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A review by kevin_shepherd
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan
5.0
"If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic." ~Ann Druyan
Believe in something without evidence and you are superstitious. Believe in something that runs counter to mountains of existing, quantifiable evidence and you are religious.
One of the most preposterous tenants of western theology is that everything exists for the benefit of man. The prevalent fundamentalist philosophy is one of anthropocentric smallness and irrefutability, a philosophy that only works if truths are somehow distorted or ignored. Carl Sagan, himself well versed in scripture, plows through these ideological conundrums to reveal a universal order many times more vast and awe-inspiring than anything the pulpit propagandists would like you to believe. Sagan's contention here is simple - if something as important as religion cannot withstand rational scrutiny, then it has no more validity than Greek mythology or Mayan astrology.
"If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would he prefer his votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves." ~C.S. (pg 31)
Believe in something without evidence and you are superstitious. Believe in something that runs counter to mountains of existing, quantifiable evidence and you are religious.
One of the most preposterous tenants of western theology is that everything exists for the benefit of man. The prevalent fundamentalist philosophy is one of anthropocentric smallness and irrefutability, a philosophy that only works if truths are somehow distorted or ignored. Carl Sagan, himself well versed in scripture, plows through these ideological conundrums to reveal a universal order many times more vast and awe-inspiring than anything the pulpit propagandists would like you to believe. Sagan's contention here is simple - if something as important as religion cannot withstand rational scrutiny, then it has no more validity than Greek mythology or Mayan astrology.
"If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would he prefer his votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves." ~C.S. (pg 31)