"Where's the evidence? Now, the word God is used to cover a wide variety of very different ideas, ranging maybe from the idea of an outsized light-skinned male with a long white beard who sits in a throne in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow--for which there is no evidence, none at all--to the view of Einstein, of Spinoza, which is essentially that God is the sum total of the laws of nature. And since there are laws of nature ... if that's what you mean by God, then of course there's a God. So everything depends on the definition of God."
"An atheist has to know more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no God."
Hopefully he found the answer to his questions.
LOL...one tires of this really asinine argument. God the Father was portrayed as an old man in religious ART...because there was no other way to portray him. BUT the theological treatises on the nature of God all say that He was pure spirit and NOT a human being, much less a European one with a long white beard. The depiction of God was a symbolic and artistic convention and had absolutely no ground in theology whatsoever.
Sagan is disappointingly dense on this point. But a lot of scientists make it, because they are relatively daft when it comes to art history and theology. One reading of Aquinas or Dante ought to persuade anyone of the idiocy of this argument.