'Contact' and Carl Sagan's faith

[yallerdawg]

The film captures the novel’s religious sensibility that Arroway is asking people to accept “on faith” her testimony of wonder.

Source: The Conversation, by Christopher Douglas

It’s the 20th anniversary of Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 science fiction film Contact, and we’re in the middle of remembering its story of aliens purposefully communicating with our planet.

The film, like the 1985 novel by Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan which it adapted, recognized the essentially religious implications of the question of whether we are alone in the universe.

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Sagan has a reputation as a hardened, somewhat combative atheist. But the film gives us a very different picture, an affirmation of the religious experience of wonder. And the novel, in turn, offers an even more startling sympathy for the epistemological premise of revealed religions.

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Sagan opposed emergent Christian fundamentalism for its growing political muscle and its creationism. He would be appalled and amused to discover that Contact’s premise of searching for meaningful patterns in random noise is used by the updated creation science of Intelligent Design to suggest the science-iness of its theological project.

He may have grown more cynical as the years went by, but his widespread reputation as a fire-breathing atheist is surely mistaken.

Read it all at: https://theconversation.com/contact-and-carl-sagans-faith-85150

[guillaumeb]

1. From the article:

This sequence is Sagan’s affirmation of the religious structure of revelation, as is the novel’s parallel between early Christian testimony and Arroway’s.

[yallerdawg]

2. Jodie Foster delivers...

one of the most aching, heartbreaking, moving expressions of the essence of faith I have ever heard.

[Cuthbert Allgood]

3. Why does it need to be the "religious experience of wonder" and not just "experience of wonder"

Why does religion have to come in to everything? Especially when Sagan WASN'T religious. He wasn't exploring religion. He was exploring wonder in the face of the magnitude of the universe. Stop trying to co-opt that into your world view of religion. Just. Stop.

[Mariana]

4. Isn't it convenient that Sagan isn't around

to respond to crap like this?

[yallerdawg]

6. Carl Sagan:

"An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed."

[Lordquinton]

9. I'm reminded of people quoting MLK out of context

to make themselves feel better about completely twisting his vision around.

[yallerdawg]

5. Apparently...

you're not familiar with the original material - written by Carl Sagan.

The novel "Contact."

[Cuthbert Allgood]

8. You would be wrong about that assumption.

Did he blur the lines between science and religion at the end of the novel? Yes. Do I think that supports your point? Nope. The blurring is about showing us that science has (or will find) the answers to whatever we are questioning.

[marylandblue]

7. In the novel, proof of God's existence was found in a mathematical pattern

I think that's the only kind of God Sagan could believe in, one who provided evidence with mathematical certainty, and it was clear that no religion yet known could ever provide such proof.

[NeoGreen]

10. Selected quotes: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

“Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.”

“In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.”

“One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.”

“Christianity may be good and Satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal code, not the Ten Commandments … The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.”

“Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.”