The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

What Our Readers Are Saying

Share your thoughts on this title!

Average customer rating 5 (6 comments)

---

`

This book is great. Carl Sagan has this way of just getting right down to the heart of the matter while keeping an open mind. This book hits a little home for me since I am a teacher and Sagan talks about the need for science education (and education in general) to keep up from falling into the abyss. This book is his look at the dangers of discounting science and the scientific method, and the need to be skeptical in general. The man was amazing. He's a legend. A true hero for the modern age.

`

First of all, I have not read the book, just the write-ups by the publisher and the comments (4) by people who have read the book. If I recall correctly, Carl Sagan is an Atheist. And he argues against the existance of demons, as well as UFO's, and a number of other phenomenom today. But if I stand by Dr Sagan, I must throw out my Bible, where demons are mentioned as fact throughout, especially in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

`

i read this book when it was first published and have seen our country become more educated and less knowledgeable over the years. for most people science is a mystery, but for those who have gotten college degrees it is to them an open book, which unfortunately they do not know how to read. in the last decade we have witnessed more hysteria and less thought about the real problems that beset us. a case in point is the mass rejection of childhood disease vaccines that have resulted in the almost epidemic rise of some of them in clusters of the well-to-do and supposedly well-educated populations. the number of children's deaths are rising. it must be rather disheartening for parents to see their child die when they know they are responsible for this. we have a whole political party that rejects even the notion of science and they are campaigning on this idea. imagine in a world they inhabit where science is ever present and the fruits of science are keeping them alive, they reject it all.

`

An exceptional read in Sagan's easily accessible style, The Demon-Haunted World is the late planetologist's effort to fight superstitious and unscientific views cast on scientific topics, as well as a call for reform in education and thinking. An amazingly interesting advocacy of skepticism, practically unputdownable!

`

Should be part of every high school curriculum. Read it and you will become a clearer-thinking person, applying the same skepticism you use buying a used car to everything. And you will increase your wonder quotient as well. What more could a book offer?

`

As one who spent the decade escaping--successfully--from fundamentalism, the value of a book is not only in how absorbing of a read it was, but also how it encouraged the freedom to not believe. I read a number of excellent books along these lines during the last ten years, both positive, in their portrayal of the ability of science to understand what is true (this one, Park's "Voodoo Science," books of essays by Stephen Jay Gould, Coyne's "Why Evolution is True") and negative, in their criticism of religion's discredited truth claims and baleful social effects (the ones you all know by Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, as well as Kaminer's "Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials" and Mills' "Atheist Universe"). A tough call, but I'd have to choose this book by Sagan for the very best of the group. To call it a book about the scientific method would make it sound dull--which it decidedly was not!--so let me rather characterize the book as providing the epistemological basis for a life of freedom. To catalogue the book's intellectual riches would be either to reproduce it word for word, or to be annoyingly pedantic, so one example alone will have to suffice. Sagan clarifies the two meanings the word "science" has, namely the method whereby we come to know things with some confidence, and the body of facts known thereby. This one idea distinguishes science from religion (religion has its store of dogma, but no method to determine whether or not any of it is true, relying on faith rather than any objective method), and illuminates the source of science's success in explaining the world (further experiments and theory can result in changes and revisions to what is considered to be true, and even overthrowing it; the final arbiter is nature, not any given human being's opinions). As Sagan himself states: "The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science"). The eclipse of science in America, due to funding issues, poorly-conceived educational practices (translation: science in elementary school is dull), and the efforts of the strange bedfellows of the religious right and the po-mo left, both eager to prevent any true scientific reasoning from overthrowing their subjective beliefs and political opinions, is leading to widespread religiously inspired ignorance, political extremism reactionary to the point of fascism (you think I'm exaggerating, but I hear it every day from my still-fundamentalist friends and family) and, more to the point and if the right can prevent any action from being taken on the climate crisis (the details of which we know by the hard work of those "stodgy and grumpy" scientists), the extinction of the human race within the next 100-150 years. It is silly to think that any one book, even one as wildly exciting as this one, can change this state of affairs--but one can always hope.