Druyan: Sagan “never understood why anyone would want to separate science, which is just a way of searching for what is true, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe.”
“The methodology of science, with its error-correcting mechanism for keeping is honest in spite of our chronic tendencies to project, to misunderstand, to deceive ourselves and others, seemed to him the height of spiritual discipline. If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just as palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.”
Science as “informed worship”
Superstition: belief without evidence
Given scale of universe, God of the Bible too small
“The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.”
If God created the universe for humans, what if humans destroy themselves?
If scientists can be fooled about canals on Mars, what of religion where evidence is weaker and will to believe is greater?
“We are the product of a unique evolutionary sequence.” e.g. could have had 12 fingers if mutations had gone differently
Either success or failure of SETI would be success
Einstein’s God: sum total of physical laws of universe; “a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe.”
What kind of God, and what evidence?
“Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?”
“By no means does it follow that religious thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without any mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do not provide.”
In early humanity, change was slow so ancestral traditions and wisdom was venerated and valuable; today change is so fast so parental wisdom is not as relevant
Late 1940s television waves our emissaries to outer space
“Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can’t convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is.”