carl sagan - the varieties of scientific experience--a personal view of the search for god

[...]... Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe Wright was, among other things, an architect and a draftsman This picture conveys a remarkable sense, for the first time, of looking at the solar system and beyond, to scale What you can see here is the Sun, and to scale to the size of the Sun is the distance to the orbit of Mercury Then the planets Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn the other planets... definition of religion as a “feeling of being at home in the Universe,” quoting it at the conclusion of Pale Blue Dot, his vision of the human future in space The title of the book you hold in your hands is a tip of the hat to the illustrious tradition of the Gifford Lectures My variation on James’s title is intended to convey that science opens the way to levels of consciousness that are otherwise inaccessible... part of the visible creation takes up so small a portion of the known universe that in a very finite view of the immensity of space I judged the seat of the Earth to be of very little consequence.” This perspective provides a kind of calibration of where we are I don’t think it should be too discouraging It is the reality of the universe we live in Many religions have attempted to make statues of their... but had not force to shape it as he would…?” To me personally, the first line, “I found Him in the shining of the stars,” is not entirely apparent It depends on who the Him is But surely there is a message in the heavens that the finiteness not just of life but of whole worlds, in fact of whole galaxies, is a bit antithetical to the conventional theological views in the West, although not in the East... scheme of the universe, having traveled so far into infinity as but to lose sight of the Earth, I think I may justly answer, as Aristotle did when Alexander, looking over a map of the world, inquired of him for the city of Macedon, ’tis said the philosopher told the prince that the place he sought was much too small to be there taken notice of and was not without sufficient reason omitted The system of the. .. But there was the clear sense that our system and the systems of other stars were similar Here at upper left is the first of four modern illustrations attempting to show just the same thing, in which we see the Earth on its orbit and the other inner planets Each little dot is intended to represent a fraction of the plethora of small worlds called asteroids Beyond them is the orbit of Jupiter And the. .. do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the cosmos if there is a great deal of life For example, we’ve talked about stars in the late stages of their evolution We’ve talked about supernova explosions There are much vaster explosions There are explosions at the centers of galaxies from what are called quasars There are other explosions, maybe small quasars In fact, the Milky... the boundaries of interstellar space This is an artist’s representation of the entire Oort Cloud Now the dimension is a hundred thousand astronomical units, and there is an external boundary to the Oort Cloud All of the planets, and the comets that we know, are lost in the glare of light from the Sun And here, for the first time, we have a scale sufficient to see some of the neighboring stars So the. .. implications fig 12 There are a huge number of stars Especially in the center of the galaxy, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, the sky is rippling with suns, altogether a couple of hundred thousand million suns, making up the Milky Way Galaxy As far as we can tell, the average star is in no major way different from the Sun Or, put another way, the Sun is a reasonably typical star in the Milky... Milky Way Galaxy.) That is, there are some foreground stars as in the previous pictures, but most of the objects you see here are galaxies—spiral ones seen edge on, elliptical galaxies, and other forms The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions and perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable . Matter. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Sagan, Carl, 1934–1996. The varieties of scientific experience: a personal view of the search for God / Carl Sagan; . and science to protect the environment. THE VARIETIES of SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE A Personal View of the Search for God CARL SAGAN Edited by ANN DRUYAN Illustrations Editor and Scientific Consultant. implications for the evolution of religion The God hypothesis The religious experience—Crimes against creation The search for who we are—Selected Q&A. ISBN: 1-4 29 5-8 38 2-7 (pbk.)1. Natural theology.