The Rogues Gallery

Billions

Carl Sagan died on December 20th, 1996.  For all that the world lost an eloquent scientist and educator, the skeptical world lost its most famous and recognizable voice and face.  Like many others, I knew him as the Cosmos guy, who reputedly (but not actually) said the phrase “Bill-yuns and bill-yuns” in his distinctive way, in a voice that sounded like he had a mouthful of caramels.  I was a teenager when Cosmos came out, and I watched this man who was unabashedly in love with science and discovery bring his excitement to “mill-yuns and mill-yuns” of Americans.  I couldn’t help feeling that the main audience that Sagan was targeting was Science itself - it was Carl’s loveletter to his lifelong Amor.  By the way, it was Johnny Carson and other comedians who made the “bill-yuns and bill-yuns” thing, though Carl himself was a pretty good sport about it, and often came out with the phrase long after Cosmos was over.  But I digress.

It was years after Cosmos that I discovered Carl’s activism in the Skeptical world, and read his book “The Demon Haunted World – Science as a Candle in the Dark,” which has since become one of the seminal tomes of skepticism.  Others, I’m sure, will be writing about Sagan’s scientific work, or his sponsorship of SETI, or his participation in the founding of CSICOP (now CSI) with a statement about the ridiculousness of Astrology.  I’m going to concentrate on one chapter of “The Demon Haunted World,” because it so helped crystallize how I understand science and the scientific method.  It’s called “The Dragon in My Garage.”  I’m going to shamelessly exploit the fair use section of the copyright laws and reproduce a lengthy section:

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage.”
Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you.  Surely you’d 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.
“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.
“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely.  “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.
“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”
Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”
You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
“Good idea, except she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.”
And so on.  I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.
Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incoporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?  If there’s 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 I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head.  You’d 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 I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility.
Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded.  So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s 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 you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you.  Surely it’s 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 there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with a fire-breathing, invisible dragon.
Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me.  Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t 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 we’re 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.  I’d rather it not be true, I tell you.  But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all….
Gratifyingly, some dragon-sized footprints in the flour are now reported.  But they’re 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 dragon’s 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.

Maybe you’re thinking that is an indictment of religion, or cryptozoology (bigfoot, anyone?), or some other particular area that you might be interested in, or might be your pet peeve.  But the point is, it isn’t.  It’s a sign pointing you toward a way of thinking – a way of thinking about everything.  Not just about needing extraordinary evidence to believe in extraordinary things, which is a big part of what Sagan is talking about above.  But also about the more and/or less provisional nature of what we believe.  This is the true open-mindedness.  A few weeks ago i got into a light-hearted conversation about religion with a catholic friend, and at some point, he asked me whether I had any dogmatic belief in anything.  I thought about it for a minute, and replied that I have beliefs, but all of them are provisional – open to change if some new evidence comes along.  My friend was surprised, and I think, a little appalled.  Perhaps he thought that meant that I have no convictions, no strongly held beliefs, but of course that’s not what I meant.  I meant that I strive always to be able to incorporate new and different pieces of evidence into how I see the world.  This is the important lesson of the Dragon in Carl’s garage.  It’s easy to reject the dragon out of hand, but discovering new dragons is a great adventure, and I have Carl Sagan to thank for making me see that.  And making sure that my standards are high, so I can tell the difference between the (probably) real ones and the other kind.  That’s fun, too.