Wrestling with Religion

In The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1997), Carl Sagan imagines that he has offered to show me a fire-breathing dragon in his garage, and, when I get there, I see only "a ladder, empty paint cans, and an old tricycle." He'd neglected, it seems, to mention that the dragon is invisible. This thought experiment imagines my proposing a series of ways to detect the dragon. They are good ideas, he imagines replying, but unfortunately won't work. Flour on the floor won't because dragons levitate, infrared won't because dragon fire is heatless, and spray paint won't because dragons are incorporeal. If Sagan insists on countering every test I propose with an evasive redefinition, it's clearly silly for him to then shift the burden of proof onto me and suggest that, since I can't prove the dragon is absent, it may very well be present. There's no practical difference between an undetectable dragon and no dragon at all. ...

American popular culture has a standard model of the afterlife in jokes, cartoons, and sentimental books such as The  Littlest Ange l. After death, the soul is an image of the living person, the same age and often in the usual clothes, that rises out of the body like a mist. This soul maintains the deceased’s name, memories, and other ego-traits and remains kin to souls gone before. “I’m going there to meet my mother." The first stop is a lectern on a puffy cloud in front of the Pearly Gates, where Peter consults a guest book. Souls whose names are written there (theories vary widely as to who qualifies) are issued white robes, halos, wings, and sometimes harps. The unlisted are dropped, sometimes through a trap door, to eternal torment by horned red devils with pitchforks in a fiery underground pit. Heaven is a walled city floating on clouds, with golden streets where the souls of the saved hang out forever in the presence of God and significant others, blissful renditions ...

    As if my latest refusal To make sense called the bluff Of an intransigent demiurge, His dada clockwork. Well, My pout is hardly the first And not likely to make Mr. Big Punch skylights in his Platonic cave. Everything’s infinitely more likely To have been some other thing— Like you, who only last week  Were here alive, and here I am Sitting across a blue table From you, and you are again.

The 2001 film cartoon Monsters, Inc . imagines a corporation of monsters that feed off scaring children through doors that are portals to their bedroom closets. This is a variant on the motif of the monster under the bed. In both cases, a presence is felt but never seen. It’s the opposite of the refrigerator light that seems to be always lit. Just as we never see the light off, children in the cartoon world never see the monsters. They can never confirm or disconfirm the existence of beings who exit through magic portals whenever closet doors are  opened. Despite their ontological indeterminacy, the monsters do frighten children. They power Monstopolis with juvenile screams, so there's clearly a psychic drain caused by the children’s belief in monsters. But if monsters are unfalsifiable, why should children believe in them at all? Why scream needlessly? Shouldn't they imagine more pleasant unfalsifiable creatures in their closets? Shouldn't they imagine, say, magica...