This short essay is a chapter in Sagan's 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World to teach and popularize the concept of falsifiability. The idea is proposed and scaffolded by ad hoc reasoning so that the goalposts of testing are always shifting.
RationalWiki reads this essay as an analogy to the belief in the existence of a God/s, comparing it to other rationalist arguments such as Russell's teapot, God of the gaps, and "Non-Overlapping Magisteria".
Carl Sagan, "The Dragon in My Garage by Carl Sagan (1995)", contributed by Prerna Srigyan, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 6 August 2023, accessed 6 May 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/dragon-my-garage-carl-sagan-1995
Critical Commentary
This short essay is a chapter in Sagan's 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World to teach and popularize the concept of falsifiability. The idea is proposed and scaffolded by ad hoc reasoning so that the goalposts of testing are always shifting.
RationalWiki reads this essay as an analogy to the belief in the existence of a God/s, comparing it to other rationalist arguments such as Russell's teapot, God of the gaps, and "Non-Overlapping Magisteria".