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The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God QUOTES

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God QUOTES

1 " If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more? "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

2 " So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

3 " I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

4 " It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

5 " Science is only a Latin word for knowledge "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

6 " As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It's a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It, could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that's no longer God's realm. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

7 " A new concept of god: “something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature…that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow…Mars…the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

8 " I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

9 " Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

10 " We make our purpose. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

11 " When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

12 " Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

13 " We are spending a million million dollars every year, worldwide, on armaments. A million million dollars. Think of what you could do with a million million dollars. A visitor from somewhere else - the legendary intelligent extraterrestrial - dipping down to the Earth and inquiring what we are about and finding such prodigies of human inventiveness and such enormous fractions of our wealth devoted not just to the means of war but to the means of massive global destruction - such a being would surely deduce that our prospects are not very good and perhaps go on to some other, more promising world. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

14 " Or look at the status of women, about which finally the planet is coming to its senses in our own time. Or even things like smallpox and other disfiguring and fatal diseases, diseases of children, that were once thought to be an inevitable, God-given part of life. The clergy argued, and some still do, that those diseases were sent by God as a scourge for mankind. Now there are no more cases of smallpox on the planet. For a few tens of millions of dollars and the efforts of physicians from a hundred countries, coordinated by the World Health Organization, smallpox has been removed from the planet Earth. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

15 " Dicho de otro modo, cualquier predisposición a la creencia religiosa puede verse poderosamente influida por la cultura indígena, viva uno donde viva. Especialmente si los niños están expuestos desde muy pequeños a una serie concreta de doctrinas, música, arte y ritual, es algo tan natural para ellos como respirar, motivo por el cual las religiones hacen tantos esfuerzos para atraer a los más jóvenes. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

16 " El mundo es totalmente diferente si la máxima velocidad de un mensaje es la que pueden alcanzar un caballo o una carabea, o bien la de la luz. La velocidad de la luz significa que podemos hablar - prácticamente a tiempo real- con cualquier persona de la Tierra o incluso de la Luna. Pensemos en la medicina. Hace unos siglos, la mayoría de los niños nacidos en las grandes familias de Europa morían en la infancia, a pesar de contar con la mejor asistencia médica de su época. Hoy en día, incluso los pobres de algunas naciones tienen una mortalidad infantil asombrosamente inferior a la de las cabezas coronadas del siglo XVII. O pensemos en la disponibilidad de medios seguros y baratos de control de la natalidad, que implica una revolución en las relaciones humanas y, sobre todo, en la condición de las mujeres. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

17 " Muchas religiones han intentado hacer grandes estatuas de sus dioses, con la idea, supongo, de hacernos sentir pequeños a nosotros. Pero, si ése era su objetivo, ya pueden quedarse con sus míseros íconos. Para sentirnos pequeños basta con que levantemos la mirada "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

18 " Todo lo que hemos visto forma parte de un universo inmenso, complicado y maravilloso. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

19 " No single step in the persuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

20 " We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go. "

― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God