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Carl Sagan
Richard Dawkins on Carl Sagan, Einstein and Religion | A How To Academy …
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Francis Schaeffer the Founder of the L’Abri community
The Cosmos Is All That Is
Francis Schaeffer wrote in 1981 in CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO chapter 3 The Destruction of Faith and Freedom:
Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it.
Meaning of life — Carl Sagan
June 30, 2021By Subhash Trivedi
Tags: Good Question
Carl Sagan was an American Cosmologist, Astronomer, Planetary Scientist, author, and science communicator. He wrote books on the planetary system and produced a TV series called “Cosmos – A Personal Voyage” in which he presented a series. Later Neil deGrasse Tyson continued the series and called it Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan believes the meaning of lifeis up to us. We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our wisdom and courage. He further says some 5 billion years from now, after it’s burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the sun. There will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being and they will know nothing of a place once called EARTH.
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
Carl Sagan
The idea of the sense of self-worth comes not from anything we have done, not from anything worthy, but by an accident of birth of humiliation. The purpose is on us and we have to define it by staying humble to everyone, making equal rights for everyone, no discrimination, gender equality.
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan pointing the dot in photo capture by Voyager 1 in space from billions of kilometers away – Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
Carl Sagan
Having said that, If we keep our purpose small such as to be kind and humble to everyone, helping each other would make a significant difference. Don’t pursue big goals just keep it simple and be conscious of yourself.
“If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”
Carl Sagan
What if the cosmos is all that there is?
Are you a materialist? Materialism (the philosophy) suggests that “physical matter is the only reality, and that everything-including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can all be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.”
Or perhaps you prefer the term naturalist. You believe that all can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws. Nothing has moral, spiritual, or supernatural significance.
Carl Sagan once said: “The cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be.”
Douglas Futuyma in Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, says:
“Some shrink from the conclusion that the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of mere mechanical mechanisms—but this seems to be the message of evolution.”
Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker:
“Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a mater watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.”`
Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis:
“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that you—your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”
What if all this is true? What if the cosmos and the chemicals and the particles really are all that there is, and all that we are?
“If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.”
—Francis Schaeffer in The God Who Is There
“Eventually materialist philosophy undermines the reliability of the mind itself-and hence even the basis for science. The true foundation of rationality is not found in particles and impersonal laws, but in the mind of the Creator who formed us in His image.”
—Phillip E. Johnson,
Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds
If you are an atheist, a materialist, a pantheist, or a naturalist, try to answer the following 11 questions:
- “If all of life is meaningless, and ultimately absurd , why bother to march straight forward, why stand in the queue as though life as a whole makes sense?” —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There
- If everyone completely passes out of existence when they die, what ultimate meaning has life? Even if a man’s life is important because of his influence on others or by his effect on the course of history, of what ultimate significance is that if there is no immortality and all other lives, events, and even history itself is ultimately meaningless?
- Suppose the universe had never existed. Apart form God, what ultimate difference would that make?
- In a universe without God or immortality, how is mankind ultimately different from a swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs?
- What viable basis exists for justice or law if man is nothing but a sophisticated, programmed machine?
- Why does research, discovery, diplomacy, art, music, sacrifice, compassion, feelings of love, or affectionate and caring relationships mean anything if it all ultimately comes to naught anyway?
- Without absolute morals, what ultimate difference is there between Saddam Hussein and Billy Graham?
- If there is no immortality, why shouldn’t all things be permitted?(Dostoyevsky)
- If morality is only a relative social construct, on what basis could or should anyone ever move to interfere with cultures that practice apartheid, female circumcision, cannibalism, or ethnic cleansing?
- If there is no God, on what basis is there any meaning or hope for fairness, comfort, or better times?
- Without a personal Creator-God, how are you anything other than the coincidental, purposeless miscarriage of nature, spinning round and round on a lonely planet in the blackness of space for just a little while before you and all memory of your futile, pointless, meaningless life finally blinks out forever in the endless darkness?
Sources
Many, but not all, of the preceding questions are paraphrased versions of those posed by William Lane Craig in his book Reasonable Faith, chapter 2, “The Absurdity of Life Without God.”
Author: Daryl E. Witmer of AIIA Institute.
Text Copyright © 2003, 2004, AIIA Institute, All Rights Reserved—except as noted on attached “Usage and Copyright” page that grants ChristianAnswers.Net users generous rights for putting this page to work in their homes, personal witnessing, churches and schools.
How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 6 | The Scientific Age
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