Showing posts with label Carl Sagan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carl Sagan. Show all posts

Friday, March 28, 2014

Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot and the Infinite-Personal God

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
What interests me about Sagan’s monologue is that so much of it is undeniably true — and yet there’s one crucial point on which I would have to disagree. Sagan, as many others have done before and after him, looks at the sheer inconceivable size and scope of the universe and comes to the conclusion that it is simply too big, and we are simply too small by comparison, for us to believe that our lives have any higher purpose, or that there is a God who cares about us.

To which I say, wait, what?