
By: Sheppard Gordon
Re: Sagan - Chicago S.T.

 Don't Believe It   // Faithful of All Stripes Take Hit In Sagan Book
 04/21/96      Chicago Sun-Times

   Astronomer Carl Sagan, the world's best-known living scientist, has
written a blunt attack on all forms of magical thinking.

     In his new book, The Demon-Haunted World:  Science as a Candle in
the Dark (Random House,  $25.95.), he assails:

   Astrology, horoscopes, faith-healing, UFO "abductions," religious
miracles, New Age occultism, fundamentalist "creationism," Tarot card
reading, prayer, prophecy, palmistry, Transcendental Meditation,
satanism, weeping statues, "channeling" of voices from the dead, holy
apparitions, extrasensory perception, belief in life after death,
"dowsing," demonic possession, the "supernatural powers" of crystals and
pyramids, "psychic phenomena" etc., etc.

     Sagan's message can be summed up in two sentences:

     Many people believe almost anything they're told, with no evidence,
which makes them vulnerable to charlatans, crackpots and superstition.

     Only the scientific outlook, mixing skepticism and wonder, can give
people a trustworthy grasp of reality.

     He scorns supernatural aspects of religion. Some of his comments:
 "If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be
eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not
mere anecdote . . . . Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting
fantasy."

 "If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can
inoculate . . . . Try science."

      "Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with
prophecy.

     "Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague,
however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there
ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of
science? . . . No other human institution comes close."

     "Since World War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new
religions featuring the supernatural . . . . In Thailand, diseases are
treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred Scripture.

     " `Witches' are today being burned in South Africa. . . . The
worldwide TM (Transcendental Meditation) organization has an estimated
valuation of $3 billion. For a fee, they promise through meditation to
be able to walk you through walls, to make you invisible, to enable you
to fly."

     "The so-called Shroud of Turin . . . is now suggested by carbon-14
dating to be not the death shroud of Jesus, but a pious hoax from the
14th century - a time when the manufacture of fraudulent religious
relics was a thriving and profitable home handicraft industry."

     Sagan quotes the Roman philosopher Lucretius:

     "Nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself, without
the meddling of the gods."

     And he quotes the Roman historian Polybius as saying the masses can
be unruly, so "they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The
ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods and the belief in
punishment after death."

     Sagan recounts how the medieval church tortured and burned
thousands of women on charges that they were witches who flew through
the sky, copulated with Satan, changed into animals, etc.

     He says "this legally and morally sanctioned mass murder" was
advocated by great church fathers.

     The astronomer-author is equally scornful of New Age gurus, flying
saucer buffs, seance "channelers" and others who tout mysterious beliefs
without evidence.

     He denounces the tendency among some groups, chiefly
fundamentalists and marginal psychologists, to induce people falsely to
"remember" satanic rituals they experienced as children.

     Again and again, Sagan says that wonders revealed by science are
more awesome than any claims by mystics. He says children are "natural
scientists" because they incessantly ask "Why is the moon round?" or
"Why do we have toes?" or the like.

     He urges that youngsters be inculcated with the scientific spirit
of searching for trustworthy evidence, to guide them through "the
demon-haunted world."

     Sagan's new book is more confrontational than his previous works.

     Perhaps, like Voltaire, he felt spurred by advancing age to take a
public stand against mysticism.

     Incidentally, during Easter week, as Sagan's volume was reaching
bookstores, all three of America's national newsmagazines - Time,
Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report - printed cover stories
questioning Christianity's chief miracle, the Resurrection.

     The battle, it seems, is on.

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