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Below are Francis Schaeffer and his son Franky:

In 1992 I began to write skeptics letters after reading their books and articles and watching their films and I was introduced to Carl Sagan’s name by a book published in 1968 by Francis Schaeffer entitled HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT in chapter 4!

Sagan in 1980

It is my view that Carl Sagan let his evolutionary views affect the way he looked at the issue of abortion. I would like to also assert that Sagan was willing to manipulate science in order to try and reach objectives he had that didn’t fit the evidence. The tactic he uses in his article on abortion in 1990 is especially reprehensible because he is using the language of a discredited scientific notion to try and give the impression that there is a scientific reason that it is okay to abortion unborn babies. Anybody familiar with Carl Sagan’s work knows how powerful he can be with his word pictures.

Recently I have been revisiting my correspondence in 1995 with the famous astronomer Carl Sagan who I was introduced to when reading a book by Francis Schaeffer called HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT written in 1968.

Francis Schaeffer

Francis Schaeffer in his book HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT (Chapter 4) asserts:

Because men have lost the objective basis for certainty of knowledge in the areas in which they are working, more and more we are going to find them manipulating science according to their own sociological or political desires rather than standing upon concrete objectivity. We are going to find increasingly what I would call sociological science, where men manipulate the scientific facts. Carl Sagan (1934-1996), professor of astronomy and space science at Cornell University, demonstrates that the concept of a manipulated science is not far-fetched. He mixes science and science fiction constantly. He is a true follower of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). The media gives him much TV prime time and much space in the press and magazine coverage, and the United State Government spent millions of dollars in the special equipment which was included in the equipment of the Mars probe–at his instigation, to give support to his obsessive certainty that life would be found on Mars, or that even large-sized life would be found there. With Carl Sagan the line concerning objective science is blurred, and the media spreads his mixture of science and science fiction out to the public as exciting fact. 

Carl Sagan pictured below:

Carl Sagan pictured below:

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When you read Sagan’s words below on abortion it reminds me of Schaeffer’s accusation of scientists like Sagan “manipulating science according to their own sociological or political desires rather than standing upon concrete objectivity.”

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I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan on August 30, 1995 and it included a letter that I had published that very day in the Democrat-Gazette.

My letter to the editor to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was published on August 30, 1995 and appeared under the title THE HUMANIST WORLD VIEW. Here is a portion of the published letter:

Adrian Rogers (pictured above was my pastor in the 1970’s and 1980’s)

Adrian Rogers, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has rightly said, “Secular Humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together.”

The pro-abortion movement in America has benefited from support from such humanists as Lester R. Brown, James Farmer, Sol Gordon, Matthew Ies Spetter, Richard Dawkins, Kendrick Frazier, Gordon Stein and Gerald R. Larue. 

Everette Hatcher III, Little Rock, Arkansas 

In a letter from Carl Sagan dated December 5, 1995, Sagan disagreed with me concerning the close relationship between atheistic evolutionists and the abortion movement.

Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.

I am not going to argue this point any further although I have done that elsewhere, but I want to move back to Schaeffer’s original point about Sagan. Sagan went on his December 5, 1995 letter to tell me that he was enclosing his article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. In that article you find these words below:

“By the third week . . . it looks a little like a segmented worm. By the and of the fourth week . . . it’s recognizable as a vertebrate, its tube-shaped heart is beginning to beat, something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian have become conspicuous, and there is a pronounced tail. It looks something like a newt or a tadpole…. By the sixth week . . . the eyes are still on the side of the head, as in most animals, and the reptilian face has connected slits where the mouth and nose eventually will be….

By the end of the eighth week the face resembles a primate’s but is still not quite human.”

Here Sagan jumps back into former evolutionary thinking and uses the discredited theory of embryonic recapitulation to lead the reader to believe that the unborn baby is not a real human for the first six months. Ken Ham does a great job of exposing this below.

Ken Ham

ACTS & FACTS     BACK TO GENESIS    The Smartest Man in America?BY KENNETH HAM  | TUESDAY, DECEMBER 01, 1992S

If you were asked to place a vote for the person whom you considered the smartest man in your country, for whom would you vote? Perhaps the President or Prime Minister? Maybe a leading scientist? What about a Nobel Prize winner?

In an August article in Parade Magazine, readers were asked the question, Who Are the Smartest People in America?” And who did the readers vote for? None other than Carl Sagan! He was the person mentioned by the most readers.

Who is Carl Sagan? He is an astronomer and author. He was appointed Professor of Astronomy and Space Science at Cornell University in 1968. Much of his fame has been gained by popularizing science through books, magazines, and the television series “Cosmos.”

Carl Sagan is also an ardent evolutionist. In fact, he received the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction for the book The Dragons of Eden, which deals with the evolution of the human brain. Many people will be familiar with his phrase; “billions and billions of years” heard on the “Cosmos” television series.

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He is also a doctrinaire “pro-choice” advocate in regard to the issue of abortion. In Parade Magazine April 22, 1990, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan co-authored an article in which they advocated that an embryo developing in its mother’s womb is not a real human until perhaps the sixth month of development. Thus they were insisting that babies could be aborted up until the third trimester.

The astonishing thing about this article is the so-called “scientific” justification used as a major part of the argument. What did the man voted as the “smartest man in America” say in this article?

He and his co-author used the old, discredited idea of embryonic recapitulation to assert that an embryo in its mother’s womb is not a real human for the first six months. What is this recapitulation idea?

A German scientist at the time of Darwin, Professor Ernst Haeckel, said that when an embryo develops, it passes through the various evolutionary stages that reflect its evolutionary history. As the embryo develops, it supposedly goes through a worm-like state, then a fish stage with gill slits, then an amphibian stage, and so on, until it becomes human. This view once was prevalent in biology textbooks in schools and colleges around the world. Many students became convinced of evolution because of this idea—an idea that was even illustrated with diagrams to “prove” that it was true.

(Ernst Haeckel pictured above)

However, it is now a well-known fact that Haeckel doctored his illustrations to support this erroneous view. For instance, in the book The Neck of the Giraffe, by Francis Hitching (an author who is critical of Darwinian evolution but nonetheless is an evolutionist and not a creationist), the following statements are made:

“Although Haeckel’s theory fell into disrepute during the peak years of neo-Darwinist supremacy, the revival of interest in embryonic development has led a number of today’s biologists to look upon his ideas more favorably. The trouble is, Haeckel was a rogue. Time and time again, Haeckel doctored his illustrations outrageously to support his biogenetic law.” Hitching goes on to talk about Haeckel’s forgeries and deception. Haeckel even admitted that he falsified the diagrams.

What is so disturbing is that the man voted the “smartest man in America” still promotes ideas like Haeckel’s. Read what the article in Parade Magazine, co-authored by Sagan, stated concerning the developing human embryo:

“By the third week . . . it looks a little like a segmented worm. By the and of the fourth week . . . it’s recognizable as a vertebrate, its tube-shaped heart is beginning to beat, something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian have become conspicuous, and there is a pronounced tail. It looks something like a newt or a tadpole…. By the sixth week . . . the eyes are still on the side of the head, as in most animals, and the reptilian face has connected slits where the mouth and nose eventually will be….

By the end of the eighth week the face resembles a primate’s but is still not quite human.”

Although Sagan doesn’t mention Haeckel, this article, which is cleverly written, clearly uses Haeckel’s discredited recapitulation theory to justify abortion! Any person who had been taught recapitulation at school or college would immediately think that Sagan is also promoting Haeckel’s ideas. How sad that many thousands of people (many of them young women), will have read this article thinking that what they read from this “smart” scientist must be trustworthy. Many may even abort a baby on the basis of this misleading information.

Just for interest, I checked a medical textbook called Medical Embryology, 3rd edition, by Jan Langman. The author states: ” . . . it can no longer be said that the human embryo ever has gills. It has pharyngeal pouches. . . .”

One of the textbooks used in high schools in Australia, Biology – The Spectrum of Life, on page 208, states:”lt was once thought that the embryo’s development (ontogeny) repeated the stages of evolutionary change. We now realize that this is not so.” I am very pleased to see this change, because when I was a teacher in the public schools in Australia, the textbooks stated Haeckel’s ideas as fact. The same has been true of textbooks in American schools. (It is distressing to learn, however, that some textbooks in schools today still promote or at least suggest Haeckel’s ideas.) Many women who went through this education system may never have heard that what they were taught was wrong, and thus may have views on abortion based on false ideas. Evolutionary indoctrination (even using known false ideas) through public schooling has certainly been a powerful tool for the humanist agenda.

Why do people listen to Carl Sagan? Parade Magazine states that he is a man who has brought scientific knowledge down to earth for millions of people. Certainly, evolutionists have done a great job of popularizing their material to the public at a level they can understand. Creationists should take note of this. Evolutionists are master propagandists. Creationists have done much exciting scientific research and have tremendous challenges andanswers tothe evolutionists’ dogma; and when people hear this information, it can change their lives. We need your support more than ever before to counteract the massive evolutionary propaganda.

According to one of the readers of Parade Magazine, Sagan “seems to have answers to every question, regardless of the subject.” One of the problems in Christendom is that many Christians have not had answers to the basic questions of life because of the intense indoctrination of evolution and the lack of good teaching in our churches. But there is no excuse now! ICR and similar organizations around the world have a wealth of information available on the creation/evolution issue so that every Christian can have the knowledge and understanding to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (I Peter 3:15).

And remember at this Christmas time the One who came down to be our Savior did not develop through evolutionary worm, fish, and reptile stages to become a human. Just as the first Adam was made directly by God, so the physical body for the last Adam (Jesus Christ—the eternal Creator) was made by God to develop in Mary’s womb, to be born (as the God-man), to live on Earth as a human, and to become the perfect sacrifice so that all may have the offer of eternal life with Him.

Cite this article: Kenneth Ham. 1992. The Smartest Man in America?. Acts & Facts. 21 (12).

Professor Ernst Haeckel was a well known scientist and his philophical views were criticized by Francis Schaeffer!

Francis Schaeffer rightly noted where the materialistic time plus chance point of view has brought us to:

The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was an early exponent of a philosophy of materialism, as was German physician Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899), whose book Force and Matter (1855) went into twenty-one editions and was translated into all the major languages. It is of more than passing interest that Richard Wagner (1813–1883), the German composer of opera, was reading Feuerbach as early as 1848. Wagner at this period of his life was deeply influenced by Feuerbach, and it was Wagner who encouraged Ludwig II of Bavaria to read Feuerbach. Thus the work of Feuerbach had its influence not only in abstract thought but also on the arts and on the state. Ernst Haeckel (1834– 1919), a biologist at the University of Jena, wrote The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the 19th Century (1899), and it became a best-seller, too. In this work Haeckel posited that matter and energy are eternal and also assumed that the human mind or soul is to be explained on the basis of materialism. He saw where this would lead and accepted that people have no freedom of will. 

When people began to think in this way, there was no place for God or for man as man. When psychology and social science were made a part of a closed cause-and-effect system, along with physics, astronomy and chemistry, it was not only God who died. Man died. And within this framework love died. There is no place for love in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. There is no place for morals in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. There is no place for the freedom of people in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. Man becomes a zero. People and all they do become only a part of the machinery.

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Haroon Ahmed,  Jim Al-Khalili, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Sir Patrick Bateson, Simon Blackburn, Colin Blakemore, Ned Block, Pascal Boyer, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky, Brian Cox, Partha Dasgupta,  Alan Dershowitz, Frank Drake, Hubert Dreyfus, John Dunn, Bart Ehrman, Mark Elvin, Richard Ernst, Stephan Feuchtwang, Robert Foley, David Friend,  Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross,  Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman,  Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison,  Stephen Hawking, Hermann Hauser, Robert Hinde, Roald Hoffmann,  Bruce Hood, Gerard ‘t Hooft, Caroline Humphrey, Nicholas Humphrey,  Herbert Huppert,  Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku,  Stuart Kauffman, Masatoshi Koshiba,  Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff,  Rodolfo Llinas, Elizabeth Loftus,  Alan Macfarlane, Dan McKenzie,  Mahzarin Banaji, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow,  P.Z.Myers,   Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff, David Parkin,  Jonathan Parry, Roger Penrose,  Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse,  Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, VS Ramachandran, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees, Colin Renfrew, Alison Richard,  C.J. van Rijsbergen,  Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg,   Lee Silver,  Peter Singer,  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, John Sulston, Barry Supple,   Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Max Tegmark, Neil deGrasse Tyson,  Martinus J. G. Veltman, Craig Venter, .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, James D. Watson, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and  Lewis Wolpert,

<a style=”font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;orphans:auto;text-indent:0;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:auto;word-spacing:0;box-sizing:border-box;background-color:transparent;color:#c01823;text-decoration:none;margin:0;padding:0;border:0;font-size:13px;font-family:Lato, ‘Helvetica Neue’, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;vertical-align:baseline;transition:color 0.2s linear, background 0.1s linear, border-color 0.1s linear;text-align:left;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;” title=”Remember when Carl Sagan trashed Star Wars on late-night TV?” href=”https://lithub.com/remember-when-carl-sagan-trashed-star-wars-on-late-night-tv/”&gt;

Carl Sagan

nitially an associate professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell where he would spend the majority of his career as the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books.^[5] He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain, Pale Blue Dot and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, Cosmos, has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries.^[6] The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the 1985 science fiction novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. His papers, containing 595,000 items,^[7] are archived at The Library of Congress.^[8]

Sagan advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of SciencesPublic Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Dragons of Eden, and, regarding Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award, and the Hugo Award. He married three times and had five children. After suffering from myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, on December 20, 1996.

In  the 1st video below in the 45th clip in this series are his words and  my response is below them. 

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

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