Religion is a Mental Illness

Charlie Rose: You convinced me a long time ago that it was arrogant for me or for anyone else to believe that there wasn't some life outside of our...

Carl Sagan: To exclude the possibility.

Rose: To exclude the possibility was an arrogance of intellect that we should not assume. You couldn't prove it. You didn't know it was there. But the arrogance...

Sagan: Right. We don't know if it's there, we don't know if it's not there. Let's look.

Rose: And if you take that, why can't you say there's a lot we don't know?

Sagan: I say it here. Watch, there's a lot we don't know. It's what I believe. But that doesn't mean that every fraudulent claim has to be accepted. We demand the most rigorous standards of evidence especially on what's important to us. So, if some guy comes up to me, a channeler or a medium, I can put you in touch with your parents. Well, because I want so terribly to believe that I know I have to reach in for added reserves of skepticism. Because I'm likely to be fooled and, much more minor, to have my money taken.

Charlie Rose: Listen to this, I hate to read too much, but this is, it's almost like they've been reading your book. This is from the New York Times for Friday May 24. "Americans flunk science, a study finds."

"Less than half of American adults understand that the Earth orbits the Sun yearly, according to a basic science survey. Nevertheless, there is enthusiasm for research, except in some fields like genetic engineering and nuclear power that are viewed with suspicion.

Only about 25 percent of American adults got passing grades in a National Science Foundation survey of what people know about basic science and economics."

I mean, this is singing your song isn't it?

Carl Sagan: Well, it's certainly what I'm talking about in "Demon-Haunted World." My feeling, Charlie, is that it's not that pseudoscience and superstition and new-age so-called beliefs and fundamentalist zealotry are something new. They've been with us for as long as we've been human. But we live in an age based on science and technology with formidable technological powers.

Rose: Science and technology are propelling us forward at accelerating rates.

Sagan: That's right, and if we don't understand it - and by we, I mean the general public - if it's something that, oh I'm not good at that, I don't know anything about it, then who is making all the decisions about science and technology that are gonna determine what kind of future our children live in? Just some members of Congress? But there's no more than a handful of members of Congress with any background in science at all. And the Republican Congress has just abolished its own office of Technology Assessment, the organization that gave them bipartisan competent advice on science and technology. They say, we don't want to know don't tell us about science and technology.

Rose: Surprising because Gingrich is genuinely interested, I think.

Sagan: He is, no question.

Rose: ... you know out of his own intellectual curiosity. Does the President still have a science adviser, at the White House?

Sagan: He does, he does, John Given. And the Vice President is scientifically literate, yes.

Rose: He's well known for being scientifically-- a science maven. I mean, you blast them all. Creationists, Christian Scientists who you say would rather allow their children to suffer than give them insulin or antibiotics. Astrologers come in for particular scorn on your part.

Sagan: Well, I wouldn't say scorn, just derision.

Rose: A more generous version of scorn. But what's the danger of all this? I mean, you know, this is not the thing--

Sagan: There's two kinds of dangers. One is what I just talked about, that we've arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is gonna blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy, if the people don't know anything about it.

And the second reason that I'm worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along. It's a thing that Jefferson laid great stress on. It wasn't enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a constitution or a bill of rights. The people had to be educated and they had to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise, we don't run the government, the government runs us.

Carl Sagan: There's two kinds of dangers.

One is what I just talked about, that we've arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?

And the second reason that I'm worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious who comes ambling along.

It's a thing that Jefferson laid great stress on. It wasn't enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a Constitution or a Bill of Rights. The people had to be educated, and they had to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise we don't run the government—the government runs us.

Charlie Rose: Jefferson was amazing in his devotion to science.

Sagan: Absolutely.

Rose: We think of Jefferson as this man who was literate and who was a passionate articulator of freedom, but if you go to Monticello, what you appreciate is he was at heart a scientist, a botanist, an architect, geologist. And if you, Meriwether Lewis, as we now know from Steven Ambrose, he wanted him to go out and do experimentations and explore and be skeptical and find answers to passages and explore the West.

Sagan: Exactly right. And there was also an economic grail there if the northwest passage was found. Jefferson said that he was at heart a scientist, that he would have loved to have been a scientist. But there were certain events happening in America that called to him, and so he devoted his life to that kind of politics.

Rose: A revolution.

Sagan: Indeed. So that generations later people could be scientists.