An Analysis Of Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World

Honestly, in my opinion, this was one of the most confusing readings yet. I believe that I understand what Carl Sagan is attempting to say, but it seemed entirely too wordy. Chapter 14 of "The Demon Haunted World" revolves around modern views of science. There is, of course, the highly believable and reproducible experimental science, the highly believable but misguided pseudoscience, and the complete renunciation of science known as antiscience. Carl Sagan indirectly argues the importance of experimental science by displaying and refuting (sometimes sarcastically) the arguments and examples of antiscience. However, the open ended and sometimes unanswerable questions combined with the long, drawn-out sentences made it quite difficult to focus

Some Postmodernists argue that science is not really knowledge at all. Instead, they speak in terms of chaos theory, the unpredictability of science, indeterminacy, or uncertainty of evolution/devolution, etc. […] In contrast with the failed approach to Postmodern science, history confirms the reality and progressive reliability of the scientific method. In fact, modern science came about because of a biblical view of reality. Campbell writes, "The rise of modern science would have been impossible without Christian presuppositions that the universe is rational because it was created by a rational

It becomes quite clear that postmodernist's attack modern science by saying that it is merely subjective and cannot be trusted due to bias and the constant changing of theories and knowledge. However, Sagan maintains a firm stance against this argument for the entire duration of the chapter and properly concludes that "If we were not aware of our own limitations, though, if we were not seeking further data, if we were unwilling to perform controlled experiments, if we did not respect the evidence, we would have very little leverage in our quest for the truth" (p.