Now, however, Dr. Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave. The occasion is 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 Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985, and it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator.
Reading Dr. Sagan’s new book is like running into an old friend at a noisy party, discovering he still has all his hair, and repairing to the den for a quiet, congenial drink.
“I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship,” he writes at the beginning of a discussion that includes the history of cosmology, a travel guide to the solar system, the reason there are hallucinogen receptors in the brain, and the meaning of the potential discovery — or lack thereof — of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Never afraid to venture into global politics, Dr. 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.
“He might be interested to see what that would be like,” Dr. Sagan wrote. “Why slow it down?”
Almost in the same breath, Dr. 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 Ms. Druyan’s impatience with religious fundamentalism that led her to resurrect Dr. Sagan’s lectures, which were part of the Gifford Lectures, a prestigious series about natural theology that has been going on since the 19th century.
Ms. 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 Dr. 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. “I know of no other force that can wean us from our infantile belief that we are the center of the universe,” she said.
But “Ethos” never happened, and the lectures disappeared.
In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down. “A lot of scientists were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore,” Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently.
Some of the books that resulted, such as Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion,” have been criticized as shrill, but Ms. Druyan said: “People like Carl and Dawkins are more serious about God than people who just go through the motions. They are real seekers.” 2
Reading Dr. Sagan’s new book is like running into an old friend at a noisy party, discovering he still has all his hair, and repairing to the den for a quiet, congenial drink.
“I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship,” he writes at the beginning of a discussion that includes the history of cosmology, a travel guide to the solar system, the reason there are hallucinogen receptors in the brain, and the meaning of the potential discovery — or lack thereof — of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Never afraid to venture into global politics, Dr. 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.
“He might be interested to see what that would be like,” Dr. Sagan wrote. “Why slow it down?”
Almost in the same breath, Dr. 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 Ms. Druyan’s impatience with religious fundamentalism that led her to resurrect Dr. Sagan’s lectures, which were part of the Gifford Lectures, a prestigious series about natural theology that has been going on since the 19th century.
Ms. 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 Dr. 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. “I know of no other force that can wean us from our infantile belief that we are the center of the universe,” she said.
But “Ethos” never happened, and the lectures disappeared.
In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down. “A lot of scientists were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore,” Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently.
Some of the books that resulted, such as Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion,” have been criticized as shrill, but Ms. Druyan said: “People like Carl and Dawkins are more serious about God than people who just go through the motions. They are real seekers.” 2
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