Conversations With Carl Sagan by Carl Sagan & Tom Head

Author:Carl Sagan & Tom Head
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Philosophy & Social Aspects, Science, Science & Technology, Literary, Biography & Autobiography, Astronomy
ISBN: 9781578067367
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2006-04-15T07:00:00+00:00

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may explain the stories of going to heaven. Incidentally, isn't the entire concept of baptism widely considered a symbolic rebirth?

EW: Where does all this leave religious beliefs that run through all cultures? CS: The general acceptance of religious ideas, it seems to me, can only be because there is something in them that resonates with our own certain knowledge—something deep and wistful, something every person recognizes as central to our being. One such common thread, I propose, is birth. I think that the mystical core of such a religious experience is neither literally true nor perniciously wrong-minded. It may be rather a courageous, if flawed, attempt to make contact with the earliest and most profound experience of our lives.

EW: In listening to the voice of science embodied in your response to religious beliefs, I am now wondering about what you regard as the relationship between science and religion. CS: In my view, they nearly don't communicate at all.

EW: Should they? CS: Of course.

EW: In your view, what do they have to say to each other? CS: I think religion has something to say to science about the social underpinnings of the enterprise of science, something about the goals of science, the human values that should always be in mind when we do science. There is also what Oppenheimer said late in his life about the development of nuclear weapons: scientists have known sin.

I also think that science has a fair amount to say to religion mainly about the nature of evidence. The idea of putting faith in an ancient argument from authority which is not to be questioned seems to me to have dire and dangerous implications for politics. I am concerned that the authoritarian aspect of religion poses real dangers for our survival.

EW: In all this, I find the deep human need for transcendence missing. CS: You're in favor of mystification?

EW: No, I'm in favor of transcendence. CS: What does that mean?

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