Chapter 22: Significant Junkies Chapter 24: Science and Witchcraft

" We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling."~ Henri Poincare

Carl ask, how can there be more science in television? One of the possibilities include the wonder and methods of science routinely presented on news and talk programs. Or a separate series of fundamental misunderstandings and mistakes made by famous scientist, national leaders, and religious figures. There is a pressing national need for more public knowledge of science. TV cannot provide it all by itself. Yet if improvements are wanted than television is the place to start.
     In Chapter 24, Carl says that science must be kept free of corruption by politics and mass movements or else it will be  nothing better than witchcraft. Witchcraft was created by the church to give the church more power through fear.
     In Chapter 25,  Sagan says that science and scientific method can be used as a tool to improve society (Social experimentation to see what works to improve life's quality). This idea is compatible with the notion of democracy and its free exchange of ideas.

                  ~End of blogs...hope you enjoyed!~

Chapter 18: The Wind Makes Dust Chapter 19: No such thing as a Dumb Question Chapter 20; A house on Fire

" The wind makes dust because it intends to blow, taking away our footprints."~ Bushmen folklore

     So many people find science hard to learn and hard to teach. Some reasons, to Carl, are precision, its disquieting aspects,  and it's prospects of misuse. Carl asks, is there something deeper? Carl admits that he doesn't believe that science is too hard to teach because humans aren't ready for it or because it arose only through a fluke or simply that we don't have the brain power to wrap our minds around it. Carl says the science that he sees in first graders is not what's expected. An inclination for science is embedded deeply within us. It is the means of our survival. Yet we discourage children from science. We are disenfranchising them, taking form them the tools needed to manage their future.

     In chapter's 19 and 20 Carl asks why children ask such great questions about the universe and science? He states that there is a problem in public education. this problem is in science and other subjects. They have problems that runs so deep it is easy to despair and conclude that they can never be fixed. And yet there are institutions in small town and in big cities that provide reason for hope. An example included Levin and Levine. They thought science should belong to everyone. their community agreed and made a commitment to realize that dream. It makes you wonder what else could we do if we worked together for a better future for kids.

Chapter 17: The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder

" Nothing is too wonderful to be true"~Michael Faraday

     It seems heartless to deprive someone from the consolation of faith, when science cannot remedy their anguish. There are many who cannot bear the burden of science and ignore it's precepts. We cannot have science in bits and pieces, applying where we feel it be necessary.
     In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern. Clearly there are limits to the uses of skepticism. In Science In the New Age, skepticism is discusses, but it is not understood and not practiced. The heart of science is an essential balance between an openness to new ideas. The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking, working together. Both skepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their marriage within  the mind of every schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education.

Chapter 14: Antiscience Chapter 15: Newton's sleep

     Scientist make mistakes. It is the job of the scientist to recognize the weaknesses. For many questions in science, you can rerun the event as many times as you like. Science is different from many other human enterprise; in it's  passion for framing testable hypothesis, in it's search for definitive experiments that confirm or deny  ideas. If we were not aware of our own limitations or were not willing to control our experiments
than there would be very little leverage in the quest for truth.
    We are much better off if we know the best that is available to the truth.In any and every case, the imagined dire consequences of the truth being generally known are exaggerated. Carl say that we are not wise enough to know which lies, or even shading of certain facts, can competently server some social purpose.

Chapter 13: Obsessed with Reality

     At the borders of science lurks a range of ideas that are appealing or at least mind-boggling, but that have not been conscientiously worked over with a baloney detection kit. Typical offerings of superstition are like carrying a foot of a rabbit or taking phone calls from the dead. Some claims are hard to test. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Others are easier. The question is how good is the evidence. The burden of proof surely rests on the shoulders of those who advance such claims.
     Nearly half of Americans believe there is such a thing as psychic or spiritual healing. Miraculous cures have been associated with a wide variety of healers, real and imagined, throughout human history. Stanley says the research data on distant, prayer based healing are promising but too sparse to allow any firm conclusion to be drawn. Mark Twain wrote that the power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal it or make it sick is a force which none of us is born without. The first man had it,  the last one will possess it. Carl says occasionally, some of the pain, anxiety, or other symptoms can be relieved by faith healers; however, without arresting the progress of the disease.
     Carl says it is sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we have been wrong.

I disagree with Carl and Mark on the spiritual healing issue. Spiritual healing does not come from a man's imagination, it comes from God alone. AMAZING STORY

Jeff Markin: Back from the Dead, Reborn Into the Light

By Sheryl Fountain
The 700 Club

Original Air Date: September 15, 2010
9 Comment(s)

CBN.com – It was the morning of September 20, 2006.  Jeff Markin recalls heading for work as usual.  What he doesn’t remember is driving himself to the hospital.
He had called his boss and told him he didn’t feel well. His boss was concerned and convinced Jeff to go to the emergency room.  Somehow Jeff made it.  Once he got there, he collapsed.
Dr. Chauncey Crandall was doing rounds in the intensive care unit that morning. He recalls, "An alert call came over the PA system that someone had arrived at the hospital with a massive deadly heart attack. Then a second call went out over the PA system and specifically asking for me because I was the cardiologist on that day. When I arrived there, it was like a war zone. It was chaos. Everyone there fighting to keep this man alive."
The ER staff worked on Jeff for 40 minutes. They shocked him a dozen times. Despite their efforts, there was no response.
Once Dr. Crandall decided the team had done everything medically possible, he called the time of death. Medically Jeff was dead, but he was still experiencing consciousness.
"I was standing in the back of a funeral home, and at that time, I determined that I had died," Jeff Markin says. "This funeral home was empty and was wondering where all my friends and family were."
While a nurse prepared Jeff’s body for the morgue, Dr. Crandall updated the charts.
"As soon as my note was completed, I walked out through the door to this emergency room and I heard this voice say, 'Turn around and pray for this man.' I wanted to ignore that voice because I said to myself, How can I pray for that man? He’s dead he’s gone. There’s no life in him, so I keep walking. The voice came back again and said, 'Turn around and pray for that man.' I stopped and thought I need to honor the Lord. So I turned around at the doorway, and I walked to the side of the body.
"The nurse was on the other side of the body, and she’s looking at me like, 'What are you doing? Why are you here?' And I stood there next to the corpse and I opened my mouth and these words came out: 'Father God, I cry out for this man’s soul. If he does not know you as his Lord and Savior, Father, raise him from the dead now, in Jesus name.‘"
‘I remember staring at bright lights and they were swirling around," Jeff says. "Out of those bright lights came an image and he told me that he was there to look over me and make sure that everything was going to be fine."
Dr. Crandall continues, "The other doctor walked in the room and I pointed to him and said, 'Shock this man one more time.' He looked at me and said, 'Dr. Crandall, we can’t shock him. He’s dead. There’s no life in him. He’s gone.' I said, 'For me, shock him one more time.' That doctor out of respect and honor for me went over to that body with those defibrillator paddles and put his paddles on that patient and shocked him. Immediately an instant heartbeat came back. Instant perfect, regular, which we’ve never seen before. Then suddenly this abdomen started moving and starting breathing and then a couple moments later, the fingers started twitching."
They immediately moved Jeff to the intensive care unit. Three days later, Jeff woke up with no evidence of brain or organ damage.
"Once I woke up, my daughter Jillian was there," Jeff says. "That’s when she told me what had happened."
Dr. Crandall says, "When I came in Monday morning, Jeff was sitting up in bed, and I said, 'Where were you that day that I prayed for you in the emergency room?' And he said, 'I was in total darkness and I was so disappointed.' I said, 'Jeff, what were you disappointed about?' He said, 'I was alone for eternity.'"
Jeff recalls, "He asked me at that time if I was willing to accept God into my life and into my heart and I did. I just opened my arms and accepted God. It was just a very emotional time and I remember crying in his arms."
Today Jeff is back at work and gets regular check-ups with Dr. Crandall.
"He still has no heart problems or residual complications from his brush with death," Dr. Crandall says.
"To know what I had gone through and to be fortunate... That’s been part of my daily battle is why me," Jeff ponders. "Why have I been so fortunate to have God shine on me? It’s been tremendous. I’ve been physically reborn. I’ve been spiritually reborn, and I’m just very grateful for that."
"This day that I prayed for Jeff was a day of very little faith. It wasn’t one of my big God days," Dr. Crandall says. " I was so much in a rush with my work, and I didn’t have a lot of faith backing that prayer up that day. But the Lord asked me to do it, so I honored the Lord and prayed. That’s all we need. Just a spark of faith like that mustard seed, and when you cry out to the mighty Holy Spirit, He will take over. Miracles are real, and they’re real today."
      This man did not heal himself. He didn't imagine himself waking up. The man even states in the article what his thoughts were which included nothing of him returning back to life. This man was healed by God and by God alone. Because another man had faith God was able to use him in the process. I believe that some people "reject strong evidence instead of admitting they were wrong" too. I have taken my time to dissect my relationship with God and who his is. I have taken the time to ask myself where is the evidence yet I see all this evidence pointing to my God's existence and to his love and power. I know that Christianity involves faith and believing in something you cannot see but my God is not quiet. He makes Himself known. I wonder if it is others that "reject the strong evidence rather than admitting they were wrong".
 http://www.cbn.com/700club/features/amazing/Jeff-Markin-Chauncey-Crandall-091510.aspx

Chapter 12: The Fine Art of Baloney Detections

     If some good evidence for life after death were announced, Carl says he would be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data. Many puerile marvels are payed attention to because they promise life after death, even life eternal.
     Carl says you must always be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow someone else's reasoning, to duplicate their experiment and see if they get the same results. The reliance of carefully designed and controlled experiments is key. Control experiments are essential. Variables must be separated. Often the experiment must be done double-blind so that those hoping for a certain finding are not in the potentially compromising position of evaluating the results.  The knowledge might influence their decision. This is implied in the Baloney Detection Kit:

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

          http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/16/baloney-detection-kit/

Chapter 10: The Dragon In My Garage

"Magic, it must be remembered, is an art which demands collaboration between the artist and his public"~ E.M. Butler

     Carl said suppose he say there is a fire breathing dragon in his garage. You would tell him to show you. Let's say you proposed spreading flour on the floor to capture it's footprints...except the dragon floats in the air. Then you propose using an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire...but the invisible fire is also heat less. Then you propose to spray paint the dragon to make her visible...except she is an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick. What if he counters every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why that proposal will not work? What is the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heat less fire and no dragon at all? Carl states that our inability to invalidate his hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless. Unless, lets say the cards are turned, and you are able to capture it's footprints and are able to detect the invisible fire. These are pieces of visible and detectable evidence that can not be ignored...yet this is not the case. Carl states that the only thing you have learned from his insistence that there really is a dragon in his garage is that something funny is going on inside his head. This applies for alien abductions.
     Carl says how surprised he is that there are psychiatrists and others with some scientific training who know the imperfections of the human mind, but who dismiss the idea that these accounts might be some species of hallucination of some kind of screen memory. Keeping an open mind is a virtue but not so open that your brain falls out. We must be willing to change our minds when warranted by new evidence. And if the alien abduction accounts are mainly about brain physiology, hallucinations, distorted memories of childhood, and hoaxing, don't we have before us a matter of supreme importance. There is genuine scientific play dirt in UFOs and alien abductions but it is of a distinctly homegrown and terrestrial character.

Chapter 9: Therapy

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."~ Sherlock Holmes

     John Mack is a Harvard University psychiatrist whom Carl has known for many years. John asked Carl if there was anything to this UFO business. Carl told him that there wasn't much going on except of course on the psychiatric side. John looked into it, interviewed abductees, and was converted. Ne now accepts the accounts of abductees at face value. John said if was completely persuasive because of the emotional power of the experiences.
   Aren't powerful emotions a routine component of our dreams? Some of John's patients describe themselves as having hallucinated since childhood. Have the hypnotists and psychotherapist been working with abductees made conscientious attempts to steep themselves in the body of knowledge on hallucinations and perceptual malfunctions. \
     Some alien abduction accounts may conceivably be disguised memories of rape and childhood sexual abuse, with the father, stepfather, uncle, or mother's boyfriend represented as an alien. It is seemed more comforting to believe than an alien abused you than by someone you trusted and loved. Therapists who take the alien abduction stories at face value deny this. Some estimates from opinion surveys range as high as one in four American women and on in six American men having been sexually abused in childhood.
     Both sexual abuse therapist and alien abduction therapist spend months encouraging their subjects to remember being abused. Carl believes that the more he looks into the claims of alien abductions the more similar they seem to report of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
     How much training in scientific method and skeptical scrutiny, in statistics or even in human fallibility have these therapists received? Most therapist contend that their responsibility is to support their patients, not to question, to be skeptical, or to raise doubts.

Chapter 8: On the Distinction Between True and False Visions

" A credulous mind...finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such. ~ Samuel Butler

     In preparing for courtroom testimony, witnesses are coached by their lawyer and made to repeat the story over and over again until they get it "right". Once on the stand, they remember the story they have been telling the lawyer's office. The witnesses may have forgotten that their memories were reprocessed.
     These facts are relevant in evaluating the societal effects of advertising and of propaganda. This lawyer aspects applies to the therapist who assist those who where abducted by aliens. Therapist must be very careful that they do not accidentally implant or select the stories they elicit.
     Perhaps what we actually remember is a set of memory fragments stitched onto a fabric of our own devising. We can make a memorable story easy to recall.  The situation is like the method of science itself, where many isolated data points can be remembered, summarized, and explained in the framework of a theory. We then much more easily recall the theory and not the data.
     In science the theories are always being reassessed and confronted with new facts.  Our memories are almost never challenged. They can be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are or become a work in continual artistic revision.

  

Chapter 7: The Demon Haunted World

"There are demon haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness."~The Isa Upanishad

     From the beginning, much more was intended than demons as a ere poetic metaphor for the evil in the hearts of men. With exhaustive citations of scripture and of ancient and modern scholars, they produced the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches - aptly described as on of the most terrifying documents in human history. What the Malleus comes down to is that if you are accused of witchcraft, you are a witch. Torture is n unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation.There is no opportunity to confront the accusers. Little attention is given to the possibility that accusations might be made for impious purposes.
     The more who, under torture, confessed to witchcraft, the harder it was to maintain that the whole business was mere fantasy. Since each "witch" was made to implicate others, the numbers grew exponentially. These constituted "frightful proofs that the Devil is still alive," as it was later put in America in the Salem Witch Trials.
     In Britain witch-finders, also called prickers, were employed, receiving a handsome bounty for each girl or woman they turned over for execution. They had no incentive to be cautious in their accusations. Typically they looked for devils marks- scars or birthmarks or nevi- that when pricked with a pin neither hurt nor bled. In the witch trials, mitigating evidence or defence witnesses were inadmissible. In any case, it was nearly impossible to provide compelling alibis for accused witches: The rules of evidence had a special character.
     The confessions of witchcraft could not be based on hallucinations, say, or desperate attempts to satisfy the inquisitors and stop the torture.Witchcraft of course was not the only offense that merited torture and burning at the stake. Heresy was a still more serous crime, and both Catholics and Protestants punished it ruthlessly. Burning witches is a feature of Western civilization that has, with occasional political exceptions, declined since the sixteenth century. In our time, withes,= and djinns are found as regular fare in children's entertainment, exorcism of demons is still practiced by the Roman Catholic and, other churches, and the proponents of one cult still denounce as sorcery the cultic practices of another.  More than half of Americans tell pollsters they "believe" in the Devil's existence and 10 percent have communicated with him, as Martin Luther reported he did regularly.
     There are no spaceships in the stories pertaining to with craft. But most of the central elements for the alien abducting account are present including sexually obsessive non humans who live in the sky and walk through walls. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?

    

Chapter 6: Hallucinations

"As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror..."~ Lucretius on the nature of things

     What is a common thread that binds headlines from an issue of UFO Universe Together? Not UFOs. Surely it's the expectation of unlimited audience gullibility. That's why they are placed in UFO magazines because by and large the very at of buying such a magazine so categorizes the reader.
     Carl believes there may very well be more than on source of alien abduction accounts, just as there are UFO sightings. /let's run through some of the possibilities:
     In 1894 the international Census of Waking hallucinations was published in London. From that time to this, repeated surveys have shown that 10-25% of ordinary, functioning people have experienced, at least once in their lifetimes, a vivid hallucination- hearing a voice, usually, or seeing a form when there is no one there. More rarely, people sense a haunting aroma, or hear music, or receive a revelation that arrives independent of the senses. Some hallucinations may occur to perfectly normal people under perfectly ordinary circumstances. Hallucinations can also be elicited: by a campfire at night, or under emotional stress, or during epileptic seizures or migraine headaches or high fever. There are also substances that the human body generates that causes hallucinations. Whatever their neurological and molecular antecedents, hallucinations feel real. It appears that all human behaviour and experience is well attended by illusory and hallucinatory phenomena. While the relationship of these phenomena to mental illness has been well documented their role in everyday life has perhaps not been considered enough. Greater understanding of illusions and hallucinations among normal people may provide explanations for experiences otherwise relegated to the uncanny, "extrasensory", or supernatural.
     A common psychological syndrome rather like alien abduction is called sleep paralysis, Many people experience it. It happens in that twilight world between being fully awake and fully asleep.
     There is no doubt that humans commonly hallucinate. There is considerable doubt about whether extraterrestrials exist. We might argue about details, but the one category of explanation is surely much better supported than the other. The main doubt you might have is: Why do so many people today report this particular set of hallucinations?

Chapter 5: Spoofing and Secrecy

"Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified." ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

     UFO is an abbreviation for Unidentified flying object. That there are things seen which the ordinary observer, or even an occasional expert, does not understand is inevitable. But why should we conduct it's a ship from the stars? A wide variety of more factual possibilities present themselves.
     Many times Carl is asked, "Do you believe in UFOs". He says that he is always surprised by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. He says he is almost never asked..."How good is the evidence that UFO"s are alien spaceships?" Many people are convinced that eyewitness testimonies are reliable and that  there must be a long standing, high level government conspiracy to keep the truth form the rest of us.
     Due to some UFO reports Carl is perfectly prepared to believe that at least some of them and perhaps voluminous files, have been made inaccessible to the public. Carl believes its times for  the files to be declassified and made generally available. If we are convinced that the government is keeping visits of aliens form us, then we should take on the secrecy culture of the military and intelligence establishments. At the very least we can push for declassification of relevant information from decades ago.
     Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.
     It's telling that emotions can run so high on a matter about which we really know so little. This is especially true of the more recent flurry of alien abduction reports. After all, if true, either hypothesis-invasion by sexually manipulative extraterrestrials or and epidemic of hallucinations- teaches us something we certainly ought to know about. Maybe the reason for strong feelings is that both alternatives have such unpleasant implications.

Chapter 4: Aliens

Chapter 4: Most Americans believe in aliens. Many believe that these aliens visit earth at a regular basis(according to public polls). In these polls, a percent of Americans also report episodes of missing time, awakening in  a state of paralysis, and flying through the air. Here is an article that gives a bit more of information pertaining to this topic:
Alien Abduction
Pollsters have concluded that two percent of Americans have been abducted by space aliens. The only problem with this is that pollsters never asked anyone whether they were actually abducted. Carl says that as a high school student he was "confronted" with the flying saucer mythology. In college Carl began to learn a little about how science works, and how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, and how our biases can color our interpretation of the evidence. Carl says he has remained fascinated long after his early enthusiasm for UFOs decreased, as he understood more about the scientific method. Everything hinges on the matter of evidence. The more we want it to be true the more careful we must be. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes and stretch the truth for many things like money or fame. They also misunderstand what they are seeing and sometimes even see things that aren't there.

Chapter 3: The Man in the moon and the Face on Mars

In chapter 3 Carl Sagan shows that the human body is responsible for most of the popular culture myths like the face on mars.

The face of Virgin Mary on a tortilla.

A cloud of Abraham Lincoln.

He says that these are all products of the central nervous system that is primed from infancy to recognize patterns, specifically those that are faces, especially the mothers face. If we look at 100,000 pictures, it's not surprising that occasionally we'll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy it would be amazing if we couldn't find one here and there. We humans have a talent for deceiving ourselves. Skepticism must be a component of the explorer's toolkit, or we will lose our way.

1.(http://moonconspiracy.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/mars_face.jpg)
2.(https://mattalltrades.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/virgin.jpg)
3.(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxsgPBAWRQjeqwxtjTFU7n34FPKFobM8I7APrvSyHF0igLbKuyfdJTX1tO9n8aQA1Ly5S2kxFp09-rS3CHMyJqspIRFn8a030YPIHEhYAQqqfAJT4uXj8eQGgHV_UrRMOY6L7V6TX6heQE/s1600/002-0-CATERS-LINCOLN-01COMBINED_225248.jpg)