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E.O. Wilson: Science, Not Philosophy, Will Explain the Meaning of Existence

The Social Conquest of Earth | Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson The Meaning of Human Existence Audiobook

In the book THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE Dr. Wilson asserted:

The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the risk of tribal religious conflict very well…. John Adams insisted that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” America has slipped a bit since then.

UNFORTUNATELY THAT QUOTE OF ADAMS IS INACCURATE!

Dr. Wilson recommended that a person spend lots of time in a partIcular field and I told him:

I got into a very small field about 20 years ago when I took about 2 years and read anything I could get my hands on concerning authenticating quotes that had been attributed to the founding fathers of the United States. It was a very tricky business but the end result was my article “Misquotes, Fake Quotes, and Disputed Quotes of the Founders,” It has become one of my most popular blog posts over the last 5 years.

If Dr. Wilson had gone to the link then he would have the first sentence which noted, ”Many inauthentic quotes attributed to the Founding Fathers have been in circulation for much of the 20th century. These are still being used frequently, especially by those in the religious right..”

I wish Dr. Wilson could have read this article below from an atheist!!!

Secularists, please stop quoting the Treaty of Tripoli

 MAY 9, 2016 BY THOMAS ESSEL

 17 COMMENTS

I’ve been to many a secular conference now where I’ve presented on the topic of “In God We Trust.” Without fail, someone in the audience will bring up the Treaty of Tripoli. I’ve also run across the Treaty of Tripoli in many atheist/secular forums and websites, including here on Patheos. I’m writing today to beseech my fellow secularists with a simple request: please, for the love of god (in the colloquial sense), stop quoting the Treaty of Tripoli.

Secularists love to quote the first clause of the first sentence to Article 11 of the 1797 treaty, which reads, “the government of the United States is in no way founded on the Christian religion.” The problem with this is that quote isn’t the entire first sentence – it isn’t even all of the first clause – and it completely takes the Treaty of Tripoli out of its historical context.

First, let’s cover a little history. In the 18^thand 19^th centuries, the states of North Africa collectively called the Barbary States – Algiers, Morrocco, Tunis, and Tripoli – would raid European shipping in the Mediterranean Sea. To prevent their commercial ships and sailors from being seized, the states of Europe would pay what was essentially protection money to the rulers of the Barbary coast. In 1783, when the American colonies gained their independence, Great Britain stopped paying the protection money for American shipping for obvious reasons.

Enter the Treaty of Tripoli.

In 1797, United States Commissioner Plenipotentiary David Humphreys certified the what would become known as the Treaty of Tripoli, which in its own time was known officially as the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary. Treat of Tripoli is a convenient shorthand. The treaty established commercial and maritime rights for the United States, acted as a sort of peace treaty (though there was no official war), and defined the amount of tribute to be paid by the United States to the Bey of Tripoli. So what does this have to do with atheism and secularism?

As mentioned above, article 11 of the treaty states that the United States government is not founded on the Christian religion. But, as mentioned above, that isn’t the whole story. Here is article 11 in full:

“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

Article 11 does not establish a historical fact about the United States in particular – which is how most secularists use it – so much as it defines the relationship between the government of the United States and the government of Tripoli. In essence, Article 11 is stating that differing religious opinions shall not be considered a pretext for violating the treaty. It should be noted that the article is careful to point out that the United States had never engaged in any armed conflict with a Muslim nation.

Still, the first clause in Article 11 is attractive to modern secularists because it seems to set a precedent for a religiously-neutral government. Taken completely on its own, I would argue that article 11 does, in fact, establish that the United States is not a Christian government. However, and any respectable academic would agree, you cannot simply look at one piece of evidence to try and establish a historical (or any other) fact. In history, you must look at evidence that is contradictory in order to gain a more precise understanding of context. Take, for example, this 1798 proclamation from President John Adams, who was president when the Treaty of Tripoli was ratified, which states,

“[T]he safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and the blessing of Almighty God, and the national acknowledgment of this truth is not only an indispensable duty which the people owe to Him, but a duty whose natural influence is favorable to the promotion of that morality and piety without which social happiness can not [sic] exist nor the blessings of a free government be enjoyed.”

Further on in the proclamation – which promoted a national day of humiliation, fasting and prayer – it recommends “that all religious congregations do, with the deepest humility, acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as individuals and as a nation, beseeching Him at the same time, of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our offenses, and to incline us by His Holy Spirit to that sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable favor and heavenly benediction.”

So though it may be true that the United States government did not enforce a specific sect of Christianity, it certainly wasn’t neutral when it came to religious matters. In fact, religion was viewed as necessary to a civil society and the government of the United States, through its executive, was willing to incorporate Christian beliefs and Christian symbolism into its affairs. Taken on its own, this type of proclamation suggests that the United States government is in fact founded on the Christian religion. The government saw pleas to the Almighty through Jesus Christ (aka “Redeemer of the World”) as necessary for the survival and well-being of the nation it governed. But again, that would be taking one piece of historical evidence to make a political point.

A further fact needs to be considered as well: there are multiple Treaties of Tripoli.

In 1801, the 1797 treaty was broken when Tripoli attacked American shipping after the United States refused to pay more tribute. This led to the First Barbary War – immortalized in the Marine Corps hymn lyric “to the shores of Tripoli – which ended with the signing of a second Treaty of Tripoli. This treaty was very similar to the original with a few notable exceptions, the most notable of which is the clause declaring that the United States is “not in any way founded on the Christian Religion” is completely missing. Here is part of Article 14 of the 1805 treaty:

“As the Government of the United States of America, has in itself no character of enmity against the Laws, Religion or Tranquility of Musselmen, and as the said States never have entered into any voluntary war or act of hostility against any Mahometan Nation, except in the defence [sic] of their just rights to freely navigate the High Seas: It is declared by the contracting parties that no pretext arising from Religious Opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the Harmony existing between the two Nations…”

If the government of the United States was so adamantly not founded on the Christian religion, why so conspicuously leave that clause out when the treaty was rewritten in 1805?
Now none of this is to say that the United States is or isn’t a Christian nation or founded on Christianity. That is a political battle that exists outside the world of late 18^th and early 19^th century America. So please, I beg you, stop quoting the Treaty of Tripoli. Not only is it not what you think it is, quoting the treaty in the context of the modern secular movement is a complete distortion of the real-world context in which it was written. It is the exact same kind of distortion that religious pseudo-historians like David Barton make when they point to things like “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence and declare that the United States is founded as a Christian nation.
The past is complicated. There existed no black and white view of the world in the 18^th century any more than one exists in the 21^st. To cherry pick evidence from an obscure 18th-century treaty without considering its context to make a political point is not only ahistorical, but also unbecoming of a movement that prides itself on critical thought, rational inquiry, and following the evidence no matter what the conclusion.

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Harvard University Professor E.O. Wilson in his office at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. USACredit: Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty.

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Francis Schaeffer mentioned Edward O. Wilson in his book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? co-authored by C.Everett Koop on pages 289-291 (ft note 6 0n page 504). That was when I was first introduced to Dr. Wilson’s work. Wikipedia notes, Edward Osborne Wilson (June 10, 1929 – December 26, 2021) was an American biologist, naturalist, and writer. His specialty was myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he was called the world’s leading expert,^[3][4] and he was nicknamed Ant Man.^[5][6][7][8]

I was honored to correspond with Dr. Wilson from 1994 to 2021!!

XXXLetter dated 3-31-17 on Isaac Newton and Book of Daniel

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Rembrandt, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1635,

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3-31-17

Dr. Edward O. Wilson, Museum of Comparative Zoology Faculty Emeritus
Pellegrino University Professor, Emeritus c/o Museum of Comparative Zoology
Harvard University
26 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Dear Dr. Wilson,

In my last letter (on GROUNDHOG DAY 2-2-17) I wrote you about the fact that I have read your book  THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE four times and I keep reading it over and over and over because I want to get it all figured out before I move on just like Bill Murray has to do in the movie GROUNDHOG DAY. Now  I have moved on and I have just finished reading your book LETTERS TO A YOUNG SCIENTIST and I must say that I really enjoyed it. I have  also enjoyed THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH and THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE too. My favorite is still THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE although I didn’t think you do anything better than  that in my eyes since I have always considered the BOOK OF ECCLESIASTES my favorite book in the Bible.

Now to comment on something you wrote in LETTERS TO A YOUNG SCIENTIST:

Once you have settled upon a subject you can love, your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study it enough to become a world-class expert. This goal is not as difficult as it may seem. Even for a graduate student it is not overly ambiguous. There are thousands of subjects in science sprinkled through Chemistry and Biology and the social sciences where it is possible in a short time to attain the status of an authority. If the subject is still thinly populated, you can with diligence and hard work even become the world authority at a young age. Society needs this level of expertise, and it rewards the kind of people willing to acquire it. (Chapter 3)

I got into a very small field about 20 years ago when I took about 2 years and read anything I could get my hands on concerning authenticating quotes that had been attributed to the founding fathers of the United States. It was a very tricky business but the end result was my article “Misquotes, Fake Quotes, and Disputed Quotes of the Founders,” It has become one of my most popular blog posts over the last 5 years.

Also in your book you quoted ISAAC NEWTON who said, “If I see further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Many scientists that Dr. Larry Vardiman  was right when he noted:

Isaac Newton is recognized today by almost all scientists to have been one of the greatest, if not the greatest, scientist who ever lived. His breadth of knowledge, his ability to analyze and synthesize the physical world, his development and use of the calculus, his formulation of the three laws of motion, and the expression of the law of gravitation have been unequaled by any other scientist before or since. Yet, it is not widely known that Newton was also a Christian and a Bible scholar. He studied the Bible diligently and wrote commentaries on portions of scripture, such as his monograph on the book of Daniel. He clearly believed that God is the Creator and sustainer of our universe. Misunderstanding the source of Newton’s creativity, some critics have suggested that Newton would have been more productive if he had not wasted so much time studying and writing about the Bible.

Just like Newton I have spent a lot of my time examining the Book of Daniel, and the thing that amazed me about it is the historical accuracy of the book. Many times it has been alleged that the author of the Book of Daniel was from a later period but how did a later author know these 5 HISTORICAL FACTS? How did he know [1] that Belshazzar was ruling during the last few years of the Babylonian Empire when the name “Belshazzar” was lost to history until 1853 when it was uncovered in the monuments? [2] The author also knew that the Babylonians executed individuals by casting them into fire, and that the Persians threw the condemned to the lions. [3] He knew  the practice in the 6th Century was to mention first the Medes, then the Persians and not the other way around. [4] Plus he knew the laws made by Persian kings could not be revoked and [5] he knew that in the sixth century B.C., Susa was in the province of Elam (Dan. 8:2). Of course, the Book of Daniel (2:37-42) clearly predicted the rise of the 4 world empires in the correct order of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome.

I  have been amazed at the prophecies in the Bible that have been fulfilled in history, and also many of the historical details in the Bible have been confirmed by archaeology too. One of the most amazing is the prediction that the Jews would be brought back and settle in Jerusalem again. Another prophecy in Psalms 22 describes the Messiah dying on a cross  almost 1000 years before the Romans came up with this type of punishment.

On page 35 you take up again your fascination with Darwin:

Whether you did or not, let’s go on to Darwin. As a young man in the 1850s, he made a five-year voyage on a British government vessel, the HMS Beagle, around the coast of Africa. He took that long period to explore and think broadly and deeply about the natural world. He found, for example, a lot of fossils…(page 35). 

I remember watching you and your good friend James D. Watson a few years ago say basically that piratically everything that ever came out of Darwin’s mouth was accurate, but when I study the records there are huge gaps in the fossil records and also I discovered that Darwin himself was filled with doubts and tension the last few years of his life.

I read the online addition of the book Darwin, Francis ed. 1892. Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters [abridged edition]. London: John Murray. There are several points that Charles Darwin makes in this book that were very wise, honest, logical, shocking and some that were not so wise. The Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer once said of Darwin’s writings, “Darwin in his autobiography and in his letters showed that all through his life he never really came to a quietness concerning the possibility that chance really explained the situation of the biological world. You will find there is much material on this [from Darwin] extended over many many years that constantly he was wrestling with this problem.”

Darwin, C. R. to Graham, William 3 July 1881

Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.* But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Francis Schaeffer observed:

Can you feel this man? He is in real agony. You can feel the whole of modern man in this tension with Darwin. My mind can’t accept that ultimate of chance, that the universe is a result of chance. He has said 3 or 4 times now that he can’t accept that it all happened by chance and then he will write someone else and say something different. How does he say this (about the mind of a monkey) and then put forth this grand theory? Wrong theory I feel but great just the same. Grand in the same way as when I look at many of the paintings today and I differ with their message but you must say the mark of the mannishness of man are one those paintings titanic-ally even though the message is wrong and this is the same with Darwin.  But how can he say you can’t think, you come from a monkey’s mind, and you can’t trust a monkey’s mind, and you can’t trust a monkey’s conviction, so how can you trust me? Trust me here, but not there is what Darwin is saying. In other words it is very selective. 

Now we are down to the last year of Darwin’s life.

* The Duke of Argyll (Good Words, April 1885, p. 244) has recorded a few words on this subject, spoken by my father in the last year of his life. “. . . in the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable works on the Fertilisation of Orchids, and upon The Earthworms,and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature—I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, ‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away.’”

Francis Schaeffer summarized :

And this is the great Darwin, and it makes you cry inside. This is the great Darwin and he ends as a man in total tension.

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I would have loved to seen Darwin’s reaction if had the chance to watch you and Jim Watson on that episode of CHARLIE ROSE Show.

I wanted to personally thank you again for taking time to write me back in 2014 and I have taken your advice and read several of your books.

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221, United States

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My Homage to the Late Harvard Biologist EO Wilson (THE SAAD TRUTH_1351)

How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 6 | The Scientific Age

How Did Writer & Biologist EO Wilson Die | The Life and Sad Ending Edwar…

Edward O Wilson has passed away 💔|| his last moment before death so touc…

Remembering the life of renowned biologist and Alabama native E.O. Wilson

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How Should We Then Live (1977) | Full Movie | Francis Schaeffer | Edith …

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FEATURED ARTIST IS WATTEAU

JEAN-ANTOINE WATTEAU (1684-1721)

Watteau is today considered one of the pioneers of the Rococo style. Unfortunately, he died at the height of his powers, as it is evidenced in the great portrait of “Gilles” painted in the year of his death

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Reaganomics generated much better results than Obamanomics. Milton Friedman had a lot to do with the success of Reagan.

Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute:

Dr. Koop with President Ronald Reagan on his appointment as Surgeon General.

“He will long be remembered as one of the great Christian thinkers of our century, with a childlike faith and a profound compassion toward others. It can rarely be said of an individual that his life touched many others and affected them for the better; it will be said of Francis Schaeffer that his life touched millions of souls and brought them to the truth of their creator.” ~ Ronald Reagan

Bernard N. Nathanson (July 31, 1926 – February 21, 2011) was an American medical doctor from New York, co-founder in 1969 of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws — NARAL — later renamed National Abortion Rights Action League. Dr. Bernard Nathanson was also the former director of New York City’s Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, but later became a pro-life activist. He was the narrator for the controversial 1984 anti-abortion film The Silent Scream.

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March 2, 2016

Hugh Hefner
Playboy Mansion  
10236 Charing Cross Road
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1815

Dear Mr. Hefner,

Yesterday was SUPER TUESDAY and I had a special interest in the results of that day since I was seeking re-election to JUSTICE OF THE PEACE (District 2 of Saline County) which is located outside of Little Rock. I was able to win in the Republican Primary but I have to face a Democrat this fall in what is the most Democratic friendly district in our county. Over the last few years Saline has grown to be the 3rd largest county in Arkansas. I am glad to say that Saline County is one of only 2 counties in the whole state that do not have a countywide sales tax.

HUGH I know that you have been involved in politics for a long time so I thought this subject would interest you today. I have 3 political heroes I wanted to mention. Milton Friedman was my hero in the area of economics and his  film series FREE TO CHOOSE is on You Tube and Ronald Reagan appeared in a promo for it.  Friedman pointed out that liberalism will kill the economy but cutting taxes and the size of government will grow the economy. Dan Mitchell noted in his article, “Texas vs. California,” February 11, 2013:

I’ve been pointing out the differences between California stagnation and Texas prosperity for quite some time. And since California voters approved a new 13.3 percent top tax rate last November, I expect the gap to become even wider. Simply stated, California is the France of America and Texas is the Cayman Islands of America. So it’s understandable that the Governor of Texas is telling employers in California that his state has a better climate for job creation.

Texas is clearly doing better on jobs, and it’s easy to avoid higher taxes when you obey Mitchell’s Golden Rule and restrain the burden of government spending.

Indeed, in the last five years Texas has gained 400,000 new jobs while California has lost 640,000. The Lone Star State’s rate of job growth was 33 percent higher than California’s last year, even as the Golden State finally pulled out of the recession. …Texas’s legislature has just trimmed its $188 billion two-year budget by 8 percent, and the state may have more revenue than it can legally spend because it is barred from raising outlays more than the rate of economic growth.

Here’s a very good Steve Breen cartoon about Perry’s fishing trip to the west coast.

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Ronald Reagan is my second political hero for 2 reasons. First, Reagan cut taxes in a big way during his time as president. Secondly, he appointed C. Everett Koop at Surgeon General and appointed many PRO-LIFE JUDGES.  This leads me to my third political hero who was C. Everett Koop’s best friend Francis Schaeffer.

A Christian Manifesto
by Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer

This address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title.

Dr. C. Everett Koop, in our seminars for Whatever Happened to the Human Race, often said that (speaking for himself), “When I graduated from medical school, the idea was ‘how can I save this life?’ But for a great number of the medical students now, it’s not, ‘How can I save this life?’, but ‘Should I save this life?'”

Believe me, it’s everywhere. It isn’t just abortion. It’s infanticide. It’s allowing the babies to starve to death after they are born. If they do not come up to some doctor’s concept of a quality of life worth living. I’ll just say in passing — and never forget it – it takes about 15 days, often, for these babies to starve to death. And I’d say something else that we haven’t stressed enough. In abortion itself, there is no abortion method that is not painful to the child — just as painful that month before birth as the baby you see a month after birth in one of these cribs down here that I passed — just as painful…

The January 11 Newsweek has an article about the baby in the womb. The first 5 or 6 pages are marvelous. If you haven’t seen it, you should see if you can get that issue. It’s January 11 and about the first 5 or 6 pages show conclusively what every biologist has known all along, and that is that human life begins at conception. There is no other time for human life to begin, except at conception. Monkey life begins at conception. Donkey life begins at conception. And human life begins at conception. Biologically, there is no discussion — never should have been — from a scientific viewpoint. I am not speaking of religion now. And this 5 or 6 pages very carefully goes into the fact that human life begins at conception. But you flip the page and there is this big black headline, “But is it a person?” And I’ll read the last sentence, “The problem is not determining when actual human life begins, but when the value of that life begins to out weigh other considerations, such as the health or even the happiness of the mother.”

We are not just talking about the health of the mother (it’s a propaganda line), or even the happiness of the mother. Listen! Spell that out! It means that the mother, FOR HER OWN HENDONISTIC HAPPINESS — selfish happiness — can take human life by her choice, by law. Do you understand what I have said? By law, on the basis of her individual choice of what makes her happy. She can take what has been declared to be, in the first five pages [of the article], without any question, human life. In other words, they acknowledge that human life is there, but it is an open question as to whether it is not right to kill that human life if it makes the mother happy.

And basically that is no different than Stalin, Mao, or Hitler, killing who they killed for what they conceived to be the good of society. There is absolutely no line between the two statements — no absolute line, whatsoever. One follows along: Once that it is acknowledged that it is human life that is involved (and as I said, this issue of Newsweek shows conclusively that it is) the acceptance of death of human life in babies born or unborn, opens the door to the arbitrary taking of any human life. From then on, it’s purely arbitrary.

I got a question for you HUGH? I understand you support financially NARAL. Did you know that the founder of NARAL left the abortion business because as technology advanced he discovered that the unborn baby experienced pain?  Here is a little more about Dr. Bernard Nathanson:

Bernard Nathanson: A Life Transformed by Truth

by  Robert P. George

In 1985, Nathanson employed the new fetal imaging technology to produce a documentary film, “The Silent Scream,” which energized the pro-life movement and threw the pro-choice side onto the defensive by showing in graphic detail the killing of a twelve-week-old fetus in a suction abortion. Nathanson used the footage to describe the facts of fetal development and to make the case for the humanity and dignity of the child in the womb. At one point, viewers see the child draw back from the surgical instrument and open his mouth: “This,” Nathanson says in the narration, “is the silent scream of a child threatened imminently with extinction.”

Publicity for “The Silent Scream” was provided by no less a figure than President Ronald Reagan, who showed the film in the White House and touted it in speeches. Like Nathanson, Reagan, who had signed one of the first abortion-legalization bills when he was Governor of California, was a zealous convert to the pro-life cause. During his term as president, Reagan wrote and published a powerful pro-life book entitled Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation—a book that Nathanson praised for telling the truth about the life of the child in the womb and the injustice of abortion.

I wanted to quote directly from you HUGH. Hugh Hefner: GOP ‘war against sex’, By Patrick Gavin, 04/23/12 12:23 PM EDT:

Hefner concludes that, “If these zealots have their way, our hard-won sexual liberation — women’s rights, reproductive rights and rights to privacy — lie in peril. We won’t let that happen.

My last question to you today is WHAT ABOUT UNBORN WOMAN’S RIGHTS? Don’t little baby girls who are just months away from being born have the right to life? This letter has been about politics but the spiritual answers your heart is seeking can be  found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.  Without the Bible then we are left with Schaeffer’s final conclusion,“If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.”

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221

PS: I have written you every week since October of 2015, and again today in this 22nd letter I challenged you on one aspect of your life and this letter centered in on your support of NARAL.  Why am I involved in politics today? The answer is because God wants us to submit to the standards given in the Bible. Francis Schaeffer noted, “They founded the country on the base that there is a God who is the Creator (now I come to the next central phrase) who gave the inalienable rights. We must understand something very thoroughly. If society — if the state gives the rights, it can take them away — they’re not inalienable. If the states give the rights, they can change them and manipulate them. But this was not the view of the founding fathers of this country. They believed, although not all of them were individual Christians, that there was a Creator and that this Creator gave the inalienable rights — this upon which our country was founded and which has given us the freedoms which we still have — even the freedoms which are being used now to destroy the freedoms.”

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Featured artist is Jan van Goyen Goyen, Jan van – by H.R. Rookmaaker

A landscape by Jan van Goyenby H.R. Rookmaaker Jan van Goyen is one of the most brilliant landscape painters of all time. He was productive between 1620 and 1656, the year of his death. His art improved in a direct line, and the works he made after 1640 are virtually all masterpieces. We shall discuss one of his paintings from 1646, Approaching storm.  

Jan van Goyen: Approaching Storm, 1646   Jan van Goyen is almost unrivalled as a master of representing space. He was in complete command of the devices that had been developed for this since the beginning of the modern period, and he applied them brilliantly. In the first place there is his perspective – figures appear smaller the further away they are from us – but possibly even more important is his atmospheric perspective – the tone and colour of an object that is further from us is lighter and softer than that of a similar object viewed at closer range (compare the sails of the boats in this painting). He also uses repoussoir – setting a lighter object against a dark background or a darker object against a light background so that it thereby appears to be located to the fore while the background is pushed back (repousser). And, finally, he uses lighter and darker strokes in the water so that a clear spatial arrangement is achieved and things are put in their right place, as it were. In this painting we see the repoussoir in the sails as they stand out against the sky but also in the dark boat set against the lighter strip of water, which is thereby clearly pushed back. Through that repoussoir the artist can make things clear and define them distinctly in their interconnectedness. Jan van Goyen knows how to use this device in such a way that we hardly notice it, it seems so natural. Only upon looking more closely do we discover the mastery and realize that it is not a simple matter of course.   It is remarkable how the painter is able to use the darkly clouded sky to draw our eye towards the back, where the lightest part of the painting is at the most distant horizon. In the clouds too one can point out repoussoir (one against the other). Yet it is still more remarkable when we come to realize just what van Goyen accomplishes with the clouds, how he divides them as dark tones across the flat surface to thereby reinforce the entire construction of his composition.   With that we have arrived at the real problem, which led us to select this painting for discussion which at first glance may appear to be just another representation of a scene one could have witnessed any time, and possibly still can, somewhere in the Netherlands along one of the great rivers or the former Zuiderzee or Haarlemmermeer. For Jan van Goyen knew, perhaps better than anyone else, that a painting is in the first place a flat surface on which we work with our painting materials to call up our picture. In spite of the fact that he knew infallibly how to use the depth-depicting devices we have described, the syntax of his times, one can never accuse him, as some modern artists have reproached the old masters for doing, of tricking us by suggesting a ‘hole in the wall’, namely a real depth. On the contrary, Jan van Goyen knew not only how to maintain the surface but also how to use it in a wonderful way to serve his purposes.   Van Goyen’s compositions are very tightly constructed and guided by an almost symphonic feel for form. Left . . . yes, one ‘reads’ a painting from left to right. This probably is because of the direction in which we write (and it would therefore be the reverse for, e.g. Chinese people). Naturally we can look at a painting from right to left or in any other way, but only after we have read it in the right direction first. In a similar way we have to read a sonnet first from top to bottom, and only after we have done that can we go back and re-read one line or another, and figure out how the way the sonnet ends is prepared and called up in earlier lines. The correct order of reading is presupposed in the creative process. But to return to our earlier discussion: at the left of the landscape we see the ‘introduction’ by means of a little boat, which draws us into the space and positions us on the water, as it were. Then we come to the first theme, which we could call ‘distance with storm cloud’. Next we have the transitional theme in the pair of slightly larger sailboats, precisely in the middle of the canvas. Following that we come to the second main theme: ships tied up at a mooring, at a harbour, suggested by a few houses entirely to the right, which at the same time form the light coda. The main element in the second theme is the ship with the large dark sail, which finds its direct ‘response’ in the somewhat smaller and lighter sail just behind it. That second theme is more loaded, busier and manifests more movement, and it fixes our eye on a less remote distance parallel to the surface of the painting.   And now, if we look at the clouds again, we see that, like a kind of countermelody, a bass line, they follow the themes, and so also the main organizing principle of the painting. Thus the ‘reading direction’ from left to right is anything but arbitrary. We cannot turn this painting around – just try holding the page up to the light on which it is reproduced here and look at it from the back. It immediately becomes difficult to see the two themes. It is still possible to do so in this case, but much more difficult in many others. That it is still possible here, at least to a degree, is due to the serenity; it is not possible where ships are in motion, with their sails fixing the direction of observation. Typically, the second theme has much more complex, and plural, constructive elements. Moving from left to right, one discovers that matters also often become more complex in a painting. It can be compared in this respect with a novel that begins with a single character but in which gradually an ever larger number of people come to play a part.   In this painting we therefore do not have some kind of copy of reality, not a photograph of what we would have seen had we been there. Rather, we enter another world, the world of the painting. And Jan van Goyen has clearly set the world of painting off from our own world with a ‘threshold’, the dark strip in the foreground.   Thus this world does not offer us exactly what we would have seen in reality with our own eyes, had we been there. Rather, what we have here is Jan van Goyen’s view of what was there, his own poetic view of a slice of reality, his own ‘song’ about the beauty at the calm mouth of a river. The things he notices and shows us are not necessarily self-evident, we must learn to observe them. And if Dutch people today cherish such beauties – and often, happily, they do – then they have to thank for that the lessons in observation that they learned from this artist (and those who followed after him), even if they are not conscious of it and, yes, may indeed never have been personally involved with such art. Once eyes have been opened to something so real and pure, so true, in which there is so much humanity and in which justice is done to all the elements, it is not easily forgotten. Fathers pass it on to their sons.   It is remarkable that this unifying effect, the distinctive quality of this ‘symphonic poem in paint’, arises in the composition. It would carry us too far afield to introduce a great deal of comparative material here. But it is precisely the use of two themes and the other elements we discussed that call forth this effect. By simply drawing a certain view of a wide river we cannot achieve such artistic content and such a suggestive result. It is therefore no surprise, as becomes evident when we examine Jan van Goyen’s works carefully, that the artist seldom stuck closely to a precisely identifiable phenomenon. His art is not topographical, it does not portray exact locations, although he occasionally incorporates a ‘citation’ or visual reference to an existing tower, for example the one in Dordt. What he shows us, rather, is the structure of the landscape, in this case of a river-mouth or a lake, where the beauty forms an integrating part of the whole.   Could this view of reality not have had something to do with the Reformation? Could it be a fruit of our having opened ourselves up once again to reality as we learn to know it in the Bible? The Reformation liberated art from the chains of the domination of church and devotion, and it did so without secularization, without seeing the world as something detached from God. Such a hymn to the unity of creation, in its beauty, in its multiformity, in its richness and intimate connection with humanity – without idealistic exaltation, without making the world a sort of humanistic paradise where one is always on vacation with no difficulty or care – is something we can look at with jealousy today. No, this is no vacation paradise, no world of labourless rest and ‘ideal beauty’; it is much more sober. It is as sober as the music of Heinrich Schütz can be, without frills, direct, and always with complete unity between means and ends.   In a painting like the one we have been discussing there is a complete unity between the iconic elements and the aesthetic structure, such that the content of the work cannot be considered apart from the manner of artistic realization: the theme is not an excuse to paint something, and the composition is not just coincidental, an embellishment of something that could have been said just as well in a few words.   We said that we might be looking here at one of the fruits of the Reformation. The painting reflects the spiritual climate in Holland during the first half of the seventeenth century. And it does so despite the fact that van Goyen was a Roman Catholic. His view is conditioned by the world in which he lived, and the word ‘Counter-Reformation’ has no meaning in connection with this river scene. Nor has it any meaning in connection with the work of van Goyen’s son-in-law Jan Steen. Compare Steen’s art with the art of Rubens and the difference will be even more clear.   Published in Dutch in Kunst en Amusement, Kok – Kampen, 1962. Published in English in M. Hengelaar-Rookmaaker (ed.): H.R. Rookmaaker: The Complete Works 3, Piquant – Carlisle, 2003. Also obtainable as a CD-Rom. piquanteditions.com/product_info.php and piquanteditions.com/product_info.php

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Best of Carl Sagan on Religion

How Carl Sagan Strengthened My Faith

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.

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. 

Sagan in 1980

Contact: A Eulogy to Carl Sagan

Home  Contact: A Eulogy to Carl Sagan

 Dr. Ray Bohlin, May 27, 1998

The Paradox of the Movie Contact

At the very beginning of the movie Contact, you should have noticed in the lower right corner of the screen a little dedication which read, “For Carl.” This, of course, is Carl Sagan (1934-1996), the Cornell astronomer and science advocate to the public, whose 1985 novel was the basis for the movie.(1) Sagan passed away in December 1996, before the movie was released, after he struggled for several years with a rare blood disorder.

The movie serves as a fitting eulogy for the most visible member of the scientific community within popular culture. The phrase “billions and billions”, attributed to Sagan, has become a part of the public’s lexicon of scientific phrases, even though Sagan never actually used the phrase in print or in any of his public broadcasts or appearances. Sagan used it self-effacingly as the title for his final and posthumously published book.

Many of us know of Carl Sagan, but we know very little about him. As a planetary astronomer, Sagan made significant contributions to the fields of chemical evolution, Martian topography, and Venusian meteorology. He also served as an official adviser to NASA on the Mariner, Voyager, and Vikingunmanned space missions. Carl Sagan led the charge both to the public and in the Congressional halls of government funding for space research and particularly SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

Sagan was awarded the Peabody Award and an Emmy for his stunningly influential public television series, Cosmos. The accompanying book by the same title is the best-selling science book ever published in the English language.(2) He earned the Pulitzer Prize for his book Dragons of Eden on the evolution of human intelligence, and numerous other awards and honorary degrees. He is the most read scientific author in the world, and upon awarding him their highest honor, the National Science Foundation heralded his gifts to mankind as “infinite.”

The main character of Contact, Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, portrays Sagan’s life in miniature. While not sharing Sagan’s awards and rapport with the public, Ellie Arroway is a brilliant, driven, self-reliant young astronomer obsessed with SETI. Dr. Arroway endures scorn and ridicule from the public and science for her dedication to discovering signs of extraterrestrial life, just as Sagan has. Arroway, like Sagan, confronted with the demons of superstition, fundamentalism, and scientific jealousy, fought back with reason, sarcastic wit, and sheer perseverance.

Arroway parrots Sagan’s views on the need for a rational, non- religious view of reality to solve our problems, his hope for an extraterrestrial savior to save us from our technological adolescence, and the wonder and beauty of the cosmos pointing to our species as a curious, brave, precious accident of the universe. What is paradoxical about Contact is not the conflict between faith and reason, but who is forced to rely on faith and experience instead of evidence. Following Ellie’s trip through the galaxy and her conversation with an alien, she returns with no documentation. What was an 18-hour experience for Ellie appeared to be an uneventful few seconds to everyone else. She must ask a Congressional panel to accept her account of events on faith with no evidence. If you were paying close enough attention as the film wound down, however, you could discover that this paradox is only apparent. Ellie’s data instruments recorded a full 18 hours–not a few seconds–of static. There was evidence of her experience, but it was withheld from Ellie by apprehensive government officials. The scientific validation once again highlights Sagan’s conviction that science is mankind’s only reliable tool in the discovery of truth, and that faith only covers up our fears and stifles our search for answers.

Contact is a must-see film for those who wish to comprehend and knowingly confront our culture’s hostility towards faith that relies on revelation.

The Paradox of Sagan’s Views of Religion

One of the most perplexing aspects of the movie Contact is the seemingly confusing portrayal of religion. The confusion, I believe, is only superficial. If you reflect on how the different traditional religion is discarded as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst.

Sagan’s disdain for traditional religion is clear from the beginning. Events from Ellie’s childhood flashback through the early part of the movie and lay the groundwork for her rational rejection of traditional Christianity. In the novel, Ellie’s father is portrayed as a skeptic of revealed religion; he views the Bible as “half barbarian history and half fairy tales.”(3) In the movie, Ellie admits to Palmer Joss that her father was asked to keep her home from Sunday School because she asked too many questions that could not be answered, such as “Where did Cain get his wife?” Although this and other objections offered in the novel are easily answered, they are left unchallenged as apparently sturdy nails in the Bible’s coffin.

When Ellie’s father dies in the movie, the clergyman offers harsh and uncaring words about some things being hard to understand, that we aren’t meant to know, and that we just have to accept it as God’s will. This deliberately presents the God of the Bible as unknowable, cruelly inscrutable, and demanding of our acceptance. Ellie’s response to the minister’s attempt to be consoling is to berate herself on where she should have left extra medicine where it could have been reached in an emergency. Self-reliance and analytical thinking easily out-compete the minister’s feeble lecture. In a conversation with Palmer Joss, Ellie confidently asserts that we created God so we wouldn’t feel so small and alone. He’s just an emotional crutch.

Two other characters in the film outline Sagan’s view of the modern evangelical right. The long-haired preaching zealot is portrayed as a dangerous man, out of control and out of touch with reality. He later borrows a trick from Muslim fundamentalists by sacrificing himself in an attempt to derail the multinational project to build the travel machine. Richard Rank, the presidential advisor, represents that portion of the religious right that hungers and thirsts not for righteousness, but for political power. At a cabinet meeting, Rank offers sanctimonious drivel about science intruding into areas of faith and the message being morally ambiguous. If his remarks made you cringe with anger, they were supposed to.

And then there is Palmer Joss, the enigmatic, amoral, has-been priest. Palmer Joss’s New Age religion sees truth as relative and the real issue as oppression. Joss has no quibble with the conclusions of science, just its attempts to overstep its boundaries and rule our lives. His knowledge of God is limited to an experience on which he does not elaborate and that intellect cannot touch. Perhaps the attraction between Joss and Arroway is the challenge they represent to each other. Joss’s religion is at least scientifically informed and therefore intriguing to Ellie, and she is scorned by the same scientific establishment that Joss distrusts. A match made in Hollywood.

Sagan left no room for any faith that does not embrace the conclusions of a scientific materialism. This needs to be kept in mind when Joss challenges her about her belief in God during the hearings. When the other multinational members speak up in defense of Joss’s question, it is clear they are only referring to some politically correct supreme being, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Sagan’s Extraterrestrial Hope

Even in a scientifically sophisticated film such as Carl Sagan’s Contact, we run into our culture’s preoccupation with life beyond our planet. Though Carl Sagan spent some of his time combating the UFO crazies, he nevertheless held out a hope that there are civilizations out there waiting to discover us, or us them. Where does this conviction come from? For a scientific materialist and humanist like Carl Sagan, this confidence comes from two sources. First is the notion that if life evolved here, it is presumptuous of us to think that we are alone. Certainly life has evolved elsewhere! Second is Sagan’s and others’ fear that our species sits on the brink of self-destruction and we will need some outside help to overcome our predicament.

In a conversation with Palmer Joss, Ellie Arroway gives a calculation of sorts to explain her confidence in life having evolved elsewhere. She is looking up into the plethora of stars in the nighttime sky and says, “If just one in a million of those stars has planets, and if only one in a million of those has life, and if just one in a million of those has intelligent life, then there are millions of civilizations out there.” It is a little surprising that a film of such high caliber would get this one wrong. If you take each of those probabilities and multiply them together, that’s one in a million million million, or a billion billion, or in scientific notation, 10 to the 18th power. Current estimates suggest that the stars number approximately 10 to the 22nd power. That would technically leave only 10,000 civilizations in the universe, not millions. That would mean that we are alone even in our own galaxy.

In another essay (Are We Alone in the Universe?) I summarized the calculations of Christian astronomer Hugh Ross. Ross estimated the probabilities of all the necessary conditions for life occurring by natural processes. Ross concluded that if all we have to depend on are physical and chemical processes, then we are alone in the universe. Life could have evolved nowhere else. Even the biochemical complexities of living cells are revealing that life requires intelligence (See my review of Darwin’s Black Box.). Sagan’s confidence that life is super-abundant in the universe is grossly out of proportion.

The second reason for Sagan’s hope of other civilizations was expressed well by Ellie Arroway. An international panel, assigned the task of choosing the one individual who would enter the machine and perhaps visit this alien civilization, queried each candidate what one question they would ask. Ellie said she would want to know how they survived their technological adolescence without destroying themselves. Sagan has been a tireless supporter of nuclear disarmament. He truly feared that we would destroy ourselves before we reached our full potential. In the opening scene of his Cosmos television series, he remarked that our species was “young and curious and brave; it showed much promise.”(4) Couple this fear with the conviction that there is no God, and the only source of hope for a salvation from ourselves is another civilization more advanced than us, giving us some pointers for survival.

This confidence that an alien culture that could contact us would be more advanced than us is not unreasonable. If they have the technology to purposefully contact us, and this is something we cannot do, then their technology must be beyond ours. What is never explained, however, even though it is raised in the movie, is why we would expect this alien culture to be benevolent. It is just as likely, if not more so, that an alien civilization would be more of the variety depicted in the movie Independence Day. This hope reflects more on Carl Sagan’s optimistic cosmic humanism that any scientific reality.

Who Will Save Us, God or Aliens?

The movie Contact tells us of a more realistic scenario for a first encounter with an alien civilization, than, say, Men in Black. A radio signal is received from space that is broadcast at a frequency that is equal to the value of hydrogen times pi and gets our attention by counting the prime numbers from 1 to 101 in sequence. The message is authenticated as coming from the star Vega, 26 light years away. The message is eventually decoded and found to contain the plans for constructing a machine for one person to apparently travel out into the galaxy. Ellie Arroway, a young astronomer who discovers the message, eventually boards the machine and travels out into space for a close encounter of a supposedly more realistic kind.

A very tantalizing line is repeated three times in the course of the film. When Ellie Arroway, as a child, asks her father if there are any life forms out in the universe, he says that if there isn’t, it would be an awful waste of space. Palmer Joss repeats the line to an adult Ellie as they engage in a conversation under a starry sky in Puerto Rico. It is a poignant scene as Ellie clearly is stunned as she recalls her father saying the same thing. Ellie, herself, repeats the phrase at the end of the film as she is addressing a group of school children and is asked if there is life out there in space.

Sagan has drawn a bead on the argument for the existence of God from design, or the teleological argument. Waste implies misdirected design. If the universe was created for us and we are alone, why does it have to be so big? Surely we could have survived quite well in a much smaller and economical universe. But if you think about it, Scripture proclaims that the heavens declare the glory of God, not man (Ps. 19:1). Indeed, if the universe was created only for man’s benefit, then it is a waste of space. We don’t deserve it. But if the main purpose of the universe is to glorify the splendid, eternal, all-powerful God, it could never be big enough.

Another interesting theme is the form that the alien takes. After Ellie travels through the galaxy, she arrives at a large docking space station. She is somehow transported to a beach, resembling a picture of Pensacola, Florida she drew as a child. Eventually, a figure approaches. It is her father. The alien appears to her in the form of her father. He tells her that they thought this would make it easier for her.

It’s fascinating that Sagan often complains that if God exists, why doesn’t he make himself plain? Why not a cross in the sky or a mathematical formula in the Bible? Why is everything so obscure? One answer from Philip Yancey’s book, Disappointment with God, is that God did reveal himself plainly to Israel during the Exodus and they still rebelled, and Jesus performed incredible miracles and still most rejected him. The Father does not want to coerce our love. So isn’t it interesting that in Sagan’s own story, when a superior intelligence wants to make contact with us, they put us in familiar surroundings, take on our form, and speak our language?! If they appeared to us in their true form, we would be repulsed. Isn’t that precisely what the Father did for us in sending Jesus to live among us? It appears that Carl Sagan has unwittingly answered his own objection.

The Worldview of Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan began his highly acclaimed public television series Cosmos with a grand overview of the universe and our place within it. With a crashing surf in the background, Sagan declares,

“The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”(5)

Sagan eloquently expresses his conviction that matter and energy are all that exist. He goes on to describe his awe and wonder of the universe. He describes a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, as the greatest of mysteries is approached. With excitement, Sagan tells us our tiny planetary home the Earth is lost somewhere between immensity and eternity, thus poignantly emphasizing our simultaneous value and insignificance.

In the movie Contact, Dr. Ellie Arroway expresses this awe and wonder at several points in the film. The most dramatic episode occurs during her galactic space flight when she is confronted with the wonders to be seen near the center of the galaxy. She is at a loss for words in the face of such beauty and humbly suggests that a poet may have been a better choice to send on the trip.

While this is all very moving, the great emotion seems strangely misplaced and inappropriate. If the cosmos is indeed all there is or ever was or ever will be, why get excited? If we are lost between immensity and eternity, shouldn’t our reaction be one of existential terror, not awe? Sagan borrows his excitement from a Christian worldview where the heavens declare the glory of God, which should produce a tingle in the spine and a catch in the voice.

In the next to final scene in Contact, Ellie attempts to defend herself by finally admitting that she has no evidence of her trip through the galaxy. But she has been given something wonderful, a vision of the universe that tells us how tiny, insignificant, rare and precious we are. In Cosmos, Sagan reflects that while we are a species that is young and curious and brave, our place in the universe is to be compared to “a mote of dust that floats in the morning sky.”(6)

How can we be tiny and insignificant and rare and precious at the same time? Clearly Sagan cannot live consistently within his own worldview. His view of the universe dictates that all is meaningless chance and we are nothing special, yet he irrationally rejects the despair that logically follows in favor of being curious, brave, rare, and precious.

As Sagan neared death, many around the world were praying for him. Though clearly an enemy of the faith, the closing sentences of the novel Contact indicated a belief, a hope, in an intelligence that antedates the universe. Might he see the whole truth before he passes into eternity? In his final book Billions and Billions, his wife Ann Druyan writes, “Contrary to the fantasies of fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion…. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching.”(7) In reflecting on the many cards and letters she received upon his death from people telling of the impact Sagan had on their lives, she writes, “These thoughts comfort me and lift me out of my heartache. They allow me to feel, without resorting to the supernatural, that Carl lives.”(8) Sadly, Carl does live, but not as she believes. Remember that enemies of the faith are lost and in need of a Savior. But even though they may be prayed for and witnessed to by colleagues up to the end, many, including Carl Sagan, will still, defiantly, die in their sins. It is a bitter, needless grief.

Notes

1. Carl Sagan, Contact (NY: Pocket Books [Simon and Schuster], 1986).

2. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), p. 459.

3. Sagan, Contact, p. 20.

4. Carl Sagan, Cosmos Video, “Episode 1: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean” (Turner Home Entertainment, 1989).

5. Ibid.

6. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 4.

7. Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 225.

8. Ibid., p. 228.

© 1998 Probe Ministries

GREAT OBSERVATION ABOUT SAGAN AND UFO’s!!!

Though Carl Sagan spent some of his time combating the UFO crazies, he nevertheless held out a hope that there are civilizations out there waiting to discover us, or us them. Where does this conviction come from? For a scientific materialist and humanist like Carl Sagan, this confidence comes from two sources. First is the notion that if life evolved here, it is presumptuous of us to think that we are alone. Certainly life has evolved elsewhere! Second is Sagan’s and others’ fear that our species sits on the brink of self-destruction and we will need some outside help to overcome our predicament.

Charles Darwin also tried to put a positive spin on his evolutionary views.  Darwin wrote, “Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is…” 

Francis Schaeffer commented:

Now you have now the birth of Julian Huxley’s evolutionary optimistic humanism already stated by Darwin. Darwin now has a theory that man is going to be better. If you had lived at 1860 or 1890 and you said to Darwin, “By 1970 will man be better?” He certainly would have the hope that man would be better as Julian Huxley does today. Of course, I wonder what he would say if he lived in our day and saw what has been made of his own views in the direction of (the mass murder) Richard Speck (and deterministic thinking of today’s philosophers). I wonder what he would say. So you have the factor, already the dilemma in Darwin that I pointed out in Julian Huxley and that is evolutionary optimistic humanism rests always on tomorrow. You never have an argument from the present or the past for evolutionary optimistic humanism.

You can have evolutionary nihilism on the basis of the present and the past. Every time you have someone bringing in evolutionary optimistic humanism it is always based on what is going to be produced tomorrow. When is it coming? The years pass and is it coming? Arthur Koestler doesn’t think it is coming. He sees lots of problems here and puts forth for another solution.

Darwin wrote, “…it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful…”

Francis Schaeffer commented:

Here you feel Marcel Proust and the dust of death is on everything today because the dust of death is on everything tomorrow. Here you have the dilemma of Nevil Shute’s ON THE BEACH. If it is true that all we have left is biological continuity and biological complexity, which is all we have left in Darwinism here, or in many of the modern philosophies, then you can’t stand Shute’s ON THE BEACH. Maybe tomorrow at noon human life may be wiped out. Darwin already feels the tension, because if human life is going to be wiped out tomorrow, what is it worth today? Darwin can’t stand the thought of death of all men. Charlie Chaplin when he heard there was no life on Mars said, “I’m lonely.”

You think of the Swedish Opera (ANIARA) that is pictured inside a spaceship. There was a group of men and women going into outer space and they had come to another planet and the singing inside the spaceship was normal opera music. Suddenly there was a big explosion and the world had blown up and these were the last people left, the only conscious people left, and the last scene is the spaceship is off course and it will never land, but will just sail out into outer space. They say when it was shown in Stockholm the first time, the tough Swedes with all their modern  mannishness, came out (after the opera was over) with hardly a word said, just complete silence.

Darwin already with his own position says he CAN’T STAND IT!! You can say, “Why can’t you stand it?” We would say to Darwin, “You were not made for this kind of thing. Man was made in the image of God. Your CAN’T- STAND- IT- NESS is screaming at you that your position is wrong. Why can’t you listen to yourself?”

You find all he is left here is biological continuity, and thus his feeling as well as his reason now is against his own theory, yet he holds it against the conclusions of his reason. Reason doesn’t make it hard to be a Christian. Darwin shows us the other way. He is holding his position against his reason.

Aniara (opera)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Premiere production at the Royal Opera, Stockholm 1959. Set by Sven Erixson.

Kjerstin Dellert and Olle Sivall in the premiere production.

Aniara is an opera in two acts by Karl-Birger Blomdahl, with a libretto by Erik Lindegren based on the poem Aniara by Harry Martinson, that was premiered in 1959.^[1] Subtitle of poem and opera is the ambiguous phrase En revy om människan i tid och rum: “A revue/review about Man in Time and Space”.^[2]

The score of Aniara is varied and makes full use of a range of musical idioms, including jazz, serial writing and an electronic tape. The narrative is sung primarily by Mimaroben, a bass-baritone, who operates the electronic tape, Mima, the computer, and by the chorus.^[1] In essence the opera (and poem) deal with the relationship between the individual and the group through time.

Many representatives of the international press were in Stockholm for the premiere in 1959 at a time when the space age was beginning.^[2] Blomdahl said in interview that the opera (in common with his next opera Herr von Hancken) was founded on “modern man’s complexity and his basically impossible situation”; Aniara dealt with “the downfall of the group”.^[3] A production was mounted in Gothenburg in 1994.^[4]

Contents

 [hide] 

• 1 Roles
• 2 Synopsis
• 3 Recordings
• 4 References

Roles[edit]

Synopsis[edit]

Controlled by the computer Mima, the space ship Aniara leaves the poisoned Earth, heading for Mars. Through Mimaroben, who is the operator of Mima, the emigrants learn of the evil of mankind.

During the celebration of midsummer, the vessel is thrown off course, causing panic, and forcing a journey to the constellationLyra which commander Chefone says will last for the rest of the lives of the crew and passengers. When the Earth is destroyed, Mima cannot continue, and Sandon makes jokes about the safety on board, but when the mute describes in signs the end of the world he becomes silent. Chefone blames Mimaroben, who, with the pilot Isagel, is taken away.

The commander deals as best he can with the increased despair and moral deterioration among those aboard, depicted in a scene in a hall of mirrors, where Daisy Dodd, her lesbian partner, and the passengers dance, and the blind poetess speaks of her cult of Light, which has replaced Mima. The body of the dead chief technician is shot into outer space in the direction of the star Rigel. The 20th anniversary of the voyage is celebrated, and the blind poetess ecstatically sees the city of heaven, but is taken away.

The final scene shows the last night onboard where Isagel dances and the blind poetess sings of the joy of death. A light beam sweeps over the dead passengers and Mimaroben prepares for the end. Finally darkness descends over the occupants of the space ship, and the audience in the theatre.

Recordings[edit]

The first performance was broadcast by Swedish Radio; a subsequent recording was conducted by Stig Westerberg, and included Viveka Anderberg, Björn Haugan, Stefan Parkman, Mikael Samuelson, Thomas Sunnegårdh and Jerker Arvidssonin among the cast.

Carl Sagan on the Existence of God

RC Sproul confronts Carl Sagan.

Sagan in Rahway High School‘s 1951 yearbook

Sagan discusses FAITH when there is no evodence

Carl Sagan on Religion

—

The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt)

Biblical Archaeology is Silencing the critics! Significantly, even liberal theologians, secular academics, and critics generally cannot deny that archaeology has confirmed thebiblical record at many points. Rationalistic detractors of the Bible can attack it all day long, but they cannot dispute archaeological facts.

—

Carl Sagan

Richard Dawkins on Carl Sagan, Einstein and Religion | A How To Academy …

—

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. 

How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 6 | The Scientific Age

–

FEATURED ARTIST IS JENNY SAVILLE 

JENNY SAVILLE (b.1970) 

If Tracey Emin is the enfant terrible of the Young British Artists, Jenny Saville is their wunderkind, the artist whose works created in her early twenties changed forever the concept of the female nude in Western Art.

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