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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
found in the books of Saul, Esther, and elsewhere in the Bible,
with hardly a pang of moral doubt. It was all, of course, troubling
to liberal theologians of a later age.
It is properly said that the Devil can 'quote Scripture to his
purpose'. The Bible is full of so many stories of contradictory
moral purpose that every generation can find scriptural justification
for nearly any action it proposes, from incest, slavery and
mass murder to the most refined love, courage and self-sacrifice.
And this moral multiple personality disorder is hardly restricted to
Judaism and Christianity. You can find it deep within Islam, the
Hindu tradition, indeed nearly all the world's religions. Perhaps
then it is not so much scientists as people who are morally
ambiguous.
It is the particular task of scientists, I believe, to alert the public
to possible dangers, especially those emanating from science or
foreseeable through the use of science. Such a mission is, you
might say, prophetic. Clearly the warnings need to be judicious
and not more flamboyant than the dangers require; but if we must
make errors, given the stakes, they should be on the side of safety.
Among the !Kung San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert,
when two men, perhaps testosterone-inflamed, would begin to
argue, the women would reach for their poison arrows and put the
weapons out of harm's way. Today our poison arrows can destroy
the global civilization and just possibly annihilate our species. The
price of moral ambiguity is now too high. For this reason - and not
because of its approach to knowledge - the ethical responsibility
of scientists must also be high, extraordinarily high, unprecedentedly
high. I wish graduate science programmes explicitly and
systematically raised these questions with fledgling scientists and
engineers. And sometimes I wonder whether in our society, too,
the women - and the children - will eventually put the poison
arrows out of harm's way.
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