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Reveals the dangers associated with widespread scientific ignorance, and explains how scientific thought has served to overcome prejudice and hysteria.

 Sagan explains that science is not just a body of knowledge, but is a way of thinking. Sagan shows how scientific thinking is both imaginative and disciplined, bringing humans to an understanding of how the universe is, rather than how they wish to perceive it. He says that science works much better than any other system because it has a "built-in error-correcting machine".    Superstition and pseudoscience get in the way of the ability of many laypersons to appreciate the beauty and benefits of science. Skeptical thinking allows people to construct, understand, reason, and recognize valid and invalid arguments. Wherever possible, there must be independent validation of the concepts whose truth should be proved. He states that reason and logic would succeed once the truth were known. Conclusions emerge from premises, and the acceptability of the premises should not be discounted or accepted because of bias.

The book was a New York Times bestseller.  An article in the Los Angeles Times and the University of Phoenix review both describe Sagan's book positively. The Los Angeles Times describes Sagan's book as "a manifesto for clear thought"