I can state without any sense of reservation that I really admired Carl Sagan as a popularizer of science. I miss him terribly and still cherish his remarkable legacy. The television series Cosmos, which he co-wrote with Ann Druyan, ignited my endless fascination with cosmology and astrophysics. Three of his books—Broca’s Brain, Pale Blue Dot, and Contact—are among the most tattered books on my shelf because I have read them so many times, and the latter still remains one of my favourite science fiction novels. (Even though the 1996 movie was really good, it just could not compare since, for obvious reasons, the book was able to explore nuances and depths that no movie ever could. And the plot device he turned π into? Pure genius!)
But his dictum that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” has come to irritate me something fierce, for no other reason than it ended up getting hijacked by parochial sycophants who are so remarkably irresponsible with it. It is inordinately popular with atheists because it feels in their hands like an impenetrable firewall shielding them against any and all theistic claims, but they wield the dictum horribly oblivious to a crucial handicap: they never bother to define univocal criteria for either what an extraordinary claim is or what extraordinary evidence looks like. The former is usually embellished with synonyms that never amount to a defining criterion, while the latter often gets positioned as anything that will not admit the supernatural. (For example, they usually posit circumstances or phenomena that never preclude possible natural explanations—e.g., God rearranging the stars to spell his name—being fenced in by Clarke’s Third Law on one side and Occam’s Razor on the other, for the evidence is always restricted to the empirical.) But also irritating is the audacious conceit of their demand, as if somehow their own intellectual sanction is a necessary instrument of validation for whatever claim was aired in their presence. “Without sufficient evidence to support your claim,” they usually say, “I am not able to believe it.” That may well be the case but, not to put too fine a point on it, what makes you think your belief is relevant or even required?
