Rituals for The Ones Believing in Science

Sasha Sagan's new book "For Small Creatures Such as We" (G.P Putnam's Sons, 2019). Image courtesy of Brian C. Seitz, fair use doctrine.



Joel Kontinen

"People are born and people die. We've all got to get through it one way or another," this is what the daughter of Carl Sagan said after her book was published.

Sasha Sagan is a religious Jew but sees her task as giving rituals for those who trust in science, such as an image of a black hole. “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be", as her father used to say.

Evidence speak to her as science, as natural phenomena. She says that science is her evidence, even though it changes. When her father was young, we had a very different idea of what Earth looked like – or Pluto.

And we certainly knew that there were other things apart of cosmos.

Source:

Gohd, Chelsea. 2019. Sasha Sagan Dives into Science, Space and Spirituality in New Book. Space.com (30 October).

Carl Sagan Day: Skeptics’ New Holy Day?

Skeptics are celebrating Carl Sagan Day. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL.




Joel Kontinen

It began with Darwin Day (February 12th). Then they invented Newtonmas. Now, they’re celebrating Carl Sagan Day on November 8th.

The “they” are sceptics, atheists and Darwinists. They are obviously trying to get likeminded folks to celebrate secular feasts instead of religious ones.

One might suspect that dislike (or perhaps even hatred) of Christianity is a major motive behind this trend.

While all the deceased gentlemen they are celebrating were scientists, the inclusion of Sir Isaac Newton is somewhat peculiar.

After all, he was no unbeliever.

Even sceptics will admit that Newton was one of the greatest scientists of all times. Yet he wrote more about the Bible than about science – and he believed in a literal Genesis and a young earth.

Newton wrote in Principia, Book III:

”This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being. … This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called 'Lord God' Παντοκράτωρ [Pantokratōr cf. 2 Corinthians 6:18], or 'Universal Ruler'. … The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect.”

But Newton’s birthday happens to be on the 25th of December.


Source:

Saganday.com

The Problem with The Cosmos

Materialistic dogma cannot account for beauty in the cosmos. Image courtesy of J. Hester and P. Scowen, Arizona State University/NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series included his belief in a purely materialistic universe: Time and again he claimed: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."

This, of course, is not a scientific claim but rather a philosophical one.

The new Cosmos series, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, repeats this same atheistic dogma.

We know that natural laws cannot bring the cosmos into existence. The universe looks designed, which is something Cosmos will not admit. Instead, it dwells on the persecution of the 16th century monk and philosopher Giordano Bruno.

However, Darwinists have turned out to be much more intolerant of dissenters than the Catholic Church is or was or ever will be.

Ben Stein’s film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed shows unambiguously who the real persecutors are in our days. They are the ones who do not want to allow any criticism of materialistic dogma that often masquerades as science.

Why on earth did the Earth not freeze to death in its youth?

Where’s the ice? According to the evolution model, Earth should have been an extremely cold planet and unsuitable for life in its youth. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

The belief in billions of years of Earth history causes problems that seem to evade answers. Recently, Minik T. Rosing and colleagues attempted to solve the faint young Sun paradox in a letter published in Nature.

In 1972 Carl Sagan and George Mullen suggested in Science that the Sun’s brightness might have only been 70 per cent of what it is now. Earth’s global mean temperature would have been below the freezing point of water and life could hardly have existed.

Sagan and Mullen speculated that Earth’s atmosphere must have contained more greenhouse gases, especially methane and ammonia, than at present so that the seas would not have frozen.

Rosing and colleagues suggest that Archaean sediments do not support the view that there would have been high concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They suggest that the solution lies in a weaker albedo, i.e. Earth would have lost less heat into space.

However, professor James Kasting of Pennsylvania State University concludes in Nature that even the newest model will not solve the riddle of snowball Earth.

It would be easy to solve the problem by giving up the belief in millions of years.


Sources:

Kasting, James F. 2010. Faint young Sun redux. Nature 464 (7289), 687-689.

Rosing, Minik T. & al. 2010. No climate paradox under the faint early Sun. Nature 464 (7289), 744-747.

Sagan, Carl and George Mullen. 1972. Earth and Mars: Evolution of Atmospheres and Surface Temperatures. Science 177 (4043), 52-56.

Carl Sagan: ”The Cosmos is all that is”

Carl Sagan was born 75 years ago. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Next week, skeptics will celebrate Carl Sagan’s 75th birthday. Sagan, an astronomer and author who died in 1996, did not acknowledge the existence of the supernatural. For him, the cosmos was all that there is.

Sagan often pointed out that there was nothing special about Earth, "a pale blue dot". Made up of recycled stardust, man could not rely on anyone else expect himself in a vast, unfriendly universe. There was no room for the spiritual realm in his worldview.

” The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be,” was Sagan’s creed.

Humanists might have a veneer of tolerance but they tend to have a rather rigid conception of what they should believe in. They have published three manifestos that might be thought of as creeds. They deny the existence of the supernatural and will only accept naturalistic explanations.
.
Fred Edwords characterised the humanists’ worldview as follows:

“Human beings are neither entirely unique from other forms of life nor are they the final product of some planned scheme of development… Humans are the current result of a long series of natural evolutionary changes, but not the only result or the final one. Continuous change can be expected to affect ourselves, other life forms, and the cosmos as a whole. There appears no ultimate beginning or end to this process.”

Carl Sagan was one of the more prominent humanists.

Guillermo Gonzales and Jay W. Richards happened to criticise Sagan. In their book The Privileged Planet (2004), they showed that Earth seems to be designed for life.

Gonzales was an associate professor of astronomy at Iowa State University. Infuriated by the book, some of his colleagues, Hector Avalos in particular, complained of the teaching of intelligent design at Iowa State and he was eventually expelled from his post. Ben Stein’s movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed documented his case.

David Warren, a columnist for The Ottawa Citizen, said: ”Atheist materialism is vastly more sensitive to heresy than any previously known religious orthodoxy.”

It seems that the humanistic inquisition sees to it that no one dares to deviate from the official doctrine (i.e. everything is a result of random processes).

Carl Sagan shared this humanistic dogma that a priori ruled out the possibility of design in the Cosmos.



Sources:

Edwords, Fred. 1984. Humanism in Perspective. American Humanist Association. The Humanist, Jan/Feb 1984.

Nye, Bill. 2006. A Tribute to Carl Sagan: Our Place in the Universe. Skeptic 13:1. http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/our-place-in-the-universe

Warren, David. 2007. The Limits of Atheism. The Ottawa Citizen. (12 August). http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=c43112b1-d4b9-4a09-ac0f-8517f0b931d5