TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Dennis Overbye

Published: February 14, 2007

It's been 10 years since we've heard Carl Sagan beckoning us to consider the possibilities inherent in the "billions" of stars peppering the sky and in the "billions" of neuronal connections spiderwebbing our brains.

In his day, the Cornell astronomer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books like "The Dragons of Eden," "Contact," "Pale Blue Dot" and "The Demon- Haunted World," and impresario of the PBS television program "Cosmos" was one of the world's most eloquent unbelievers, an apostle of cosmic wonder, critic of nuclear arms and a champion of science's duty to probe and question without limit, including the claims of religion. He died of pneumonia after a series of bone marrow transplants in December 1996.

Since his death, the public discourse on his favorite issues — the fate of the planet, the beauty and mystery of the cosmos — has not fared well. The teaching of evolution in public schools has become a bitter bone of contention; NASA tried to abandon the Hubble Space Telescope and censor talk of climate change; and religious fanatics crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center, which helped lead to a war in the Middle East that has awakened memories in some corners of the Crusades.

Now, however, Sagan has rejoined the debate with the publication last month of "The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God" (Penguin). The book is based on a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985; it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator.

"I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship," he writes.

But Sagan acknowledges that religion can engender hope and speak truth to power, as in the civil rights movement in the United States, but that it rarely does.

It's curious, he says, that no allegedly Christian nation has adopted the Golden Rule as a basis for foreign policy. Rather, in the nuclear age, mutually assured destruction was the policy of choice. "Christianity says that you should love your enemy. It certainly doesn't say that you should vaporize his children."

When Saddam Hussein was hanged in December, those words had a haunting resonance.
It was Druyan's impatience with religious fundamentalism that led her to resurrect Sagan's lectures, which were part of the Gifford Lectures, a prestigious series about natural theology.

Druyan, who co-wrote "Cosmos" and produced the movie "Contact," based on her husband's novel, runs Cosmos Studio and was a leader in the aborted effort by the Planetary Society to launch a solar sail from a Russian submarine two years ago. Among her lesser-known achievements is a kiss on the cheek of the science writer Timothy Ferris, which was recorded and included on a record of the sounds of Earth that is part of the Voyager spacecraft now flying out of the solar system.

She and Sagan had planned to use his Gifford lectures as the basis for a new television show called "Ethos," a sequel to "Cosmos," about the spiritual implications of the scientific revolution.

But "Ethos" never happened, and the lectures disappeared.

In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in the United States, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down.

Some of the books that resulted, such as Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion," have been criticized as shrill, but Druyan said: "People like Carl and Dawkins are more serious about God than people who just go through the motions. They are real seekers."

About a year ago, Druyan went looking for Sagan's lectures, eventually finding them in his archive at Cornell. Rereading them, she said, "I couldn't believe how prophetic they were." It took about a day for her editor at Penguin to decide to publish them, she said.

Never afraid to venture into global politics, Sagan warns at one point of the danger that a leader under the sway of religious fundamentalism might not try too hard to avoid nuclear Armageddon, reasoning that it was God's plan.

Druyan, who co-wrote "Cosmos" and produced the movie "Contact," based on her husband's novel, runs Cosmos Studio and was a leader in the aborted effort by the Planetary Society to launch a solar sail from a Russian submarine two years ago.

Among her lesser-known achievements is a kiss on the cheek of the science writer Timothy Ferris, which was recorded and included on a record of the sounds of Earth that is part of the Voyager spacecraft now flying out of the solar system.

She retitled the book — Sagan had named his lectures "The Search for Who We Are" — as a nod to William James, whose Gifford lectures in 1901 and 1902 became the basis for his book "The Varieties of Religious Experience."

Near the end of his book, Sagan parses the difference between belief and science this way: "I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed."

The search for who we are does not lead to complacency or arrogance, he explains. "It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us."

The last word may as well go to Dawkins, who in a 1996 book nominated Sagan as the ideal spokesman for Earth. In a blurb for the new book, Dawkins said that the astronomer was more than religious, having left behind the priests and mullahs.

"He left them behind, because he had so much more to be religious about," Dawkins wrote. "They have their Bronze Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wishful thinking. He had the universe."