Sagan was a puppet for the beast system hypnotising us in to thinking we are insignificant cosmic accidents in an infinite godless universe. Neil Disgrace Tyson & Brian Cock are his nauseating replacements
When I was younger and Sagan was still around I enjoyed seeing him on Carson. After he died I never thought too much about him until a year or so ago when someone I know suggested I read one of his books, the title escapes me, so I checked it out from the local library.
The book opened with Sagan describing a trip he was on. He was leaving an airport to go to his hotel, I think that's where he was going, and he got into a cab. He said the driver recognized him, asked if he was Sagan and Sagan said yes.
The driver then said his name was William Buckley, I think that was his name, and they had a laugh over that. Then the driver engaged Sagan about a few topics, the lost city of Atlantis was one, and on each topic the driver was excited about the possibilities each topic was based on ancient fact. Each time Sagan, being the wise person he considered himself to be, shot down the driver's enthusiasm down by saying no, the topic wasn't true.
That's a rough paraphrase of the opening of the book. After reading that I thought if Sagan was a true "scientist" he would have joined the driver in his enthusiasm by saying something similar to "we don't have evidence that Atlantis existed but we should keep looking ...". Instead he basically said "no", Atlantis didn't exist.
I quit reading the book because I concluded Sagan was little more than an arrogant charlatan.
That is disappointing. My own reply, and the one I'd have preferred Sagan had made, would be, "There's no evidence for it to date but the stories had to come from somewhere. Maybe we should try to imagine what might have inspired them?"
Sagan is also one of the key figures behind the greenhouse effect and global warming. This was built on the baseless assumption that Venus had once been like Earth. There never was a shred of evidence to justify that idea.
Indeed, he was a Cornell professor known around campus as the most arrogant and pompous. Very few students wanted to sit in his classes. He had a tendency to squash scientific inquiry because he “knew” everything.
I wonder what Carl Sagan would have to say about Stephen Meyers’s book: The Return of the God Hypothesis? Released in 2021, this book may be the best treatise ever written on how Science actually supports the existence of a Creator. In nearly all scientific literature, the word “Theory” was dropped from the term Big Bang Theory in the late 20th Century, very near the time of Carl Sagan’s death. Science now affirms that our universe had a beginning. Further scientific advancements that occurred after Sagan departed, such as the Genome Project and the Fine Tuned Universe, reveal a universe that is driven by information, not merely random data. Information is data that is organized and systematic. The complexities of our universe are such that such a highly ordered universe could not have been achieved by chance. Stephen Meyer shows why from a scientific perspective. The Return of the God Hypothesis is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Science and that other evidence based construct: Faith.
"Science now affirms that our universe had a beginning."
It can't do that. The idea that the Big Bang was the ex nihilo creation of the universe came from Georges Lemaitre a Jesuit priest and scientist. Hardly anyone in the field today thinks along those lines and science certainly couldn't prove anything about the early stages of the universe, and that is assuming that it even had a beginning.
Stephen Meyers is a Bayesian and would never claim that anything’s proved. His argument is that a mental origin of the universe is more likely than the materialist idea.
And I agree with him. However, he makes a speculative leap from that to suggesting that the universe was created by a personal God and offers no support for his equating a universal mind with the God of the Bible. He is a Christian so I suppose he let his bias get the better of him.
Actually he bases his entire argument on Intelligent Design, for which there is a a great deal of compelling evidence, not on any personal God, Christian or otherwise.
Two things happened mid to late 1960s while i was there: The Big Bang Theory, having gained Scientific Consensus, was popularised; and The Holocaust, as a commemoration of only the Jewish suffering at the hands of the German Nazis, entered popular consciousness...Oh ! And third - we'd gotten a Teevee...
That’s what’s known as a strawman argument. While Georges Lemaitre, who invented Big Bang theory, may have believed in creation ex nihilo (he was a Jesuit priest after all), it’s not the modern view at all.
Interesting 🧐... final interview.During his final interview, aired on May 27, 1996, Sagan issued a strong warning, telling Charlie Rose:
We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it..
Are there any mentally-healthy people who go into the field of psychiatry? I have my doubts.
I think people who regard themselves as scientists, like Carl Sagan, have a great terror of possibly believing in or accepting the possibility of something for which we don't currently have verifiable evidence, or for which the natural law supporting it hasn't yet been understood or perhaps even discovered.
The extraordinary variety of life on earth, including creatures who are constantly surprising the "experts" by being able to do things we've reliably been told ought to be impossible, make a compelling argument for all sorts of life everywhere. But I don't see any reason why them sentient beings in other galaxies would be any less morons than we are. And the universe is a very big place. We ain't got no firm idea how big it really is. I have great confidence that any creatures capable of space travel will be hanging around their own extremely vast neighborhoods.
I think a lot of scientific advances have come from the imaginative sort of scientists who trust their own intuitions to lead them outside the conventional boxes. But you need a lot of confidence to follow crazy paths that often, after a lot of ridicule from one's peers, turn out to have been brilliantly correct.
Now in the glow of my maturity, I don't get over-impressed by any of the smart people--not even Carl Sagan, who was of course an individual human being and subject to all sorts of human weaknesses. All of these people have their own prejudices and even the nicest have a little bit of their own arrogance too. I'd agree with him on not taking seriously the reports by that psychiatrist. The mind creates wonderful or terrifying narratives to support things we don't in the moment understand. You ought to see the kinds of narratives I can come up with to explain something for which I have only a teeny piece of data and I can testify to how wrong one can be.
“It’s a way of thinking, a way of sceptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.” Very nice. And in the years since Dr. Sagan’s death, this mindset and way of thinking have slipped through our fingers. We elect corrupt fools as public servants, and we blindly accept what they tell us, with no thought to skeptical interrogation or human fallibility.
" then who is making all the decisions about science and technology that are going to determine what kind of future our children live in? Just some members of Congress" Ah, simpler times. Bu it wasn't true then anymore than now. It has always been a 'merger' of state and corporations. +media and universities. It is just more evolved than in the times when the Catholic Church and the monarchies of old Europe was the merger of of the decisions. The numbers of members of the monarchies or cardinals of the Vatican that were up on( then current) science and technology were few. Narratives were as important then as now in shaping the political and scientific landscape.
Communists can have wisdom too. "If we are not able to ask sceptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."
I suppose they can have some wisdom, or at least make some true statements. But if a man comes away from an education at Cornell, Berkeley and Chicago with a severe misunderstanding of human nature as well as the nature of government, he is not the guy I would rely on for wisdom.
I was fortunate to spend an hour with him on an airplane on the way to Ithaca, NY. He had just spoken at a conference Al Gore had organized (on the climate, and future of technology and science). He was both on to what was happening regarding government controlling scientific advancement via funding, but mesmerized by attention from a politician who seemed (but didn't) to speak his language.
The spirit realm is not pseudo science. Energy work, remote viewing, clairvoyance, spiritual attacks and warfare, dark beings and light beings, and much more are interwoven into this realm. Sagan’s reductionist materialist scientific worldview is perpetuated through his ignorance and not being sensitive or open enough to see what people have been tapped into for our entire existence. Animals are no different. They are often more sensitive to the beings and subtle and overt energies in our environment. Holding this dweeb of a man on a pedestal for having a limited worldview and selling “science” to people only serves to further obfuscate the broader truth of the universe. There is much more out there and in here than stardust.
Yes indeed! There are many good reads out there by smart science folks refuting the reductionist viewpoint now, The Romance of Reality being but one recent read. Energy is key, as is the negentropic nature of Life.
Many thanks to the reader who recommended "American Moon". I had long been a skeptic of the moon program, and familiar with Dave McGowan's excellent series: "Wagging the Moondoggie", but had not yet seen the actual footage of the three astronauts fielding questions about what they might have seen on the trip.
I once had the opportunity to ask a U-2 pilot if he could see stars on a daylight mission; he readily asserted that he could see a few of the brighter ones. To have to admit that no stars had been visible on a moon mission before an audience which must have included some familiar with aerospace is fascinating and appalling. It's too bad Sagan wasn't there to ask them some hard questions.
I regret that I am unable to purchase a subscription to your newsletter -- the titles you post are almost invariably intriguing, and some of your readers post interesting comments. What I have found in the sub stack is most worthwhile.
I left my job at the hospital rather than participate in the mandatory medical experiment -- I had acquired too many anecdotes of injury due to this simple procedure, and had reported them as such to oncoming shifts. They didn't expel me, I resigned without thinking of making a request for a religious exemption, since I saw no objection around me due to religious grounds in anyone of faith -- so who would affirm this objection? Working at the supermarket is a happy change, but there isn't any money.
One is not supposed to read Michel Foucault -- academic historians detest him, so I'm told -- but many years ago, in nursing school, The Birth of the Clinic was my guilty pleasure. I haven't fact-checked his assertion that a second banner had been carried during the French Revolution, less well known than Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It read, according to the author: No More Hospitals! A customer who comes through my checkout line obliges me with the opportunity to practice pronunciation of what should presumably have been the original French.
Just an observation about "faith." Sagan's definition is dismissive, even glib. I'm reading Mary Midgley's Science as Salvation, and she notes how troubling this sort of "scientific" dismissiveness can be. When it comes to faith, she notes that even those who make an effort at being scientific have faith in their assumptions. She quotes "William James's schoolboy" as remarking "Faith is when you believe in something that you know ain't true." -- which is Sagan's definition here. But Midgley points to a more sober understanding of the term:
"The faith we live by is something that you must have before you can ask whether anything is true or not. It is basic trust. It is the acceptance of a map, a perspective, a set of standards and assumptions, an enclosing vision within which facts are placed. It is a way of organizing the vast jumble of data."
And what's more: "faith does sometimes affect one's view about facts. It can determine which facts one is prepared to accept."
NE - Sagan was well aware of the level of ignorance that plagues us, prescient as to how that could be leveraged, and how the consequences thereof could be a prescription for disaster.
Sagan was a puppet for the beast system hypnotising us in to thinking we are insignificant cosmic accidents in an infinite godless universe. Neil Disgrace Tyson & Brian Cock are his nauseating replacements
I agree his replacements are nauseating
When I was younger and Sagan was still around I enjoyed seeing him on Carson. After he died I never thought too much about him until a year or so ago when someone I know suggested I read one of his books, the title escapes me, so I checked it out from the local library.
The book opened with Sagan describing a trip he was on. He was leaving an airport to go to his hotel, I think that's where he was going, and he got into a cab. He said the driver recognized him, asked if he was Sagan and Sagan said yes.
The driver then said his name was William Buckley, I think that was his name, and they had a laugh over that. Then the driver engaged Sagan about a few topics, the lost city of Atlantis was one, and on each topic the driver was excited about the possibilities each topic was based on ancient fact. Each time Sagan, being the wise person he considered himself to be, shot down the driver's enthusiasm down by saying no, the topic wasn't true.
That's a rough paraphrase of the opening of the book. After reading that I thought if Sagan was a true "scientist" he would have joined the driver in his enthusiasm by saying something similar to "we don't have evidence that Atlantis existed but we should keep looking ...". Instead he basically said "no", Atlantis didn't exist.
I quit reading the book because I concluded Sagan was little more than an arrogant charlatan.
Disappointing.
That is disappointing. My own reply, and the one I'd have preferred Sagan had made, would be, "There's no evidence for it to date but the stories had to come from somewhere. Maybe we should try to imagine what might have inspired them?"
Sagan is also one of the key figures behind the greenhouse effect and global warming. This was built on the baseless assumption that Venus had once been like Earth. There never was a shred of evidence to justify that idea.
Indeed, he was a Cornell professor known around campus as the most arrogant and pompous. Very few students wanted to sit in his classes. He had a tendency to squash scientific inquiry because he “knew” everything.
Shame
I wonder what Carl Sagan would have to say about Stephen Meyers’s book: The Return of the God Hypothesis? Released in 2021, this book may be the best treatise ever written on how Science actually supports the existence of a Creator. In nearly all scientific literature, the word “Theory” was dropped from the term Big Bang Theory in the late 20th Century, very near the time of Carl Sagan’s death. Science now affirms that our universe had a beginning. Further scientific advancements that occurred after Sagan departed, such as the Genome Project and the Fine Tuned Universe, reveal a universe that is driven by information, not merely random data. Information is data that is organized and systematic. The complexities of our universe are such that such a highly ordered universe could not have been achieved by chance. Stephen Meyer shows why from a scientific perspective. The Return of the God Hypothesis is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Science and that other evidence based construct: Faith.
"Science now affirms that our universe had a beginning."
It can't do that. The idea that the Big Bang was the ex nihilo creation of the universe came from Georges Lemaitre a Jesuit priest and scientist. Hardly anyone in the field today thinks along those lines and science certainly couldn't prove anything about the early stages of the universe, and that is assuming that it even had a beginning.
Yes it can and it did. Suggest you read Stephen Meyers’s book. He lays out the science very thoroughly
Stephen Meyers is a Bayesian and would never claim that anything’s proved. His argument is that a mental origin of the universe is more likely than the materialist idea.
And I agree with him. However, he makes a speculative leap from that to suggesting that the universe was created by a personal God and offers no support for his equating a universal mind with the God of the Bible. He is a Christian so I suppose he let his bias get the better of him.
Actually he bases his entire argument on Intelligent Design, for which there is a a great deal of compelling evidence, not on any personal God, Christian or otherwise.
Two things happened mid to late 1960s while i was there: The Big Bang Theory, having gained Scientific Consensus, was popularised; and The Holocaust, as a commemoration of only the Jewish suffering at the hands of the German Nazis, entered popular consciousness...Oh ! And third - we'd gotten a Teevee...
Big Bang, something from nothing = everything.
That’s what’s known as a strawman argument. While Georges Lemaitre, who invented Big Bang theory, may have believed in creation ex nihilo (he was a Jesuit priest after all), it’s not the modern view at all.
One theory is as valid as another
Interesting 🧐... final interview.During his final interview, aired on May 27, 1996, Sagan issued a strong warning, telling Charlie Rose:
We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it..
In 2020, the chickens finally came home to roost....
Are there any mentally-healthy people who go into the field of psychiatry? I have my doubts.
I think people who regard themselves as scientists, like Carl Sagan, have a great terror of possibly believing in or accepting the possibility of something for which we don't currently have verifiable evidence, or for which the natural law supporting it hasn't yet been understood or perhaps even discovered.
The extraordinary variety of life on earth, including creatures who are constantly surprising the "experts" by being able to do things we've reliably been told ought to be impossible, make a compelling argument for all sorts of life everywhere. But I don't see any reason why them sentient beings in other galaxies would be any less morons than we are. And the universe is a very big place. We ain't got no firm idea how big it really is. I have great confidence that any creatures capable of space travel will be hanging around their own extremely vast neighborhoods.
I think a lot of scientific advances have come from the imaginative sort of scientists who trust their own intuitions to lead them outside the conventional boxes. But you need a lot of confidence to follow crazy paths that often, after a lot of ridicule from one's peers, turn out to have been brilliantly correct.
Now in the glow of my maturity, I don't get over-impressed by any of the smart people--not even Carl Sagan, who was of course an individual human being and subject to all sorts of human weaknesses. All of these people have their own prejudices and even the nicest have a little bit of their own arrogance too. I'd agree with him on not taking seriously the reports by that psychiatrist. The mind creates wonderful or terrifying narratives to support things we don't in the moment understand. You ought to see the kinds of narratives I can come up with to explain something for which I have only a teeny piece of data and I can testify to how wrong one can be.
“It’s a way of thinking, a way of sceptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.” Very nice. And in the years since Dr. Sagan’s death, this mindset and way of thinking have slipped through our fingers. We elect corrupt fools as public servants, and we blindly accept what they tell us, with no thought to skeptical interrogation or human fallibility.
" then who is making all the decisions about science and technology that are going to determine what kind of future our children live in? Just some members of Congress" Ah, simpler times. Bu it wasn't true then anymore than now. It has always been a 'merger' of state and corporations. +media and universities. It is just more evolved than in the times when the Catholic Church and the monarchies of old Europe was the merger of of the decisions. The numbers of members of the monarchies or cardinals of the Vatican that were up on( then current) science and technology were few. Narratives were as important then as now in shaping the political and scientific landscape.
Sagan was a bright guy, but I would not commend his "wisdom". He was a communist, and a fool.
Communists can have wisdom too. "If we are not able to ask sceptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."
I suppose they can have some wisdom, or at least make some true statements. But if a man comes away from an education at Cornell, Berkeley and Chicago with a severe misunderstanding of human nature as well as the nature of government, he is not the guy I would rely on for wisdom.
I was fortunate to spend an hour with him on an airplane on the way to Ithaca, NY. He had just spoken at a conference Al Gore had organized (on the climate, and future of technology and science). He was both on to what was happening regarding government controlling scientific advancement via funding, but mesmerized by attention from a politician who seemed (but didn't) to speak his language.
The spirit realm is not pseudo science. Energy work, remote viewing, clairvoyance, spiritual attacks and warfare, dark beings and light beings, and much more are interwoven into this realm. Sagan’s reductionist materialist scientific worldview is perpetuated through his ignorance and not being sensitive or open enough to see what people have been tapped into for our entire existence. Animals are no different. They are often more sensitive to the beings and subtle and overt energies in our environment. Holding this dweeb of a man on a pedestal for having a limited worldview and selling “science” to people only serves to further obfuscate the broader truth of the universe. There is much more out there and in here than stardust.
Yes indeed! There are many good reads out there by smart science folks refuting the reductionist viewpoint now, The Romance of Reality being but one recent read. Energy is key, as is the negentropic nature of Life.
Science is what has put on the precipice of extinction. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Anyhow ... my favourite science movie of all time is American Moon https://youtu.be/KpuKu3F0BvY
This the best documentary ever. And it demonstrates why it is so easy for them to convince billions to inject 'Operation Warp Speed'
I'm thinking... that helicopter that flew around Mars -- is CGI... not sure how you fly a helicopter when there is almost no atmosphere...
The film is 3 hours long!
If the best movie you ever watched was 3 hours long instead of 90 minutes... wouldn't that be a good thing?
I've watched Scarface and Apocalypse Now at least 100x each. I wish they were longer
I am watching it now! It's like Basil Fawlty was telling Sybil that he is doing something NOW.
So I AM watching it!
Many thanks to the reader who recommended "American Moon". I had long been a skeptic of the moon program, and familiar with Dave McGowan's excellent series: "Wagging the Moondoggie", but had not yet seen the actual footage of the three astronauts fielding questions about what they might have seen on the trip.
I once had the opportunity to ask a U-2 pilot if he could see stars on a daylight mission; he readily asserted that he could see a few of the brighter ones. To have to admit that no stars had been visible on a moon mission before an audience which must have included some familiar with aerospace is fascinating and appalling. It's too bad Sagan wasn't there to ask them some hard questions.
The footage of the astronauts after their trip still goes round my mind after watching it!
I regret that I am unable to purchase a subscription to your newsletter -- the titles you post are almost invariably intriguing, and some of your readers post interesting comments. What I have found in the sub stack is most worthwhile.
I left my job at the hospital rather than participate in the mandatory medical experiment -- I had acquired too many anecdotes of injury due to this simple procedure, and had reported them as such to oncoming shifts. They didn't expel me, I resigned without thinking of making a request for a religious exemption, since I saw no objection around me due to religious grounds in anyone of faith -- so who would affirm this objection? Working at the supermarket is a happy change, but there isn't any money.
One is not supposed to read Michel Foucault -- academic historians detest him, so I'm told -- but many years ago, in nursing school, The Birth of the Clinic was my guilty pleasure. I haven't fact-checked his assertion that a second banner had been carried during the French Revolution, less well known than Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It read, according to the author: No More Hospitals! A customer who comes through my checkout line obliges me with the opportunity to practice pronunciation of what should presumably have been the original French.
Warm Regards, Richard Dingman
Excellent interview. Great man. I entirely agree with his position about science. Thank you.
The tyranny of the intellect, and its knowingness !!
"Science" rivals The Church to become The Authority...
Authoritarianism lurks in the shadows,
dressed ,tempting and bejeweled...
("Science" spoken of as abstraction, as reification - and shares,
with shit, the root ,"to separate from")....
Give me The Scientific Method, any day, but never unquestioned
Authority...Anyway Carl, i prefer The Electric Universe paradigm,
and i like what that young Indian mathematician said (in the movie),
about not being able to provide proof: "When i discover a solution
in my mind, i believe God left it for me to find.")
Just an observation about "faith." Sagan's definition is dismissive, even glib. I'm reading Mary Midgley's Science as Salvation, and she notes how troubling this sort of "scientific" dismissiveness can be. When it comes to faith, she notes that even those who make an effort at being scientific have faith in their assumptions. She quotes "William James's schoolboy" as remarking "Faith is when you believe in something that you know ain't true." -- which is Sagan's definition here. But Midgley points to a more sober understanding of the term:
"The faith we live by is something that you must have before you can ask whether anything is true or not. It is basic trust. It is the acceptance of a map, a perspective, a set of standards and assumptions, an enclosing vision within which facts are placed. It is a way of organizing the vast jumble of data."
And what's more: "faith does sometimes affect one's view about facts. It can determine which facts one is prepared to accept."
NE - Sagan was well aware of the level of ignorance that plagues us, prescient as to how that could be leveraged, and how the consequences thereof could be a prescription for disaster.