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

The Marriage of Scepticism and Wonder
in Loch Ness or the Congo Republic; or we will find artefacts of an
advanced, non-human species elsewhere in the solar system. At
the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in
my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone
humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers;
(2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive
thoughts or images 'projected' at them; and (3) that young
children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which
upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not
have known about in any other way than reincarnation. I pick
these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (I don't),
but as examples of contentions that might be true. The last three
have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support.
Of course, I could be wrong.
In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a
modest manifesto called 'Objections to Astrology' and asked me
to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found
myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any
validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of
the statement was authoritarian. It criticized astrology for having
origins shrouded in superstition. But this is true as well for
religion, chemistry, medicine and astronomy, to mention only
four. The issue is not what faltering and rudimentary knowledge
astrology came from, but what is its present validity. Then there
was speculation on the psychological motivations of those who
believe in astrology. These motivations - for example, the feeling
of powerlessness in a complex, troublesome and unpredictable
world - might explain why astrology is not generally given the
sceptical scrutiny it deserves, but is quite peripheral to whether it
works.
The statement stressed that we can think of no mechanism by
which astrology could work. This is certainly a relevant point but
by itself it's unconvincing. No mechanism was known for continental
drift (now subsumed in plate tectonics) when it was
proposed by Alfred Wegener in the first quarter of the twentieth
century to explain a range of puzzling data in geology and
palaeontology. (Ore-bearing veins of rocks and fossils seemed to
run continuously from eastern South America to West Africa;
285