must therefore be an apologist for intellectual flaky religious views. This is childish. I encourage you to develop more intellectually rigorous and less tendentious habits of mind. An intellectual horizon where Sagan and Dawkins are intellectual heroes is highly parochial.
In the case of Dawkins, that he was whiggish and philosophically weak is not some novel criticism. His criticisms of Aquinas, for example, were laughably uninformed. And unlike Aquinas, who charitably advised people to attack an interlocutor's views at his strongest points, Dawkins happily sought out the weakest and their weakest for cheap show. He didn't seek out highly regarded scholars who disagreed with him, but ones he could easily ridicule, and he found them. It is buffoonish to think Dawkins et al. have some kind of intellectual high ground here. Only someone ignorant of philosophical work of the last two millenia could find Dawkins impressive here.
For you and others here, I would recommend beginning with Edward Feser's "The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism" [0] to begin to grasp how crude, unsophisticated, and incoherent their intellectual positions are. The author wrote this book during the height of the New Atheist craze when the polemic of the "Four Horsemen" was particular aggressive, and so he rightly returns some of those polemical barbs, though unlike the New Atheists, his comes from a position of intellectual substance.
I absolutely adore Sagan -- I have a first edition of both this book and Cosmos in a prize position on my book shelf -- and yet I agree. He had a disdain for all things irrational, yet man himself and his psyche is irrational. He would have done well to assimilate Carl Jung et al into his academic diet. But he didn't because he had the classic atheist's arrogance to him. Still, he was a treasure. You just have to know which domains he had authority to speak about and which he didn't.
I did ^F for religion in The Demon-Haunted World and he mentions it 170 times with quite a lot of examples. Maybe he knew enough for his purposes? If you think something is bunk it's not required to understand every detail of that bunk to disbelieve it.
I've been thinking a lot of Mark Fisher's Hauntology lately.
Hauntology is about this sense of loss. That there are these other futures that were due and coming, but have been cancelled. Fisher argues that Western society mid-future lost it's ability to generate "new", trapped recycling and recombining.
And it feels like that, and so much worse. We're not just lacking in our generative wow, in our ability to go forth & be "yes we can" people. We're utterly dogged and dragged down into the muckiest disrealities by endless people deliberately haunting the world. That half of politics everywhere has become pro-haunting parties. That dis-reality and fear, scaredness of the world and other people, has no real purpose but it keeps people weak and dumb and slow, as Sagan said. Off kilter with no sense and sensibility.
It feels like the dishonesty and fearmongering of politics, the calling of enemies, the unwillingness to come back to reasonability and reason and faith and trust in each other, to be good: it's haunting us so badly. We're in an age where The Demon-Haunted World is a playbook. Being used everyday by the very powerful.
To make people into: scared people, afraid of demons haunting them, believing in shadows and fear more than truth and reason. We humanity are being haunted by spook science going on in the Head of the Health and Human Services (RFK). It's Presidents getting up and telling us our cities are warzones and our Senator getting up and asking for photos of today & it being an incredible place. The President's Truth acocunt posting AI-generated "med-bed" dis-realities! https://bsky.app/profile/wyden.senate.gov/post/3lzy6exxcf22n
This world is demon haunted, and it's not just ignorance of the dark. It's destroying the worthy good futures, refusing arrival of decent obvious truth, by ensnaring us and locking us in fantasy. It's using many-headed-hydra tactics, to flood the zone of reality, to brow-beat disreality forever, to insist insanity has a valid spot on the Overton Window.
Unfortunately, humans don't have a good "make up your own mind" mechanism wired into them. People laugh at "grok is this true", but I have little doubt that Grok does a better job of fact checking than an average person would.
I read this book many years ago and it made a big impression on me.
His view is that normal, rational, intelligent people... can have fictional stories in their heads about how things work. It takes energy and focus and research to fix these wrong stories, so often we live with them or don't recognize them.
Many times I've been casually talking with someone, say something, then realize that doesn't make any sense. My wrong story made sense in my head, but not when I speak it out loud.
By practicing the scientific method, we can gradually weed out the wrong stories in our heads.
Now I'm going to re-read `The Demon-Haunted World`
I believe we all carry massive mythologies that are tough to displace.
My Kagi-fu fails me. Its by an environmentalist who says any, say "avoid poisoning fish" advice stands against a massive "the line must go up" mythology. He compares it to the geocentrism of the Church; how the Sun, Moon and starts rotate around us and provides for humanity; and how heliocentrism also had to stand up against this massive mythology.
Depth psychology would suggest that mythology is an emergent phenomenon of the psyche; there is no removing it.
Better to understand that it is there and how it works. It is precisely due to this myth-making faculty that in the absence of a legit mythos (i.e. that of Christianity, which was the dominant cosmo-conception / worldview in the west for most of our history) the vacuum of power that is left by the absence of a God figure will be replaced by the nearest approximate/surrogate the psyche can find. This is how we elevate celebrities like Trump to the status of a God-king who can do no wrong.
> "This is how we elevate celebrities like Trump to the status of a God-king who can do no wrong."
I've long wondered about that even as I've watched the shift intensify over the decades, but in the context you describe, the MAGA death-cult starts to sorta come into focus a bit more. As they've abandoned "God" (as evidenced by so many of their actions going directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus in their own bible) they need a replacement god-figure to worship (one more in-line with the baser desires that they're choosing to embody).
I still find it genuinely insane that their worship of one man leads them to fully embrace the downfall of civilized and thoughtful interaction so completely that it becomes a literal existential risk for humanity.
> "Better to understand that it is there and how it works."
This is the way to overcome / work around so many of our basic human "design flaws". Understanding and being aware of those things allows you to take actions to adjust in beneficial ways. This is one of the "special things" that truly separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom; Our ability to outright defy our "baser instincts" (at least some of us, anyhow).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism
Thats the actual term and its missing from public debate and school curricula.
Most people that consider themselfs atheists are actually undecided, so more of a skeptic then a strong believer in none-god. Questioning your beliefs is the crucial skill skeptics practice and some "rationalists" lack.
Charles Eisenstein
Sacred Economics" and "The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible"
Dragons of Eden was formative for me.
I feel like the current generation of young people don’t have anyone like Carl Sagan to bring a sense of wonder to science and exploration. It makes me sad.
Sean Carroll, author of the book The Big Picture and host of the Mindscape podcast, has been this for me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_M._Carroll
> "I feel like the current generation of young people don’t have anyone like Carl Sagan to bring a sense of wonder to science and exploration. It makes me sad."
The closest I've seen in modern times is maybe [Neil DeGrasse Tyson][1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson
hank green, Veritasium, Mark Rober, SmarterEveryDay
Oh yeah, duh! I totally forgot about YouTube... Tons of great science communicators on YouTube! I should know better. I've learned truck-loads of great "sciencey" skills and knowledge from YouTubers.
... to replace them with better wrong stories! Repeatedly, as fast as possible.
Your reply is not very HN, but you have a point. Many things cannot be settled with a scientific argument because we rarely disagree about the mass of an electron or the spectrum of Helium. In our daily discussions, almost nothing can be decided by science. Most of it boils down to different values, and different ways to think about the world (Weltanschauung). Finding common ground in those cases is hard work which requires inderstanding, openness and fairness of both sides. Or the acceptance of authority.
Everything is subject to fallibility, even things that appear true by definition (if they attempt to say something about reality). Not only matters of worldview, moral values, and philosophy, but science too. It's not simply adding bricks to an edifice that is permanent and final. It's all wrong stories, of quite steadily improving similarity to reality. The goal at any point in time is to be wrong in the next way.
That's understood. Science is never the definitive answer, but I added the "authority" bit for a reason: if you don't know what the mass of an electron is or how you could go about finding out, you end up having to accept authority. But there are many things that are (currently) not open to a similar objective scientific approach. And those are our daily concerns, and the most contentious topics. The scientific method isn't going to help there.
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES
Edit: came for the Sagan, found the Pratchett!
To complete the quote with my favourite part:
> You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?
(Hogfather, p.422)
also https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1389211598215.pdf p.246
Chapter 2:
Chapter 13: Chapter 25:Well shit, that's happening right now.
My only question is was this slide orchestrated or is it the natural tendency of humanity to slip back to ignorance when all their needs are met, like the Eloi in The Time Machine? Someone made lots of money from this slide, I just don't know if it was random chance or a scheme that worked.
This quote has always stuck with me and I think about it often, perhaps one of the main quotes that have steered my life.
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”
― Alan Moore
The answer is more often than not alternative c) all of the above.
Development may be a random walk, but there are plenty of people with interest in a certain outcome, and when they get the opportunity they will take it and try escalate the process. That's true in most things.
I also tend to believe that it is not a coincidence that so many societies right now flirt with authoritarianism, for example. We influence each other, even more so now that information is global and electronic.
Is the quote actually true or just something the author made up? Alan Moore appears to be a fiction writer.
Alan Moore is a deeply philosophical person who does a lot of research in general, and as part of his writing process. Here's the source for the quote,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgSbaKpCjq4
However to fully put this into context you also need to understand that Alan Moore is an occultist, so he views both power and chaos (in the social context as well as the metaphysical context) through that lens.
https://www.reddit.com/r/occult/comments/1iv2eic/alan_moore_...
It just makes me think he is a lunatic. I don't think the same person can be deeply philosophical and an occultist at the same time. I recently adopted a practice of reading the author's wikipedia page before reading the book, to make sure the author is an actual expert in the field, and not just a clown.
Oh dear, you should learn more about philosophy.
Plato was deeply esoteric — as were the Pythagoreans for that matter. The history of philosophy is rather enchanted, as it were.
See Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Ficino, Agrippa, Newton…
Say what you will about Moore (though he's the author of Watchmen, widely considered not only the greatest graphic novel of all time and a biting indictment of the entertainment industry and the military industrial complex... no small feat)
But -- I'm an occultist and a philosophical person, so I can tell you from first hand experience that occultism and philosophy are inextricably bound. Any pursuit of metaphysics is occult in nature. Occult simply means "hidden"; it is the domain of those things which can not be perceived directly, but have to be reasoned or intuited out via the mind.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by metaphysics and occultism? Do you believe in mysticism, casting spells summoning creatures from other realms, etc? Or some other kind of occultism? It is my best understanding that Alan Moore is into this stuff.
My own views on these things have no bearing on the definitions of those words. Occultism is an extremely broad catch-all umbrella of domains of knowledge that all share in the essential trait of having to do with something that is normally hidden from us. The set of all things which lie outside of the realm of our direct apprehension.
Metaphysics, in that sense, is a subset of the Occult. Metaphysics itself is an extremely broad field, dealing with things like ontology, mathematics, physics, onieriology, cosmology, and so on.
One need not identify as an occultist to study a field which would fall under the label of the occult. Many things are occult and people do not realize it. Psychology, by virtue of the fact that our own psyches are largely hidden from our purview, is widely accepted as an asepct of the Occult, for example.
As for my own beliefs, I do not consider them beliefs, as once you know something to be true, does it make sense to still consider it an article of faith?
There is such a thing as a gnostic.
Sad to say, we are now living in the world he feared, as fully realized.
The "crystals and horoscopes" part is such a cheap jab that's going to alienate a lot of the population. Astrology is a harmless introspective process for most people, they just like having a framework to characterise their beliefs and feelings. You find very few people who feel that it's prescriptive and limits their life.
Contrasted with very rational people who are chasing magical, unmoored valuations in the stock market for instance. We buy and sell equity based not on future cash flows, but on confidence there will be a bigger sucker down the line. This untethering of "value" from any productive work is a greater contributor to the hollowing out of the US economy than anyone buying a piece of amethyst.
The “clutching” and “nervously consulting” is essential here. It’s where it has stopped being a “harmless introspective process”.
Apart from that, I read “crystals” and “horoscopes” in a more metaphorical sense here.
The verbs are not the issue. America has been hollowed out by political propaganda, offshoring and growing wealth inequality. Sagan fails to identify any of these and instead dunks on harmless folk superstitions. Show me where the Fed rate or IBM's quarterly earnings or a Fox News chyron were determined by a horoscope.
The real enemy is the belief that value can be created from nothing, such that an economy of infinite growth can exist. Once you've exhausted all the externalities - exploiting people overseas, domestically, pillaging natural resources - you're left in a zero sum game.
> Sagan fails to identify any of these and instead dunks on harmless folk superstitions. Show me where the Fed rate or IBM's quarterly earnings or a Fox News chyron were determined by a horoscope.
It's in the same paragraph...
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority
Yeah he correctly identifies the outcome, but like I said he misattributes the cause. And his rhetoric is not helpful in getting "common people" around to his cause. It comes across as elitist and condescending.
Some research in neuroscience suggests that potentially the majority of our actions happen primarily in the limbic regions of the brain and then later our pre-frontal cortex makes up a logical story for why we acted this way. This is really trippy and can cause you to rethink your own sanity if you think about it long enough. It’s quite possible I don’t know why I do much of what I do… but I am good at making up a story to explain to keep me sane. Crazy to think about.
I think that may be something that LLMs are lacking. They've got the make up a story bit but not the limbic system.
I've got a theory that the experience of consciousness is down to something like that - different systems in the brain interacting, like it being a bit of the brain that brings together info from the senses and memory recall and thinking outputs and then makes up a story/model of it.
"While asleep I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of results in elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing..."
- Srinivasa Ramanujan
He seemed to spend all day thinking about mathematics, so perhaps it isn't surprising if he dreamt about it as well.
From https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Jul/the-trouble-with-many-...
> Back when I was at university, a friend mentioned to me that he wanted to read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. I had been a fan of Sagan since my teenage years, but had put off reading that book. Asking him if he’d read any of Sagan’s works, he said “No, but this book is often present in skeptic reading lists.”
> Many years later, I finally read the book. I’m surprised with it being recommended by skeptics, as it has a lengthy criticism of skeptics.
...
Quotes taken straight from the book:
"And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is in its polarization: Us vs. Them—the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, you’re beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the skeptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted."
...
"In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped."
It is indeed a great book. I would caution folks here that it is not particularly representative of Carl Sagan's books. If you loved/hated this book, it doesn't mean you'll love/hate his other books.
I have no idea why you'd be surprised the skeptical community adores this book, its basically the clearest statement of the core fundamental principles, a plea to be open and empathetic is not hostile. It's just wisdom, and the majority of people who think of themselves as skeptics believe that its important. At the same time, sometimes you want to be around people who share and build community with the same ideology as you which should be perfectly ok.
> I have no idea why you'd be surprised the skeptical community adores this book,
The details are in the blog post. Basically, every skeptic community I've looked at has espoused the very behavior that Carl Sagan criticizes in the book. Very dismissive and arrogant folks. There's a reason he explicitly calls out the skeptic community.
I did put this disclaimer though - I don't want this discussion to degrade into a no true Scotsman fallacy:
> Or at least, visible and vocal skeptics I run across on the Internet. An argument could be made that these are the minority and not really representative of the majority of people who ascribe to skepticism.
I read those Sagan quotes as a criticism of capital "S" Skeptics, those for whom skepticism is an identity perhaps more than it is a means to an end. I feel that Sagan's ultimate goal is to foster skepticism (or at least a refined version thereof), and that he is merely offering a warning about tribalism and ego.
> I feel that Sagan's ultimate goal is to foster skepticism (or at least a refined version thereof),
I agree, yet I will note that he goes out of his way in the book to label skepticism and then criticize it. He did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic. The Descartes quote is in the book as well.
Put another way: He was a skeptical person, but he did not ascribe to "skepticism".
One thing I was pleasantly surprised to find in the book was an inclination to believe certain things to be true that many skeptics will refuse to entertain due to the lack of evidence. The only example I can recall was that back (and other) pain is often entirely psychosomatic. He didn't invoke John Sarno, but he showed clear openness to believing it. It wasn't a simple "I must have an open mind, so I must consider this as a possibility", but an actual assertion of his belief in it given recent findings. He gives a rationale on why it is a reasonable thing to believe.
(Sidenote: I have a lot of pain, and Sarno's approach did nothing for me)
You originally expressed surprise that skeptics hold this book in high regard. I just find your surprise a bit difficult to understand. If, on the whole, the work advocates for skepticism (among other things), wouldn't endorsing it be the consistent choice for skeptics? I would never throw out a programming textbook if it criticized and emphasized the too-common tendency of programmers to over-engineer solutions.
> He goes out of his way in the book to label skepticism and criticize it.
Respectfully, I disagree, his criticism reads to me primarily as a criticism of dogmatism. First and foremost he seemed to identify as a "scientist", but he also maintained that you can't have effective science without skepticism.
> He did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic.
I would just differ by saying "He did not wish to be thought of only as a skeptic," I am not sure if that is a complete departure from your intent.
> If, on the whole, the work advocates for skepticism (among other things)
Been a while since I read it, so I have to ask: Does it? What stood out to me was criticism of skepticism.
Yes, in my interpretation, though not in isolation.
> It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas.
Can you enumerate these communities?
Can I suggest metabunk, which seems to me to be pretty neutral in this regard?
It's one thing to preach the ideals and another to live by them.
Sagan really nailed something that needs to be said around certain human beliefs with these specific arguments.
I happen to follow the history of supposed UFO encounters as a personal hobby since years ago. I personally try to view it with a solid dose of careful qualification and skepticism that avoids preconceived biases and this means reading both the reports themselves, their analysis by those who are convinced they were somehow paranormal or inexplicable at least, and analysis by skeptics and people who style themselves as debunkers.
To start with, from the two extremes representing on the one end UFOlogist types and on the other end, hard skeptics and the above-mentioned self-styles debunkers, there's no shortage of emotional reaction, irrational thinking, preconceived notions and confirmation bias.
As for me, while I can't absolutely claim my own objectivity to be perfect and free of biases of one kind or another (by definition this is hard because if one were capable of such a thing, they wouldn't have a bias in the first place) I try to keep an open mind that's not dismissive of those who sincerely and with no evident reason for lying or hallucinating, claim to have seen strange things in the skies, but also try to recognize that people do misinterpret things, especially if they're not trained observers, or sometimes just lie.
However, what I have noticed from many in the skeptic community in particular (and from the debunkers especially) is exactly the thing that Sagan notes. A harsh, extremely condescending attitude to any suggestion that any strange UFO sighting type incident be anything but perfectly explicable. More damningly, because they go into analyzing any such thing with a mind that's already decided on such things not being possible, by default they always feel they must debunk. It has basically become for them a default response.
In some UFO sighting reports, where the details truly are baffling and even include very trained, sober observers (Air Force pilots, police, scientists etc), I've seen reviews by skeptics in which the contortions they make to justify the event as some mundane thing are almost more absurd than simply admitting that X group of people saw something that can't be explained (without having to say that this means it was a UFO by the way).
This is not skepticism. It is instead a dogmatic logic, one based on emotion and irrationality disguised as hard boiled seriousness and being combined with a distinctly arrogant attitude around professing to be the one who is really the rational thinker, it comes across as even more absurd.
From UFO investigators, the same happens in the other direction of course, but on the other hand, I've frequently seen reports in which they themselves have the flexibility to say that some particular case was indeed mundane. I have yet to see a serious skeptic, say, a Philip Klass type, who ever admits something to be inexplicable no matter how hard they need to stretch reasoning to avoid doing so. In some cases, some of them also simply delve into outright character assassination and claiming a witness to be an idiot or implying that there's something wrong with them.
Again, Sagan's warning about compassion comes to mind. On this, he really nailed it while arguing for the importance of skepticism.
Why is the book so expensive (in Britain)? I found a picture online of the back cover showing ISBN 0-7472-5156-8 and £7.99, but the prices I see for ordering it now are ... discouraging.
Free online at archive.org https://ia801202.us.archive.org/6/items/DemonHauntedWorld_ca...
£7.99 might have been the price for a new copy 30 years ago. There are used copies on eBay for around this price with free shipping from the states.
Consider that out of print hardcover first printings might ask a premium & if you have a local bookstore that you might want to support.
Is the "demon" here a reference to Descartes' epistemological demon of doubt?
I once lent my copy to a friend of a friend prone to conspiratorial thinking, who professed to be open-minded and interested in my viewpoint. A few years later, after many reminders, he returned it to me. I asked him what he thought of it. He said he never read it, but it made for a great paper weight. This was the first of many realizations for me that magical thinking cannot be altered with logic.
I like how everybody thinks this applies to others and they should change.
When in fact this entire genre should be read and addressed exclusively for oneself.
It reminds me how I was passionately discussing sth like this with a (former) friend and it seemed we agreed on the principles. When suddenly through some offhand remakr or turn of phrase it turned out he was thinking of others while I was thinking of myself
Meaning, he thought how easily others were misled (naturally, he himself was perfectly immune, his worldview correct) while I was talking about how I needed to protect myself from being seduced by agreeable nonsense.
Again, this genre applies to the reader, it is not a lecture material for you.
We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and cope.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
Assessing other peoples’ beliefs and ideas is, in my experience, one of the best ways to stay sane and learn. Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them. I feel like it is people with unfounded ideas (religions, historically) that try mightily to stop other people from critically assessing them.
> Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them
That's a nice thing to believe. I disagree.
The difference between good people and bad people literally is the things they believe. Nazis aren't born evil, they are made evil by naziism. Its not only OK, it's necessary to your survival to judge them by that metric.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
A kinder way to say "judging" is perhaps discrimination. As humans we must discriminate between the good and bad opinions of others, and even good and bad people, or we are doomed.
If you were to learn only from your own mistakes, or try to pretend that there is no such thing as a bad person, you would live a short and brutal life of victomhood.
We must judge kindly, but we must judge.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
I agree with you except for this part here, because what other people believe can, and does, materially impact you when they vote. There's an incentive to try and influence others' beliefs when they're harmful to you or your communities.
Sure but then it also pays to be clear what you are doing: It it not about "truth" or epistemology but about influence/propaganda/persuasion/pick your own euphemism.
And the literature on this is completely difft and, more to the point, vastly more effective than the one on philosophy of science or striving for truth.
Not saying one is better than the other. My point is only those are difft and Sagan is not a good guide to make masses of people vote or act how you want.
> What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and cope.
In a world with bad faith & ill-informed missionaries (meme-ssionaries?) this is an inadequate political/societal perspective. We should all have the humility to be wrong but the conviction of our current beliefs and tomes that represent them
It's more you can't get someone to change their thinking by giving them a book if they don't want to change or read the book. My mum gives me books on the Baha'i faith but that doesn't work well either because I'm not interested. It's more about whether the person is motivated to change than about logic I think.
> magical thinking cannot be altered with logic
Logic itself is a kind of magical thinking. There's no way to get from logic to epistemology, and yet people think they will get to epistemological high ground if they keep to a logic asceticism strictly enough.
It can, but it's a long process, and it does seem quite rare. It's a depressing realization I've come to a well
It's not a nice thought - how much of human thinking is just down to wiring. Pre-set connections somewhere in the big switchboard of human mind.
How much of whether you're right or wrong on a given issue is not down to knowledge, intelligence or rigor - but to pre-set biases that happen to be set the right way or the wrong way. How the same knowledge and intelligence that can guide you to truths can instead lead you to be more entrenched in wrongs, and just how hard it is to know the difference.
You can try to be better than that, but even if you do, you aren't going to escape your own nature. And most people don't even seem to try.
People here are taking an overly cynical binary stance. It's not that logic cannot reach such people, but that there are barriers to them thinking and accepting your logic. Once you remove most of the barriers, most of these people are happily logical.
The important realization I had is that this is true even for fairly rational people. If you've ever encountered someone who tends to listen more to one source than others, they are exhibiting the exact same behavior this thread is complaining about. And in my experience, this happens to everyone, even the most rational people I've met.
"Once you remove 97% of human nature, what remains is quite logical and reasonable."
That's what I'm talking about. That one person who seems way more rational than most might be 95% irrational - just outperforming the "97% irrational" baseline. And those 2% that make up the difference? How much of this is teachable skills, things you and me could learn and apply, and how much of it is just some weird brain wiring?
That appearance of reason may be deceiving too. You'd expect an atheist to outperform the average by a lot - but is this true? How many atheists are atheists because they carefully examined the case for God's existence and found it lacking - and how many are instead atheists because of something like an innate contrarian streak, or just because of conformism paired with non-religious upbringing?
I happen to remember the reason why I ended up an atheist quite well. I just didn't like the idea of God existing, at all. I didn't get there by being reasonable - I got there by being lucky.
Those barriers often exist as survival mechanisms. It could be quite rational to not even give a hint that one will even consider the logical viewpoint if some of the consequences involve losing one’s status in the community, losing one’s job etc. The overly “rational” loners have something broken with this survival instinct.
The worst is we don't know what we don't know. That sounds trite, but in fact the scientific method is about generating a consensus among "rational, educated, intelligent people."
That doesn't mean it's correct. It doesn't even mean it's objective. The best you can get is a consensus among a subset of humans that certain things happen because of certain other things, and certain models can predict some of these things with limited accuracy.
This turns out to be useful for human experiences, as far as it goes. But we literally can't imagine what connections we're not aware of, what formalisms and models we can't create because our brains are too limited by their evolutionary wiring, and what experiences we're not having because same.
You could argue that these invisible imperceptible things can't affect us, by definition. But we don't know that's true. There could an entire universe of influences and abstractions we're not aware of.
And there probably is. Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe?
What we think of science is more like the gap between the smartest 1% and the rest of the population. Science is a good way to make those 1% insights sticky and useful to everyone else.
But it's highly presumptuous to assume that human cognition has no limits, and the universe fits comfortably inside our brains.
> Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe
My belief on this is not entirely rational, of course, but it seems to me that there's probably a sort of Turing-completeness for intelligence/understanding, where as soon as a mind starts being able to understand abstraction, given enough time and resources, it can probably understand the entire universe.
It would also be presumptuous to say that brainfuck is equally powerful to every other programming language that exists, and yet we know it to be true. The fundamental reason we can prove that Turing-complete languages are equivalent to each other is that we can build the same abstractions in both, so intuitively it feels like a similar principle holds for human intelligence.
So, being able to be rational is a lottery. With the odds improving as culture progresses, but still always a lottery. Such is life I guess.
It's open-ended, anyway. I mean nobody's rationality is ever perfect, or even very good, except relative to others.
Carl Sagan just might be my favorite non-fiction author. As Richard Dawkins said, he was incapable of constructing a bad sentence.
One of my favorite parts of this book was the essay "The Dragon in my Garage". The essay argues that if you can't provide any testable or falsifiable evidence for a dragon's existence, then its existence is no different than the absence of a dragon.
Mentioned it in my blog -
"The promise of an afterlife is a cornerstone of many religions, offering comfort in the face of mortality. However, this promise often hinges on the existence of an all-powerful deity, whose nature and existence remain subjects of debate. Central to many afterlife beliefs is the notion of an invisible, immortal soul or spirit capable of experiencing emotions, enabling the concepts of reward or punishment. Yet, no empirical evidence has been found to confirm the existence of such a soul. Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven."
My other favorite books from him are -
1. Pale Blue Dot - That "look again at that dot" might be the most poetic thing I've read.
For the unaware, or for those who want to read it again, here's the full quote -
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 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.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
2. Cosmos.
3. BILLIONS AND BILLIONS - the part he described coming to know that he had cancer was beautifully written.
4. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are with Ann Druyan.
I never read that fiction book he wrote - Contact.
But, man, I'm going to add one of his books to my To Be Read list again lol.
>Carl Sagan just might be my favorite non-fiction author. As Richard Dawkins said, he was incapable of constructing a bad sentence.
And Sagan was just so personable and seemingly humble. While Sagan basically agreed with Dawkins on most points as to the importance of science and reason and the dangers of magical thinking and religion, he lacked the arrogance and smugness that Dawkins has that often rub people the wrong way. I wonder what Sagan would have written had he lived into the early 21st century "New Atheism" period.
> While Sagan basically agreed with Dawkins on most points as to the importance of science and reason and the dangers of magical thinking and religion, he lacked the arrogance and smugness that Dawkins has that often rub people the wrong way.
He didn't merely lack it - he opposed it. A quote from the book:
"In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped."
...
"whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted."
I dislike the "pale blue dot" speech for assigning importance to a big empty universe just because it's big, and then accusing us of all sorts of hubris despite acknowledging that this is the only known place where anything's of interest.
> Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the [irrelevant empty space with nothing going for it except size] ...
I don’t disagree with your point. The earth is pretty special as the only known location for intelligent life. However:
1) Most people haven’t internalized at all how big and empty and terrifying the universe is. This is a rhetorical device to make that point.
2) Carl Sagan also famously said “We are a way for the universe to know itself” so I think you may be straw-manning his overall position just a little bit here.
He plainly says "the folly of human conceits". It's nice if he does a u-turn on this elsewhere, but the speech is still gleefully wallowing in putting down humans as big-headed ... for what? And why are "superstar" and "supreme leader" in quotes like that? Those superstars and supreme leaders on earth are the actual genuine ones. I know of no others elsewhere, do you? I mean OK important people may tend to be pompous, but some people are indeed important. Sagan, for instance, was a celebrity, meaning that he was celebrated by other people on account of his being some good. I don't need him to deny it, and I don't need him to make this speech vicariously denying the importance of everybody else.
This is pretty flakey reasoning. First, the only reason “internalizing” the size of the universe would have any relevance here is if you were going to use that to draw the bad inference of insignificance. That was the context. Otherwise, it is, at best, an interesting fact that can be equally interpreted as awe-inspiring (I do not see why it would be terrifying; I think it is grand and wonderful).
I think Sagan was, in his clumsy way, perhaps trying to recover something lost in the loss of religion, a kind of reverential humility that recognition of God previously inspired. The closest thing he could find was the universe. Naturally, this leed toward a kind of pagan materialist pantheism (which likely explains his interest in Hinduism).
Good for you!
It is indeed a silly claim. Size has nothing do with significance. There is no logical inference that says Man must occupy a certain amount of the universe to be significant.
Perhaps Sagan should have devoted more effort to examining his rather amateurish assumptions. Like Dawkins, he was terrible at philosophy.
Oh really. Is that a dig at atheism?
Sagan (like Dawkins) was way out of his depth where philosophy and theology are concerned. I don’t know if he was just lazy or presumptuous or had an agenda or somehow managed to pass through life criticizing things he didn’t understand without ever thinking to himself “gee, maybe I should actually familiarize myself with these views I keep criticizing”, but he seemed to be completely unaware of the actual work in this space. He was incredibly amateurish, the sort of person unintellectual people think is “an intellectual”. He was sort of a watered-down logical positivist/advocate of scientism mired in misconceptions and stereotypes who wasted his time jousting with straw men.
Talk about hubris, and a comically unsophisticated sort. There are much more intellectually interesting atheists out there (in recent history in the Anglosphere, someone like Thomas Nagel, for example; Nietzsche, of the historically most famous ones). Sagan, Dawkins, the New Atheists are lightweights.
You say "logical positivist/advocate of scientism", but what I'm hearing is "he liked science, and I don't". I'm mischaracterizing your viewpoint, I hope? What do you specifically mean, how were his arguments scientistic?
(For bystanders who don't know the term, scientism is like when an advert says our shampoo contains hilyironic acid which nourishes the growing hair or some similar sciency-sounding nonsense, maybe with 3D graphics of molecules, to sell you on a thing just by association with science.)
Scientism is the name of an ideology to which Sagan subscribed.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philoso...
That's the sympathetic version of it.
I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion. I value true science, I appreciate science, but for what it is, not what it is not. A robust philosophy of science helps in this regard, as it allows us to examine and to understand the nature of science, its methods, its limits, the nature of the knowledge its gives us, and so on. Scientism is incoherent from the start, as its basic proposition is self-refuting, as it is not itself a scientific claim.
W.r.t. Sagan, it is the general character of his work that it privileged science (and I mean this in the modern sense of the term, i.e., “empirical science”) to the exclusion of other rational modes of knowing. Indeed, if anything is paradigmatic of rationality, it is philosophy, not empirical science. And Sagan’s insistence on evidence of does not square with things like his views on mathematics (never mind some of the superficial commentary on numerical representation) or what proofs for the existence of God can consist of.
Sagan’s views were also often guided by sentiment rather than reason. The first that comes to mind if the childish and fallacious inference involving the tacit assumption that size is proportional to significance. But of course, they were presented as if they were reasoned.
My point is, whatever his merits as an astronomer and the practice of astronomy (I have heard varying opinions), he was a mediocrity in areas like philosophy and theology. He should have had the humility to recognize the limits of his knowledge.
Wow, you've really got it out for Carl Sagan (of all people)! Why is it required that he be something other than a "mediocrity" in philosophy and theology? He was an astronomer and (more importantly in my opinion) an incredible science communicator. That doesn't necessitate also being an expert in the study of religion, faith, and philosophy.
> Why is it required that he be something other than a "mediocrity" in philosophy and theology?
Because as a general rule, if you're going to engage in commentary of a subject matter, you should know what you're talking about. Many people, including many scientists (certainly among the vocal ones), fail to mind the bounds of their narrow domain of expertise and tread unwittingly into philosophical territory, all the while believing their views are scientific in nature. This happens all the time with materialism, which is not a metaphysical position entailed by science, but nonetheless is often presented as if it were and sold to the public as a package deal. Sagan was certainly guilty of that, that and his whiggish view of history.
> I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion
By guessing, of course! Gotta start somewhere.
You still haven't supplied details of exactly ... ah, don't worry about it, I suppose I'll just bear your observation in mind when I come to read a Sagan book. Or a Dawkins book. But I don't remember Dawkins sidelining philosophy? It still sounds kind of like "oh he should have said something apologetic about religion because of metaphysics instead of being so damn certain", the kind of thing any wet agnostic would like - not because there's quality philosophy being overlooked, just because wishy-washy people want their spirituality placating.
I think you have a good deal of odd baggage that's clouding your judgement. You seem to believe that anyone who is critical of any kind of intellectually flaky stance toward "religion" must therefore be an apologist for intellectual flaky religious views. This is childish. I encourage you to develop more intellectually rigorous and less tendentious habits of mind. An intellectual horizon where Sagan and Dawkins are intellectual heroes is highly parochial.
In the case of Dawkins, that he was whiggish and philosophically weak is not some novel criticism. His criticisms of Aquinas, for example, were laughably uninformed. And unlike Aquinas, who charitably advised people to attack an interlocutor's views at his strongest points, Dawkins happily sought out the weakest and their weakest for cheap show. He didn't seek out highly regarded scholars who disagreed with him, but ones he could easily ridicule, and he found them. It is buffoonish to think Dawkins et al. have some kind of intellectual high ground here. Only someone ignorant of philosophical work of the last two millenia could find Dawkins impressive here.
For you and others here, I would recommend beginning with Edward Feser's "The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism" [0] to begin to grasp how crude, unsophisticated, and incoherent their intellectual positions are. The author wrote this book during the height of the New Atheist craze when the polemic of the "Four Horsemen" was particular aggressive, and so he rightly returns some of those polemical barbs, though unlike the New Atheists, his comes from a position of intellectual substance.
[0] https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstiti...
I absolutely adore Sagan -- I have a first edition of both this book and Cosmos in a prize position on my book shelf -- and yet I agree. He had a disdain for all things irrational, yet man himself and his psyche is irrational. He would have done well to assimilate Carl Jung et al into his academic diet. But he didn't because he had the classic atheist's arrogance to him. Still, he was a treasure. You just have to know which domains he had authority to speak about and which he didn't.
I did ^F for religion in The Demon-Haunted World and he mentions it 170 times with quite a lot of examples. Maybe he knew enough for his purposes? If you think something is bunk it's not required to understand every detail of that bunk to disbelieve it.
It's a lot of very strong language with very little evidence.
I've been thinking a lot of Mark Fisher's Hauntology lately.
Hauntology is about this sense of loss. That there are these other futures that were due and coming, but have been cancelled. Fisher argues that Western society mid-future lost it's ability to generate "new", trapped recycling and recombining.
And it feels like that, and so much worse. We're not just lacking in our generative wow, in our ability to go forth & be "yes we can" people. We're utterly dogged and dragged down into the muckiest disrealities by endless people deliberately haunting the world. That half of politics everywhere has become pro-haunting parties. That dis-reality and fear, scaredness of the world and other people, has no real purpose but it keeps people weak and dumb and slow, as Sagan said. Off kilter with no sense and sensibility.
It feels like the dishonesty and fearmongering of politics, the calling of enemies, the unwillingness to come back to reasonability and reason and faith and trust in each other, to be good: it's haunting us so badly. We're in an age where The Demon-Haunted World is a playbook. Being used everyday by the very powerful.
To make people into: scared people, afraid of demons haunting them, believing in shadows and fear more than truth and reason. We humanity are being haunted by spook science going on in the Head of the Health and Human Services (RFK). It's Presidents getting up and telling us our cities are warzones and our Senator getting up and asking for photos of today & it being an incredible place. The President's Truth acocunt posting AI-generated "med-bed" dis-realities! https://bsky.app/profile/wyden.senate.gov/post/3lzy6exxcf22n
This world is demon haunted, and it's not just ignorance of the dark. It's destroying the worthy good futures, refusing arrival of decent obvious truth, by ensnaring us and locking us in fantasy. It's using many-headed-hydra tactics, to flood the zone of reality, to brow-beat disreality forever, to insist insanity has a valid spot on the Overton Window.
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> He explains methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered pseudoscience.
America would be much less divisive if they ignored the preachings of their tribe leaders, and made up their own minds.
Unfortunately, humans don't have a good "make up your own mind" mechanism wired into them. People laugh at "grok is this true", but I have little doubt that Grok does a better job of fact checking than an average person would.