“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage.”
Suppose … I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out,
see for yourself….
“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, incorporeal, 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
is 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….
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 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 after all…
Gratifyingly, some dragon-size 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 data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and
sober people share the same strange delusion.
—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), pp. 171-173.