The Demon-Haunted World

Introduction

Carl Sagan is deeply troubled about our society: "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time . . . 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" (p. 25). Sagan does not fret in vain—a quarter of Americans believe in astrology (p. 303), millions believe in UFOs, alien abductions, magnet therapy, and the power of crystals. Science is under direct attack in some quarters; fundamentalist Christian groups, for example, have successfully lobbied local and state educational boards to prohibit the teaching of evolution (Richard, pp. 328-339).

Discussion

The prevalence of superstitious beliefs and the increase in antiscientific rhetoric are accompanied in the latter part of the twentieth century by the decline of the scientific literacy of the American public. Our high school students perform very poorly in international standardized math and science exams. Sixty-three percent of Americans are unaware that the last dinosaur died before the first humans lived and roughly "half of American adults do not know that the Earth goes around the sun and takes a year to do it" (p. 324). These disturbing trends lend credence to Sagan's nightmare, described above, that our society's critical faculties are in decline. Sagan argues that our ignorance of scientific facts and the scientific method leads to the uncritical acceptance of misguided and potentially dangerous beliefs.

The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan's final book before he died in 1996, is an all-out attack on superstition, irrationality, and unjustified belief. His primary target is pseudoscience, beliefs that "purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature" (p. 13). Proponents of pseudoscience desire the "credibility of science, but without being bound by its methods and rules" (p. 184). The superstitions listed above and the creation science literature promulgated by fundamentalists qualify as pseudoscience because they claim the empirical evidence, practical utility, and certainty of scientific proof while making methodological mistakes that invalidate their arguments. In contrast, the cold fusion fiasco (in which two chemists falsely reported creating nuclear fusion) is not pseudoscience, it is simply bad science and was corrected as a matter of course within the scientific community (Hugh, pp. 15-23).

As a planetary astronomer, in conjunction with his role as a public scientific figure, Sagan became an expert on UFOs and alien abduction reports. These pseudoscientific beliefs bear the brunt of his attack in The Demon-Haunted World. If there comes a time when you pick up the World Weekly News and believe that you have been abducted by aliens, that a vast government conspiracy has hidden the truth about the Roswell incident, or that aliens left a giant sculpture of a human face on Mars, pick up a copy of Sagan's book as soon as possible. He thoroughly ...