Carl Sagan Cosmos. Once favorite of mine and I even reviewed Broca’s Brain for a national magazine.
The smug atheism was ahead of its time for today’s style. Sorry to disagree but there was at least an implied knock on religion when he said something like (condescendingly) it was understandable that with the limited scientific knowledge of their times that people would turn to superstitious beliefs in large forces working behind nature and affecting their lives for mysterious purposes from beyond. Then when showing galaxies and so on the music goes into the motifs used for King of Kings or the Ten Commandments-—implying the substitute for God is science. Smug atheism.
At the gathering of people sitting in rows in a large room to say nice things at a lectern after he died, one said “Our being here and doing this today does not mean Carl had a late life conversion to religion and that we are honoring that. He refused to believe right to the end and this is just a gathering, not with a spiritual meaning to it.” (My paraphrase).
It’s too bad the conservative religious commentary writer Dennis Prager couldn’t have debated Sagan. He reportedly did a good job against some God deniers recently.
Stephen Hawking had his arrogant dismissal of God as unnecessary in Hawking’s own superior working out of all knowledge. Aggravating.
Fair enough. I of course didn’t know either in their personal lives. Were they fools in them, as the Bible says? Maybe. Hawking certainly sounded like one near the end, with his warnings of aliens and global warming. “The wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight”, and “the fool sees only foolishness in God’s wisdom”.