Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" disappointing...

Vivificat! - A Personal Catholic Blog of News, Commentary, Opinion, and Reflections ^ | 14 December 2005 | Teófilo

[Teófilo]

...after almost twenty years of mature reflection.

Folks: the Discovery Science Channel has been broadcasting for the last several weeks a re-make of Carl Sagan's popular PBS series, Cosmos. For those of you old enough to remember, the series became a hit when first broadcasted, rapidly turning into a cultural phenomenon. Saganisms like "billions and billions, googol, and googolplex" are now American idiomatic markers. I myself remember watching with enthusiasm, always welcoming the opportunity to think new thoughts and to look at the universe in a different way.

As I watch the show today, I can't believe how naïve it really was, how biased, and thoroughly disingenuous in terms of its narrowly empiricist and positivistic view of reality. Christianity—and Christendom and the Catholic Church in particular—often come under the severest of Sagan's judgments; Sagan often dismisses them as oppressive, obscurantist, antiscientific and "mystical"—a word that Sagan used many times, seemingly unaware of its technical and very restricted meaning in Catholic teaching. But then again, Sagan was known for dismissing anything smacking of religion and in this he was true to his positivistic outlook.

Cosmos had its time, but in light in advances in historical studies and the ongoing reevaluation of Classical and Medieval knowledge and outlooks, Sagan's magnus opus has outlived its utility as an instrument for conveying true and accurate knowledge about the Universe and about mankind's quest to understand it and most importantly, mankind's effort to integrate this knowledge into a consistent and coherent knowledge matrix that also takes into account human purpose and eternal aspirations.

[My2Cents]

From comments about the book on Amazon:

Sagan betrayed his sense of fair play after dealing Velikovsky's work its public deathblow at the AAAS conference (which the astronomer Tom Van Flandern called a "sneak attack"), as he never engaged in a public discussion of Velikovsky's work again. That is not the practice of honest science, but the work of a hack, using his reputation to outweigh his arguments. In that respect, Ginenthal is to be commended for his work, as he exposes critical aspects of Sagan's execution of his debunker's craft.

[My2Cents]

Define "evolution." Micro evolution, certainly. The rise of new species with greater complexity from more simple forms? Where's the proof.

[My2Cents]

Well, I certainly oppose the narrow-minded prejudiced propaganda of arrogant scientists who presume to understand everything about the way the universe works. I count myself an enemy of that kind of arrogance.

[js1138]

Define "evolution.">

As I used it above, common descent.

[Richard Kimball]

I never saw the Cosmos series, and only read one article by Sagan, a defense of Roe v. Wade he published in Parade magazine. He used an incredibly tortured logic, hypothesizing what would happen if every unfertilized egg were protected, and went on to talk about all the sperm that died. He completely skipped the concept of a fertilized egg being a person, but jumped to the Supreme Court "trimester" ruling, saying since it was illogical to give each sperm and egg constitutional rights, the Supreme Court decision was the correct one.

It was obvious to me that like Phil Donahue and Hugh Hefner, Sagan could not have dealt with even cursory critical analysis of his views, and therefore limited his exposure to one way communication (books and television), and interviews with sympathetic hosts who would not challenge any of his assertions. He could never get away with it today. The bloggers would tear him apart.

[Markjwyatt]

RightBrainBrother says:

"...There's nothing about the big bang, astronomy, quantum physics, or even (gasp) evolution that in any way lessens God's role in the Universe...":

It depends on how these things are interpreted. There is an antireligious ideology which finds its way into a lot of scientific circles. Sagan certainly represented this.

Also, science has directly challenged the Church in the case of geocenrtism. The challenge is fione, except science has not demonstrated its case conclusively (and this is an understatement). See this series.

Geocentricity 101: A beginner's Course:

Part I: Basic Principles:

Part II: Basic Physics:

Part III: Scriptural and Church Position:

Geocentricity 101, Supplement: Discussion of Scripture and Church Position

Mark Wyatt

www.veritas-catholic.blogspot.com

[Alex Murphy]

Chapter 17, The Lonely Self (II): Why Carl Sagan is So Anxious to Establish Communication With An ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (an excerpt)

     Sagan is right in saying that despite all the claims of UFO sightings and encounters of a third kind, extraterrestrial creatures, and such, not a single artifact, e.g., a piece of metal, a bit of clothing of a visitor, a piece of tissue, a fingernail, has been recovered.
     Yet Sagan has written whole volumes promoting the probability of the existence of intelligent life on the billions of planets orbiting the billions and billions of stars in our galaxy, let alone the billions of other galaxies -- this in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that life exists anywhere else in the Cosmos, let alone intelligent life. Of all the billions of electromagnetic waves from the Cosmos received here on Earth, not a single one can be attributed to an ETI.
     Therefore, one might ask Sagan the same question he put to UFOers: Of all the countless bits of data received from outer space, the observations of astronomers, the millions of units recorded by radio telescopes, why has not a single bit of information been received which could not be attributed to the random noise of the Cosmos?

Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely? (pick one)

    (a) Sagan is lonely because, as a true devotee of science, a noble and reliable method of attaining knowledge, he feels increasingly isolated in a world in which, as Bronowski has said, there is a failure of nerve and men seem willing to undertake anything other than the rigors of science and believe anything at all: in Velikovski, von Daniken, even in Mr. and Mrs. Barney Hill, who reported being captured and taken aboard a spaceship in Vermont.
     (b) Sagan is lonely because, after great expectations, he has not discovered ETIs in the Cosmos, because chimpanzees don't talk, dolphins don't talk, humpback whales sing only to other humpback whales, and he has heard nothing but random noise from the Cosmos, and because Vikings 1 and 2 failed to discover evidence of even the most rudimentary organic life in the soil of Mars.
     (c) Sagan is lonely because, once everything in the Cosmos, including man, is reduced to the sphere of immanence, matter in interaction, there is no one left to talk to except other transcending intelligences from other worlds.

[onedoug]

You're welcome. I'd be anxious to know what you think.

Dennis Prager's website is offering 2 DVDs incorporating the two interviews he's had with Schroeder just recently and 2 or 3 years ago.

[LiteKeeper]

Carl Sagan - former atheist

[lawnguy]

I enjoyed the Cosmos book, it got me interested in science.

But otherwise Sagan was a joke. He was most famous for being a professional debunker who always showed up on the UFO expose`s.

He later latched onto the "nuclear winter" theory, and showed up on this week with David Brinkley during the first Gulf War and declared that if Sadaam set the oil wells on fire, the result would be a catastrophic agricultural disater. Another scientist was on the show, and said that would not happen.

He turned out to be right, and Sagan took a big credibility hit.

[Alex Murphy]

Carl Sagan - former atheist

Carl Sagan, having cooled to room temperature, is probably feeling uncomfortably warm right now...

[LiteKeeper]

yuppers

[Quix]

Good points.

Sagan was . . . besides being a jerk . . . clueless.

"The fool has said in his heart there is no God" as Scripture puts it.

At least, now, he knows the truth. The painful truth.

Sad. Terminally sad.

Thanks.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I used to know a woman who babysat for him....it's a small world.

He is a great example of people who put strictures on what they will accept as data because they like their strictures. But scientists are not the only ones who can be guilty of this.

God, give us open minds to truth instead of minds that pretend to be open. Amen.

[Quix]

Agreed. I just put this on the global warming thread:

I realize the following will be unlikely to match your escatology . . .

However, I'm increasingly convined that we need to pray for folks such as Crichton.

In fact, I believe we will be increasingly able to guage where we are on the road to the global tyrannical government by:

1. How many of such folks are speaking out against the MSM brainwashing from the puppet masters . . .

then

2. How many of those suddenly have terminal 'accidents' and 'heart attacks' and 'suicides.'

or

3. How many recant vociferously but not very convincingly.

[Quix]

Carl Sagan - former atheist

INDEED

Given that believers will be giving account for every idle word . . . imagine the account he's held to for all his destructive God/Christian hatine words.

[Wormwood]

Cosmos has kindled more intellectual curiosity and a reverence for the awe-inspiring physical universe than just about any single work in the past 50 years.

The fact that he doesn't praise bronze-age tribal mythology is hardly a detriment to Carl Sagan's legacy.

[x]

Cosmos has kindled more intellectual curiosity and a reverence for the awe-inspiring physical universe than just about any single work in the past 50 years.

Maybe, but I just don't see it. I literally haven't thought about the show since it was on, or about Sagan for about twenty years. By contrast, Jacob Bronowski, Kenneth Clark, Alistair Cooke, and Robert Hughes and their shows have remained in my memory.

Maybe it's because I'm not a science guy or because Sagan's been dead for so long, but it looks to me like he and his show have pretty much been forgotten. Too much rapturous gazing upwards, maybe.

[Teófilo]

Cosmos has kindled more intellectual curiosity and a reverence for the awe-inspiring physical universe than just about any single work in the past 50 years. The fact that he doesn't praise bronze-age tribal mythology is hardly a detriment to Carl Sagan's legacy.

Ah, Wormwood! The fact that you both reduce it all to "bronze-age tribal mythology" in such a cavalier fashion, is a black mark on both your vaunted, supreme intellects.

-Theo