published 10/14/06
Review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark, a book by Carl Sagan
An engaging manifesto on the importance of clear thinking in a superstitious world
by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark. Random House, 1997.
This is a book about clear thinking.
Modern health care desperately needs clear thinking. Doctors rarely have the beside manner or the time to guide us anymore. So people are taking the pursuit of health science into their own hands, looking for answers in their hearts, in bookstores, and in the stories they hear.
This seeking is a healthy and necessary impulse. But one tragic consequence is that there is too much misinformation and non-medicine floating around out there — much more than there was fifty years ago, when most people didn’t presume to know much, and probably made fewer anecdotal claims about healing. There may even be more non-medicine today than there was at the turn of the (previous) century, in the golden age of the snake oil salesman.
There is too much misinformation and non-medicine floating around out there.
Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World is a good place to learn how to ask the right questions. He paints a chilling picture of what our world has been, and might be again, without clear thinking. But while he challenges many cherished superstitions and sloppy patterns of thought — enough to push the buttons of most readers, because most of us fondly cling to several comforting beliefs without much reason — this is no dry skeptic, no irritating debunker. Sagan was constantly amazed by life and the universe, and it shows in all of his writing.
“There are wonders enough out there without inventing any,” he writes.
This treatise on critical thought is one of my all-time favourites, a book that makes ten others unnecessary, the kind of book that will change how you think forever.
Further Reading
If you found this book review interesting, you may also be interested in some other articles that I have written that from a critical thinking perspective:
The following websites have little to do with health care specifically, but are interesting and essential resources for anyone generally interested in skepticism and critical thought:
- Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (http://www.csicop.org/). CSICOP encourages the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and disseminates factual information about the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public. CSICOP.org publishes the venerable magazine The Skeptical Inquirer, the oldest periodical for skeptical minds, and they have archives of full text articles reaching back many years available online.
- Skeptic: Extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science (http://www.skeptic.com). The Skeptics Society, headed by Dr. Michael Shermer, is a scientific and educational organization for “anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science.” In many ways, this is the best of the skeptical websites, and the organization also publishes a pretty good podcast.
- Snopes.com: Urban Legends Reference Pages (http://www.Snopes.com/). Barbara and David P. Mikkelson have been publishing the Urban Legends Reference Pages on Snopes.com since 1995. It is one of the most thorough collections of debunkery available anywhere. Although relatively few items concern health care specifically, it is an essential bookmark for every critical thinker.
- James Randi Educational Foundation: An educational resource on the paranormal, pseudoscientific and the supernatural (http://www.Randi.org/). James Randi has an international reputation as a magician and escape artist, but today he is best known as the world’s most tireless investigator and demystifier of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. The James Randi Educational Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1996. Its aim is to promote critical thinking by reaching out to the public and media with reliable information about paranormal and supernatural ideas so widespread in our society today. The JREF also sponsors the “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge,” which offers a million bucks to anyone who demonstrates a paranormal ability or phenomenon. Since 1964, every single one of about 1000 challengers has either failed the preliminary test, or failed even to agree to acceptable rules for the test.
