So I found this on Facebook, 'shared' nearly 44,000 times the last I checked.
Since Science is obviously a person, as is indicated by Gervais, I figure she must be weeping right now (because Science has feelings and is insecure and always needs to be one up on Religion - that pesky & incovenient cousin). She's probably distraught over how folks make such unscientific & simplistic arguments to defend her virtue (like arguments of Religion that folks use to defend the virtue of the ladies).
I can't be sure, but if Science were anything like me (and she's got to be, right?) she'd be wondering why these mullahs of Atheism forget this: the gun used to shoot the child in her head for wanting to go to school was created by Science, designed expressly for shooting at living things. In that sense, culpability - in varying degrees - lies with both parties.
Science doesn't like to be told things like this - especially when she's trying so hard to trump Religion using the platform of logic.
And because she knows there are plenty of great ones, she wishes these defenders of hers would get a better argument.
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Carl Sagan on Charlie Rose (at 7:45 he talks about religion):
Not long before he died, Carl Sagan admitted he was a chronic pot smoker. Perhaps science hasn't discovered that if "just a whiff of marijuana in a theater" made him high, as he put it, it's only because he'd been chronically stoned for decades.
ReplyDeleteThat would explain a brain so deranged as to write senseless sentences like "The great Greek works of art are all meaningless." One would expect that from a depressed teenager. Sagan meant it as a Scientific Papal Bull.
Sagan must never be forgotten for his near-criminal libeling of the independent thinker Immanuel Velikovsky, upon which Sagan built his career as a carnival barker for the worship of "S"cience. Sagan's "scientific" rebuttals of Velikovsky in "Boca's Brain" are nearly all invented, and what he didn't invent was mere quasi-religious sophistry, making dogma out of mere theory.
Thanks for the comment Tom. To be honest, I'm completely ignorant about the things you've written (except stories about smoking pot and I'm not entirely sure I can comment on the extent to which it affected the coherence of his science).
DeleteIn my opinion, he was a wonderful science communicator (I especially appreciated what he said in the clip I've posted) but I'm not qualified to respond to what you've just written except to say: Well, that's one more thing for me to learn about.
You'll find the sentence about art being meaningless in "Demon Haunted World."
DeleteI was a student of Velikovsky's works, and was appalled to see how falsely Sagan had written of him. I contacted the closest associate I could, his Cornell roommate Dr. Peter Pesch, who vilified Velikovsky to all visitors to his observatory for his entire career. Peter told me he'd never read Velikovsky at all. "If Carl says it, it's good enough for me." Unquote. It was just as plain that Sagan never read Velikovsky either.
It's simply that "S"cience, that is, the cultists sitting in the moneyed positions at Universities, couldn't tolerate the idea of either God or gods or that ancient peoples' gods made any rational sense whatsoever. This difficult-to-fathom idiocy continues to this day in attempts to reduce all ancient gods to "sun worship, because people were in awe of the sun."
Sagan was not a "great communicator of science," but an articulate mealy-mouth who met with moneyed approval. Is American English your native expertise? Americans joked about his very odd, somewhat obsessed fashions of speaking and pronunciation. He simply wowed a highly ignorant public. That's where the grants come from. He never has been held in high regard by real scientists. I'd know that because I have various scientists as clients and in my family. They found him disgusting.
Velikovsky had postulated in 1945 that ancient stories of wars between the gods -- all around this planet -- were in fact records of collisions from spheres of matter pulled out of Jupiter by the passing of a very large body that has a several-thousand year orbit. Velikovsky's scholarship was "staggering," said a critic.
Einstein wound up agreeing with Velikovsky. A majority body of mediocres, fearing both for their jobs and their anti-theisms, boycotted his work. These frightened mediocres stated in general that there was no reason to read Velikovsky's work to know it's wrong, as, after all, stories of gods were involved.
If you care to get serious, Charles Ginenthal's CARL SAGAN vs IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY details 750 pages of reprehensible conduct from these budding High Priests of Scientism.
Velikovsky's WORLDS IN COLLISION is still available. It's still a fascinating read. And "S"cience has since accepted most of the conclusions he made, yet blackballing him and inventing other "causes."
This is a much greater story than of "Galileo," who in fact was never "persecuted for Science," but called before a committee because he hadn't written the treatise in Latin. Everybody had already known the world was round and all that since ancient times. "S"cience simply wants its genuinely false myths enforced for the money and all other considerations effaced.