Carl Sagan on Charlie Rose: Demon-Haunted World

Carl Sagan is one of the preeminent astronomers of our time he is known for bringing the heavens to our living rooms with his PBS series cosmos his latest work is the demon haunted world science as a candle in the dark it explores the country's growing fascination with pseudoscience astrology of faith heals the supernatural and the like all superstition said he says threatened to undermine true science I am pleased to have him here and I also take note of the fact that he is the David Duncan professor of astronomy and space sciences and director of laboratory studies at Cornell University distinguished Visiting science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology and co-founder and president of the Planetary Society the largest space interest group in the world and a former Pulitzer Prize winner welcome back thank you great to see you listen to this I hate to read too much but this is it's almost like they've been reading your book this is from the New York Times for Friday May 24 Americans flunk science a study finds less than half of all American adults understand that the Earth orbits the Sun yearly according to a basic science survey nevertheless there's enthusiasm for research except in some fields like genetic engineering and nuclear power that are viewed with suspicion only about 25 percent of American adults get passing grades in a National Science Foundation survey of what people know about basic science and economics I mean this is singing your song and well it's certainly what I'm talking about in in in demon-haunted world my feeling Talia is that it's it's not that pseudoscience and superstition and new-age so-called beliefs and fundamentalist zealotry are something new they've been with us for as long as we've been we've been human but we live in an age based on science and technology with formidable technological powers science and technology are propelling us forward at accelerating rates that's right and if we don't understand it but we I mean the general public if it's something that oh I'm not good at that I don't know anything about it then who is making all the decisions about science and technology that are gonna determine what kind of future our children live in just some members of Congress but there's no more than a handful of members of Congress with any background in science at all and the Republican Congress has just abolished its own office of Technology Assessment the organization that gave them bipartisan competent advice and Science and Technology they say we don't want to know don't tell us about some surprising because Gingrich is genuinely interested I think you know his own intellectual curiosity does the president still have a science adviser he given and the vice president is scientifically that science maven I mean you you blast them all creationist Christian Scientists who you say would rather allow their children to suffer then give them insulin or antibiotics astrologers come in for particular scorn on your part well I would say scorn just the derision during a more generous version but what's the danger of all this I mean you know this is not the thing there's two kinds of dangerous one is what I just talked about that we've arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is gonna blow up in our faces I mean who is running the Science and Technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it and the second reason that I'm worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge it's a way of thinking a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility if if we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell us that something is true to be skeptical of those in authority then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious who comes ambling along it it's a thing that Jefferson laid great stress it wasn't enough he said to enshrine some rights and I in a constitution or a bill of rights the people had to be educated and they had to practice their skepticism and their education otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us Jefferson was amazing in his devotion to science when I think of Jefferson as this man who was illiterate and who was a passionate articulator of freedom but if you go to Monticello exactly what you appreciate is he was at heart a scientist a botanist an architect geologists geologist in and if you Meriwether Lewis as we know know from Stephen Ambrose you know he wanted him to go out and do experimentations and explore and be skeptical and find answers to passages and explore exactly right and there was also an economic Grail there if the Northwest Passage was found Jefferson said that he was at heart a scientist that he would have loved to have been a scientist but there were certain events happening in America that called to him and so he devoted his life to that kind of relatives indeed so that generations later people could be scientists have we the point is made and maybe by you you know is it when's the last time we had a president who made a speech about science may I say that yeah it is this notion that that science is a not of great interest to us in some sense that somehow we don't want to learn you see people read the stock market quotations and financial pages look how complex that is and they know the direct connection to their own there's a motivation but they're capable large numbers of people people are able to look at sports statistics look how many people can do that understanding science is not more difficult than that it doesn't involve greater intellectual activities but the the thing about science is first of all it's after the way the universe really is and not what makes us feel good and a lot of the competing doctrines are after what feels good and not what what's true okay but you got to make I'm gonna sure you'll go for this far with me but I mean there's a lot of that that is about feeling good and there's a lot of that that's about hocus pocus but at the same time there are millions of people who understand science does not prove religion but because religion is faith-based and therefore you should do not deny the value of it because it is faith-based and not signed but let's let's let's look a little more deeply into that what is faith it is belief in the absence of evidence now I don't propose to tell anybody what to believe but for me believing when there's no compelling evidence is a mistake the idea is to withhold belief until there is compelling evidence and if the universe does not comply with our predispositions okay then we have the wrenching obligation to accommodate to the way the universe I mean but I mean you so you step forward to say I deny all religion because I can't see it oh no no no you see the experience and the value of reaching for higher experiences let me say religion deals with history with poetry with great literature with ethics with morals including the morality of treating compassionately the least fortunate among us all of these are things that I endorse wholeheartedly where religion gets into trouble is in those cases that it pretends to know something about science the science in the Bible for example was acquired by the Jews from the Babylonians during the Babylonian captivity of 600 BC that was the best science on the planet thing but we've learned something since then Roman Catholicism reformed Judaism most of the mainstream Protestant denomination have no difficulty with the idea that humans have evolved from other creatures that the earth is 4.6 billion years old with the Big Bang they don't have any trouble with that the trouble comes with people who are biblical literalists who believe that the bible is dictated by the creator of the universe to an unerring stenographer and so therefore the end and has no metaphor allegory and from there they make their political and economic choices and Soufan choices and scientific scientific choices and scientific and that part of your problem with that idea anxiety is that because for the wrong reasons we make the wrong choices about science that's right so who is more humble the scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fal ability of all the human beings involved in the writing of this body okay I mean I accept that but I also the argue will be made by many is that you know you don't have to whether whether an a specific scientific I took place as described by some some biblical writer is not is not at the heart of the religious faith and the religious experience somebody doesn't agree with you and some people don't some people think that every jot and tittle in the Bible is essentially throw one thing away to allegory a metaphor then it's up to everybody to make their own decisions then how are we this a lot of this has to do with science in the United States are we different than other nations absolutely not you can see this worldwide in India there's madness about astrology in Britain it's ghosts and Germany is raised coming up from the earth that can only be detected by the dowsers every country has its its own specialties we we seem to be fascinated about UFOs right now but what is that before you leave you tell me about you and professor Mack John Mack is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who I've known for many years we were arrested together at the Nevada nuclear test site protesting us testing in the face of a Soviet moratorium on testing and many years ago he asked me what what is there in this UFO business is there anything to it and I said absolutely nothing except of course for a psychiatrist he is a psychiatrist well he looked into it and decided that there was so much emotional energy in the reports of people who claim to be abducted that it couldn't possibly be some psychological aberration that it had to be true he believed his patients I do not believe his patients many of these stories are about waking up from a deep sleep and finding your bed surrounded by three or four short Durer gray and sexually obsessed beings who then take you to their spaceship after they sliver you through their walk through your wall and perform a variety of objectionable sexual experiments but here we have dr. Carl Sagan mm-hmm astronomer versus doctor John knowing doctor what's his first on the Johnny Mac MD no question so what's the problem I couldn't he says how could how can scientists this is a scientist so no I'm asking how could I mean what do you think of this man coming to these I think he is not using the scientific method in approaching his issue and when you constantly I mean I assume you come at him with both barrels in conversation and and in the demon of the world and he says he says I don't appreciate the emotional force you don't of these these reports but many people awaken from a nightmare with profound emotional force that doesn't mean that the nightmare is true would means something went on inside our head you were making a point before I jumped to John Mack oh yeah what I wanted to say is going back to the question of of adequate evidence on something that's emotionally really really pulling you I I lost both my parents about 12 or 15 years ago and I had a great relationship with them I really missed them I would love to believe that their spirits were around somewhere and I'd give almost anything to spend five minutes a year with them do you hear their voices every sometimes but six or eight times since their death I've heard it Carl just just in the voice of my father for my mother now I don't think that means that they're in the next room I think it means that I've had an auditory hallucination I was with them so long I heard their voices so often why shouldn't I be able to make a vivid recollection of me here's what's interesting about this for me I mean you won't see this but I'll throw it at you anyway you convinced me a long time ago that it was arrogant for me or for anyone else to believe that there wasn't some life outside of our to exclude the possible to exclude the possibility was wasn't was to was an arrogance of intellect that we should not I stood assumed you couldn't prove it you didn't know it was there but the arrogance free right we don't know if it's there we don't know if it's not there let's and if you take that why can't you say there's a lot we don't know the power layer that we as a lot we don't know you know it's what I believe about but that doesn't mean that every every fraudulent claim has to be accepted we we demand the most rigorous standards of evidence especially on what's important to us so if some guy comes up to me in a channeler or a medium and say I can put you in touch with your parents well because I want so terribly to to believe that yeah I know I have to reach in for added reserves of skepticism because I'm likely to be fooled and much more minor to have my money taken what was it jay-z night was yeah exactly she is a guy named RAM fuzz ten thousand years older 35 35 yes and he tells you lots of things but nothing about what life was like thirty five thousand years ago Shirley MacLaine believes Shirley MacLaine believes that Ram pho was her brother things like the Loch Ness monster big all that again is it all fakes I mean the most famous photograph has now been shown to be a fake but could there be a unknown mammal or even reptile of large dimensions swimming in an Irish Scottish lake good that we don't know about sure the good who says no but nobody but the evidence does not support it does not demonstrate it so do we say Oh ridiculous you know we don't do that we say unproved which is a Scottish verdict some reviewers differ with your conclusions on this point that you seem to say it's growing this kind of pseudoscience yeah I I don't we've this is part of being human humans have had this way of magical thinking through all of our history the problem is that today the technology has reach formal maybe even awesome proportions and so the dangers of thinking this way are larger not that this is a new kind of thing you were living with Milo dysplasia or I have been you have been it's in remission are you have well you know with with diseases of this sort and all cancers it's the bone marrow it's mild dysplasia is not exactly cancer the bone marrow but if untreated it inevitably leads to leukemia and the trouble with all these diseases is you never know that you've got every last cell you can only detect down to a certain level but down to the level that anybody can detect and in terms of how I feel and my stamina and all that it seems to be gone I'm very lucky because you had a sister who assists assisting there who to have a bone marrow transplant that's one and also the enormous advances in scientific in medical science in just the last few years if I'd had this thing five or ten years ago I would be dead sure as shootin and then finally the love and support of my family all of those have played a central role so you're optimistic I'm very optimistic or at least very hopeful and just share with us because of your your sense of language and and and your sense of understanding and and being reflective and introspective what this what do you think about it what does it do for you - I didn't have any religious conversion but I thought about what it would be like to die certainly and what it would be like for my family and I didn't much think about what it would be like for me because I don't think it's likely there's anything that you think about after you're dead yeah long dreamless sleep I'd love to believe the opposite but I don't know of any but one thing faith carls hey-- one thing that it has done is to enhance my sense of appreciation for the the beauty of life and of the universe and the the sheer joy of being alive you had a healthy portion of that before this but even you it happens too oh there's no question every moment every every inanimate object and to say nothing of the exquisite complexity of living beings yeah you imagine missing it all and suddenly it's so much more precious may you live a long time thank you very much thank you sure yeah Carl Sagan science as a candle in the dark the title of the book is a demon haunted world thank you for joining us we'll see you next time you

Channel: Entheonaut

Views: 60,756

Keywords: Carl Sagan, Charlie Rose, Demon-Haunted World, Demon Haunted World

Id: 3JpQFVXGzUI

Length: 20min 23sec (1223 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 12 2018

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[u/neuromancer420]

I discovered the Entheonaut channel yesterday. What a beautiful yet familiar cosmonaut stands in the place of its icon. I hope you all find them fitting for this sub.