There it is — my personal copy of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. Purchased sometime in the mid 90s, it served as an introduction to skepticism, intellectual honesty, and freethought. Hungry for more, I started reading books by Michael Shermer, Martin Gardner, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and more.
More relevant now than when it was written. Sagan warned of a time when people would lose the ability to tell fact from fiction — when opinion, rumor, and ideology would eclipse reason. We're there. A post-truth age fueled by social media, warped by politics, and further blurred by AI. Ironically, the very people most hostile to critical thinking have adopted Sagan's own mantra with "I’m just asking questions." But theirs isn't skepticism; it's subversion. It's the performance of inquiry with none of the discipline, humility, or evidence that real questioning demands.
Here are a few favorite quotes:
"The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility — more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive."
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
"But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans—teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge."
"Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend - substantively and in depth."
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
— Carl Sagan