Carl Sagan and the Cult of Scientism

Atheists celebrated Carl Sagan Day yesterday. Sagan is a patron saint of the Scientism Denomination of Materialist Atheism. Over at sandwalk, Prof. Moran posted the following paragraphs from one of Sagan’s books:

”In every such society there is a cherished world of myth and metaphor which co-exists with the workaday world. Efforts to reconcile the two are made, and any rough edges at the joints are tend to be off-limits and ignored. We compartmentalize. Some scientists do this too, effortlessly stepping between the skeptical world of science and the credulous world of belief without skipping a beat. Of course, the greater the mismatch between these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with untroubled conscience, with both.

”In a life short and uncertain, it seems heartless to do anything that might deprive people of the consolation of faith when science cannot remedy their anguish. Those who cannot bear the burden of science are free to ignore its precepts. But we cannot have science in bits and pieces, applying it where we feel safe and ignoring it where we feel threatened—again, because we are not wise enough to do so. Except by sealing the brain off into separate compartments, how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000 years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995) P. 297.”

Now if you haven’t already spotted the false presuppositions which Sagan embedded in these two famous paragraphs, then re-read them with that in mind.

Done? Good. Here’s my take. Sagan, like many Atheists, presumes that there are two separate magesteria a la Stephen J Gould, completely separate and incompatible, one of which is totally factual and rational, the other of which is non-factual and irrational to the point of insanity. Hence this statement:

” Of course, the greater the mismatch between these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with untroubled conscience, with both.”

Never mind that there is no physical, material lump called “conscience” or that there is no scientific experiment capable of providing the morality to tweak the conscience, Sagan declares that there is a moral mismatch, not just a physical or intellectual mismatch between the magesteria. Perhaps his moral statement goes like this:

”No knowledge should ever be accepted that is not scientifically derived, whatever that means”

Now if this statement is a truth statement, and it is, and if it is an imperative, and it is, then there must be a scientific derivation for the statement itself. But of course there is not. The statement, and the Saganesque thinking behind it, is internally contradictory: therefore it is logically false, and intellectually non-coherent.

But Sagan’s entire career in philosophizing is based on this premise. And Sagan’s entire appeal to Atheists of the world is the fact that he promotes this premise. For the Saganites, science and Materialism are actually moral imperatives. This is an obvious feature of a religion, one which is based on a false ideology.

But that was just the first paragraph. Let’s move on to the second:

” In a life short and uncertain, it seems heartless to do anything that might deprive people of the consolation of faith when science cannot remedy their anguish.”

Presupposition: the irrational magisterium has a purpose: to provide consolation and remedy anguish.

Under this assumption there is no rational reason or reasoning involved with the second magesterium; it is predefined as irrational, serving desperate emotional needs that are not assuaged by mere experimental data.

” Those who cannot bear the burden of science are free to ignore its precepts.”

Because the two magesteria cannot overlap in any way, those who engage the bad magisterium must be rejecting science. This presupposition goes counter to the prior sentence which gives an actual purpose to the bad magisterium, a purpose which science cannot fulfill, not a rejection of science but stepping outside of its grasp to access something more. One might presume that Sagan is obliquely referring to creationism / ID here, but that is not what he actually says: his statement refers to the entirety of the non-scientistic realm of intellectual thought.

Of course on the surface, he is correct. One may safely ignore science as a source of moral instruction, purpose for one’s life, and answers to the question, “what sort of person should be?” But that again is not what he meant. What he meant is that the bad magisterium is a science-free zone, a fact-free zone where only fiction and “myth and metaphor” exist: a zone that is fully fallacious, a zone where one takes leave of one's sanity if one goes there.

” But we cannot have science in bits and pieces, applying it where we feel safe and ignoring it where we feel threatened—again, because we are not wise enough to do so. Except by sealing the brain off into separate compartments, how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000 years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?”

Those who access the bad magisterium cannot fly in airplanes? Here is the crux of Sagan’s belief, finally surfacing from the deep like a whale breeching and blowing. If a person accesses the bad magisterium, then by Sagan’s lights that person has rejected rationality and science in toto. There is no continuum between technology and a first cause. And to think that there actually is continuity is a violation of scientism, which brings us full circle back to Sagan’s Moral Law:

”No knowledge should ever be accepted that is not scientifically derived, whatever that means”

So deeply embedded is this fallacious entreaty that it is not necessary to state it, even in Sagan's philosophist articles like these. It is a firmly believed axiom, a moral First Principle for Atheism, Philosophical Materialism, and Scientism. But under the First Principles of Logic – those principles which secretly underlie actual science, logic and rational thought – Sagan’s Moral Law is so obviously a logical failure that its non-coherence place Sagan and Saganism into a separate magisterium yet, a third zone where irrational is declared rational, and not just rational: it is called moral, based on its own irrational moral principles. This magisterium might well be called the Realm of Moral Self-Delusion as Scientific Factism.