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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
colleagues', and that sceptics exhibit 'a kind of religious zeal to
defend the materialistic and atheistic world view that smacks of
what has been called "scientific fundamentalism" or "irrational
rationalism" '.
This is a common but to me deeply mysterious - indeed, occult
- complaint. Again, we know a great deal about the existence and
properties of matter. If a given phenomenon can already be
plausibly understood in terms of matter and energy, why should
we hypothesize that something else, something for which there is
as yet no other good evidence, is responsible? Yet the complaint
persists: sceptics won't accept that there's an invisible firebreathing
dragon in my garage because they're all atheistic
materialists.
In Science in the New Age, scepticism is discussed, but it is not
understood, and it is certainly not practised. All sorts of paranormal
claims are quoted, sceptics are 'deconstructed', but you can
never learn from reading it that there are ways to decide whether
New Age and parapsychological claims to knowledge are promising
or false. It's all, as in many postmodernist texts, a matter of
how strongly people feel and what their biases may be.
Robert Anton Wilson (in The New Inquisition: Irrational
Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, 1986) describes sceptics as
the 'New Inquisition'. But to my knowledge no sceptic compels
belief. Indeed, on most TV documentaries and talk shows,
sceptics get short shrift and almost no air time. All that's
happening is that some doctrines and methods are being criticized
- at the worst, ridiculed - in magazines like The Skeptical Inquirer
with circulations of a few tens of thousands. New Agers are not
much, as in earlier times, being called up before criminal tribunals,
nor whipped for having visions, and they are certainly not
being burned at the stake. Why fear a little criticism? Aren't they
interested to see how well their beliefs hold up against the best
counterarguments the sceptics can muster?
Perhaps one per cent of the time, someone who has an idea that
smells, feels and looks indistinguishable from the usual run of
pseudoscience will turn out to be right. Maybe some undiscovered
reptile left over from the Cretaceous period will indeed be found
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