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.
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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

Would Secular Humanists Expel Paul Anka?

Paul Anka recorded a song about Adam and Eve, seen here in the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum.

Joel Kontinen

Secular humanists are not known for their love of tolerance. Their creed, spelled out in the Humanist Manifesto that has been updated a few times since its origin in 1933, rules out the supernatural and they definitely do not want to hear about God.

Most if not all humanists are firm believers in Darwinian evolution. They have a track record of resisting anything that smacks of religion. For instance, they seem to hate the word Christmas and have attempted to replace it with Newtonmas.

Some atheists want to remove all references to God from society. They especially dislike the words In God we trust. Recently, Michael Newdow and other atheists filed a suit in an attempt to remove the words "so help me God" from the U.S. presidential inauguration oath. In 2001 he tried to ban prayer from the ceremony but was unsuccessful.

There was a time when pop singers would allude to biblical events and few if any would protest. For instance, in 1960 Canadian-American pop star Paul Anka recorded a song called Puppy Love. The b side of the single record had a biblical title: Adam and Eve.

The words might have made Michael Newdow sue the record company for putting religious allusions on an otherwise secular song. Some of Anka’s words would seem to be very disturbing to the humanists:

In the garden of Eden
a long time ago
there was a story
I'm sure you all know.

But more was to come:

I'm sure you remember
and I know you believe
the story of Adam and Eve.

But even that was not enough. The next verse clearly contradicts the Darwinian version of life beginning in a warm little pond:

In the garden of Eden
where life began
yes the very beginning
of woman and man.

Those were the days, my friend. It seems that the secular humanists were hibernating. And Paul Anka was not the only one to use biblical allusions in popular songs. Humanists would also have to censure Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

Literature would provide more disturbing news for Darwinists. They would have to dispose of John Bunyon, John Milton, the Russian classics and many, many more including G. K. Chesterton , C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Narnia and the Lord of the Rings would definitely have to go.

Richard Darwins has used the G-word more than once in his writings. Perhaps the humanists might consider banning him, also.

And the foundation for the seven-day week is in Genesis. Both the French Revolution and its Russian counterpart attempted to change the length of our week because of its biblical allusions but both were unsuccessful.

Darwinists are fond of quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky who once said, “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution.” However, it seems that Christianity is so deeply imbedded in western culture that like Don Quixote secular humanists are fighting against windmills in their attempts to remove all and every allusion to it.


Sources:

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

Lyricsmode. Adam And Eve lyrics by Paul Anka. http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/p/paul_anka/adam_and_eve.html

Why Critical Thinking is Dangerous

The Ancients were not as ignorant as Secular Humanists suppose. Image of the Antikythera Mechanism, courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen


Massimo Pigliucci, who is known for his anti-ID views, wrote a comment on Sarah Palin’s views on science education. His piece was mostly full of rhetoric and empty of facts. Pigliucci, a professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, seems to be afraid that opposing Darwinism raises “a nation of ignorant bigots whose understanding of the world is no better than that of a tribe of ancient middle eastern people wandering around the desert thousands of years ago.”

What Pigliucci has failed to sees is that archaeology and historical finds have shown that ancient people were no ignoramuses. The Old Testament prophet Isaiah, for instance, already knew that the earth was round.

Recent research on the Antikythera Mechanicm revealed that the Greeks were more advanced than we thought. A few weeks ago I visited the ruins of Ephesus and saw that the Romans were no simpletons either.

Pigliucci admits that he is not sure whether Sarah Palin is a creationist but has dug up a two-year old interview in which she advocated open discussion on origin issues in class. She later explained that this would not mean including creationism as part of the curriculum.

Open debate is one thing the Darwinists are afraid of. As Eugenie Scott put it, “In my opinion, using creation and evolution as topics for critical-thinking exercises in primary and secondary schools is virtually guaranteed to confuse students about evolution and may lead them to reject one of the major themes in science.”

Ergo, allowing students to think critically might cause them to doubt Darwinian evolution.

Pigliucci writes that open debate would probably make kids conclude that the earth is flat. In his view, a belief in creation is “superstitious nonsense that harks back to an earlier era of ignorance about how the world works.”

Just how objective is this view? Professor Pigliucci writes for Skeptical Inquirer and has for instance taken part in a conference called One Nation Without God? The others speakers included Christopher Hitchens, Paul Kurtz and Eugenie Scott, who are all atheists.

This might say something about the objectivity of his approach, not forgetting the fact that this conference was arranged by the Council for Secular Humanism.

In a survey of the basic tenets of secular humanism, Fred Edwords says that belief in a transcendent God involves “arbitrarily taking a leap of faith and… abandoning reason and the senses.”

This, of course, is a deeply philosophical stance and cannot be supported by science, history or even evidence.

On the contrary, there is much that speaks for the presence of a transcendent God who has revealed Himself in history as Jesus Christ.

In the Soviet Union, science was seen to support the claims of Marxism. Open political discussion was suppressed. Dissenters were often sent to mental asylums. The attitude of some Darwinists is beginning to sound like the approach of the Soviet comrades who definitely knew they were right and all others were wrong.




Sources:

The Cowtown Humanist. April 2003 Volume 5, No. 1http://www.hofw.org/news/news-apr-03-3.htm

Edwords, Fred. 1984. Humanism in Perspective. American Humanist Association. Leaflet reprint from the Humanist, Jan/Feb 1984.

Pigliucci, Massimo. 2008. LiveScience. Is Sarah Palin a Creationist? (1 September) http://www.livescience.com/culture/080901-sb-palin-creationist.html

Witham Larry. 2002. Where Darwin Meets the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.