emotional

Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, had this to say about the relationship between science, God and the religions:

I'm afraid I quite disagree. Science has not made God bigger. Science has either made God so small as to be irrelevant, or (my own opinion) it has killed God completely.

Certainly the universe as revealed by science is greater than anything the Bible and Qur'an have envisaged. But the God who started such a universe, if we can hypothesise such a being, has not become bigger by that. Religions' God took an active hand in creation and in history and gave mankind a framework of commands, hopes, fears and expectations. This (deistic) God merely set the physical constants and left everything running free. A fat lot he cares about the lamb eaten by the lion, the poor man oppressed by the rich, or anything at all. You can't pray to him, you can't worship him, you can't do anything with him except to present him as a first-cause hypothesis, an explanation for the yet unknown.

My own opinion, however, is that this god-talk is meaningless. Science hasn't made God either greater or smaller; science has simply, as Nietzsche said, killed God. The findings of science don't show how God is great; they show how Nature is great. They show that the natural, material universe of matter/energy and chemical-physical reactions is a closed system needing no external explanation (viz., God). So I agree with Sagan that "science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe", but I don't think this awe has anything to do with God.

Shadowy Man

I don't think Sagan thought it did either. I read his statement as evidence of his inability to understand some religious people's willful ignorance.

Starboy

Perhaps science has not "killed god". But it does assume that god is irrelevant and then proceeds to show how well that assumption works. It works so well that many now see how stupid the god assumption was in the first place. The best light one can view the god assumption in is as an innocent confusion between humans and nature. The worst case view is just downright fraud and deception. In this day and age promoters of god fall into the fraud category.

Starboy

lisarea

I agree with Shadowy Man's assessment.

Because I feel the same way--albiet less knowledgeably and eloquently than the Butthead Astronomer--I feel pretty certain that I know what he was getting at. I could be wrong.

Maybe even as recently as a few hundred years ago, the concept of god was necessary to describe our sense of wonder and awe at the world around us. The human brain seems wired for wonderment, in fact. We're curious, we have a compulsion to understand things. Before we had developed the tools and technologies to really gather information about the world around us and the universe, we created metaphors for certain basic concepts. The way that everything just fits together and works. The sheer mind-bogglingness of basic concepts like infinity. So, pattern-seekers that we are, we created metaphors to describe all these concepts that made us tingle all over for some reason. Magical, all-powerful gods! Egotistical, human-centered creation! Seas parting! Time stopping!

We all seek out that sense of wonder. We always have. We just groove on it. The thing is, though, the metaphors created so long ago are now worthless for any benevolent purpose other than simply understanding our human past. We know too much now to adequately describe it in simple anthropomorphic terms. But we took these things for literal truth, rather than as a way to describe abstract concepts and to instill a sense of wonder. And now we know that even these over-the-top metaphors fall flat. Those simple little gods, those spectral despots, are flaccid and ineffectual when compared to what we already know about the way things work.

Sagan was an astronomer, but more than that, he was one of the more insightful social critics of our day, and one of the strongest popular advocates of rational thinking, education, and scientific research. I suspect, as such, that he tempered his views a little at times, so as not to completely alienate the religious public.

Personally, I think the options are to either toss out the god concept entirely; or to change it so that it's not some anthropomorphic, sapient entity, but rather what I like to think of as the Great Overriding Laziness--those strange and circular laws of nature that make things work together simply because those are the things that work together, and other stuff doesn't work because it doesn't work.

PS: I am not a crackpot.

sakrilege

It is my opinion that science has awed religion enough that religion needs to get science to agree with it and thereby benefit from this awe. Why else have YECs put so much effort in having 'scientific' explanations that match Genesis?

Shake

I think that:[list=1][*]sakrilege makes an excellent point[*]Sagan does understand "some religious people's willful ignorance."[/list=1]
In fact, in reference to #2 above, Sagan has it precisely as some theists see things. The fact that other theists come to the conclusion that their, "God must be even greater than we dreamed," is not discounted. Your use of the word "some" allows this.

This link is from a well-written objection to The Case for Faith, and specifically addresses science and religion. At the bottom of the page, you can link to the index.