Carl Sagan was such a brilliant dude.........truth explorer! Cut thru the bullshit and get straight to the answer in a no-nonsense fashion. Scientific method. A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage Suppose (Im following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely youd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity! Show me, you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon. Wheres the dragon? you ask. Oh, shes right here, I reply, waving vaguely. I neglected to mention that shes an invisible dragon. You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragons footprints. Good idea, I say, but this dragon floats in the air. Then youll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire. Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless. Youll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible. Good idea, but shes an incorporeal dragon and the paint wont stick. And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it wont work. Now, whats the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If theres no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What Im asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing youve really learned from my insistence that theres a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. Youd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe Ive seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you dont outright reject the notion that theres a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge youre prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely its unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of not proved. Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that theres something here, and that in a preliminary way its consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon. Now another scenario: Suppose its not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who youre pretty sure dont know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit were disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. Id rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons werent myths at all. Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But theyre never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragons fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such evidence -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion. -Carl Sagan
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 04:36:36 +0000