Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
evidence is meagre to nil. True, brain lesions can make us lose
major segments of our memory, or convert us from manic to
placid, or vice versa; and changes in brain chemistry can convince
us there's a massive conspiracy against us, or make us think we
hear the Voice of God. But as compelling testimony as this
provides that our personality, character, memory - if you will,
soul - resides in the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on
it, to find ways to evade the weight of the evidence.
And if there are powerful social institutions insisting that there
is an afterlife, it should be no surprise that dissenters tend to be
sparse, quiet and resented. Some Eastern, Christian and New Age
religions, as well as Platonism, hold that the world is unreal, that
suffering, death and matter itself are illusions; and that nothing
really exists except 'Mind'. In contrast, the prevailing scientific
view is that the mind is how we perceive what the brain does; i.e.,
it's a property of the hundred trillion neural connections in the
brain.
There is a strangely waxing academic opinion, with roots in the
1960s, that holds all views to be equally arbitrary and 'true' or
'false' to be a delusion. Perhaps it is an attempt to turn the tables
on scientists who have long argued that literary criticism, religion,
aesthetics, and much of philosophy and ethics are mere subjective
opinion, because they cannot be demonstrated like a theorem in
Euclidean geometry nor put to experimental test.
There are people who want everything to be possible, to have
their reality unconstrained. Our imagination and our needs
require more, they feel, than the comparatively little that science
teaches we may be reasonably sure of. Many New Age gurus - the
actress Shirley MacLaine among them - go so far as to embrace
solipsism, to assert that the only reality is their own thoughts. 'I
am God,' they actually say. 'I really think we are creating our own
reality,' MacLaine once told a sceptic. 'I think I'm creating you
right here.'
If I dream of being reunited with a dead parent or child, who is
to tell me that it didn't really happen? If I have a vision of myself
floating in space looking down on the Earth, maybe I was really
there; who are some scientists, who didn't even share the experience,
to tell me that it's all in my head? If my religion teaches that
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