Scientifically illiterate AmericansMay 8, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
insight as to why the sheep believe in ghosts, God, aliens, luck charms. Well done.
Should be required readingApril 28, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I wish Carl Sagan had lived long enough to produce a revised edition of this book to incorporate the rise of the Internet and the signal to noise ratio present on it. Not only does he give you a practical tool kit of critical thinking, he provides examples of how such a kit was used or ignored in our past. often with bloody and sad results.
People holding rigid convictions are often threatened by people who use critical thinking and for good reason. Critical and skeptical thinking plays no favorites and will confront religion as easily as it does the charlatan claiming to speak to dead relatives for money. Sagan repeatedly reminds the reader that a choice must be made, know the truth no matter how scary it may appear or delude yourself with comforting thoughts.
Reading this book will not get you to think Carl Sagan's way, it will teach you to think your own way. It can seriously alter your world-view when you begin to examine why you believe what you do. We need critical thinkers today more than ever as we become flooded with information from sources of unknown quality and intent. The human mind wants to believe what it is told and even the best minds fall victim to distortions and lies. Having a mental system in place to help you evaluate what you see and hear will go to great lengths to protect you from your own gullibility.
There is a reason the scientific method is emphasized by Sagan, it has been proven to work over and over. It is a self correcting system that thrives not on belief but on testable facts. It welcomes scrutiny and the attack of long held ideas in order to refine what we know to be true.
Sagan makes an elegant point that to be a critical thinker you have to be willing to change your mind when facts and evidence challenge what you currently think. Holding fast to a rigid conviction makes you a convict in your own mind and is such a waste.
An idea is only as good as the attacks it survives. To weakly attack an idea because you don't want it to fail undermines the point of thinking at all.
A Candle in the DarkApril 22, 2008 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm so lucky to have read this book several years ago when I was a young teen. In an age of increasingly bitter attacks on religion by folks who seem to be more angry at God than skeptical of him, it's refreshing to return to Carl's warm and persuasive technique. Rather than inviting the reader to attack religious ideas and their hapless hosts, Dr. Sagan presents skepticism, materialism, and the scientific method as what they are - invaluable tools of discovery for the curious mind.
It seems like we skeptics are, thanks to Hitchens and Dawkins, becoming the arrogant killjoys and persecutors that Ben Stein's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" makes us out to be. I've always considered this book to be the ultimate atheist primer, and never have we been more in need of this lucid, breezy, and amusing introduction to free thinking.
excellent book,sagan saw the future.April 20, 2008 1 out of 2 found this review helpful
warning: sheepole people need not bother reading this book.You need to be able to have a semblance of Critical thinking, and this book helps shed light on ufo's,ghosts, and all the other invisible friends.anyone who can see the trouble this country is currently in, needs to read this book. science allways prevails!
A superior book, but it won't be read by those who need it.March 31, 2008 5 out of 5 found this review helpful
If there was one thing that the late Carl Sagan could not stand, it was pseudoscience. This was a man who spent decades trying to make REAL science more attainable for the layman, and how do we repay him? By accepting lunacy such as New Age faith healers, the "face" on Mars, and crop cirlces being made by aliens as fact, that's how. Well, not ALL of us. But certainly enough of us that we have no right to scoff at the people in 14th Century who wore bird masks because they believed it would ward off The Black Plague.
The Demon Haunted World is a long overdue kick to the arse of the proofless idiocy that is wrongly associated with true science. Science requires a painstaking trial and error system called The Scientific Method - which will push me past 1000 words if I try to explain. All that pseudoscience requires is gullibility. Science is fed by hard work and intellect. Pseudoscience is fed by misguided emotion. Sagan never once said anywhere in this book that science is perfect. Along with great things such as penicillin, food refrigeration, and the Internet that can be credited to science; things like nuclear weapons, Agent Orange, and DDT could be blamed on it as well. Sagan acknowledged that. When all things were taken into consideration, science was the horse he chose to put his money on. And with good reason.
Another great thing about this book is how Sagan said he was open to what the pseudoscience crowd believed - as long as they provided hard, concrete evidence. Which none of these people have been able to do. He didn't totally reject ideas that didn't mix with established science. He just didn't like the way these were casually accepted without proof, or at best proof that had a very questionable basis. For the thinking person, it takes much more than someone throwing a hubcap in the air and taking a picture of it for there to be proof of intelligent life from other planets. Doing such a thing doesn't even prove that there is intelligent life on THIS planet. Yet, people have done such things before and there was always someone there to fall for it every time.
There are a couple of problems with this book that are not related to quality but still must be addressed. First of all, the book was written in 1994 or thereabouts because he makes references to the movie Dumb and Dumber and the TV show Beavis and Butthead. He comments on how they both celebrate stupidity. It has gotten much worse 14 years later with reality shows and George W. Bush. Also, look who wrote the book. How many people outside the scientific community read Sagan? Especially those who need to read him the most - the tabloid readers? But these are just minor gripes that shouldn't really be taken to discourage anyone from reading.
