Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
not exactly pray) that Mao Zedong would live 'for ten thousand
years'. Nearly everyone in ancient Egypt exhorted the gods to let
the Pharaoh live 'forever'. These collective prayers failed. Their
failure constitutes data.
By making pronouncements that are, even if only in principle,
testable, religions, however unwillingly, enter the arena of science.
Religions can no longer make unchallenged assertions about
reality so long as they do not seize secular power, provided they
cannot coerce belief.
This, in turn, has infuriated some followers of some religions.
Occasionally they threaten sceptics with the direst imaginable
penalties. Consider the following high stakes alternative by William
Blake in his innocuously titled Auguries of Innocence:
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
The rotting Grave shall ne'er get out.
He who respects the Infant's Faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death
Of course many religions, devoted to reverence, awe, ethics,
ritual, community, family, charity, and political and economic
justice, are in no way challenged, but rather uplifted, by the
findings of science. There is no necessary conflict between science
and religion. On one level, they share similar and consonant roles,
and each needs the other. Open and vigorous debate, even the
consecration of doubt, is a Christian tradition going back to John
Milton's Areopagitica (1644). Some of mainstream Christianity
and Judaism embraces and even anticipated at least a portion of
the humility, self-criticism, reasoned debate, and questioning of
received wisdom that the best of science offers. But other sects,
sometimes called conservative or fundamentalist - and today they
seem to be in the ascendant, with the mainstream religions almost
inaudible and invisible - have chosen to make a stand on matters
subject to disproof, and thus have something to fear from science.
The religious traditions are often so rich and multivariate that
they offer ample opportunity for renewal and revision, again
especially when their sacred books can be interpreted metaphorically
and allegorically. There is thus a middle ground of confessing
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