Why skepticism?
Shalini Sehkar
Friday, 18 May 2007 05:33 UTC
I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark]
Updated 18 May 2007 05:33 UTC
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Replies
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Actually, I would say that it depends on your perception. I’m currently writing about a survey conducted in Australia in 2008 and co-created by myself and another researcher.
Sure, today, you can watch Richard Dawkins (2007) introduce the documentary ‘Enemies of Reason’ with the following intro:
Science has sent orbiters to Neptune, eradicated smallpox, and created a supercomputer that can do sixty-trillion calculations per second. Science frees us from superstition, and dogma and enables us to base our knowledge on evidence… well, most of us… Yet today, reason has a battle on its hands. I want to confront the epidemic of irrational, superstitious thinking. It’s a multi-million pound industry that impoverishes our culture and throws up new-age gurus that exhort us to run away from reality. As a scientist, I don’t think our indulgence of irrational superstition is harmless. I think it profoundly undermines civilization… We live in dangerous times, when superstition is gaining ground and rational science is under attack.
Bu historical precedence of adherence to superstition indicate that this isn’t anything new. George Bernard Shaw (1903) described English society in the decades prior to the First World War as:
…superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping, materialisation seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this half century of the drift to the abyss. (Man and Superman, Act IV).
If you’re worried that it will ‘appear more tempting’, then I guess we have to start taking a different approach to the efforts we’ve made before. I’m becoming more and more interested in the application of pop culture to challenging dangerous superstitions (for we can argue that there is a spectrum regarding what superstitions can do), for a start.
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I think that was just a complete quote by Carl Sagan :-) The poster should have voiced her reason/concern/question in more than two words in title! Or was that the title of Sagan’s chapter too?
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