Carl Sagan on the Existence of God

my question is given all these demotions what is your personal religion or what do you is there any type of God to you like is there a purpose given that we're just sitting on this speck in the middle of this sea of stars no I don't want a duck any questions and I'm not going to duck this one even though I have high religious personages who are close friends of mine in this room but let me ask you what do you mean when you use the word God well I guess what my question it's like is there a purpose for I mean given all these two motions why don't we just blow ourselves up why don't we yeah what what is what is our purpose I mean you turn the question around if we do blow ourselves up does that disprove the existence of God no I guess not I mean it'll be a little late to make the discovery but still yeah I guess what I what I'm asking is since as we as we kind of make God almost go away in this as as he threw these demotions and I and I don't mean he because who knows what God is but but still saying it makes it right icky doesn't yeah yeah it's it's tough I like it to be a yeah don't we yeah we've been trained to think of it as a he it's it seems that through the ages we have humans have created a mythological framework that has always involved some kind of often involves some kind of higher spiritual powers and as every human cultures as that goes away as we know more and more that and it seems harder and harder to prove that anything might exist like that where does that leave us on our own which to my mind is much more responsible than hoping that someone will save us from ourselves so we don't have to make our best efforts to do it ourselves and if we're wrong and there is someone who steps in and saves us okay that's alright I'm for that but we you know hedged our bets its Pascal's bargain run backwards I'll say another word the word God covers an enormous range of different ideas and you recognize that in the question running from an outsized light-skinned male with a long white beard sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow for which there is no evidence it's in my mind if anybody has some I sure would like to see it to the kind of God that Einstein or Spinoza talked about which is very close to the sum total of the laws of the universe now it'd be crazy to deny that there are laws in the universe and if that's what you want to call God then of course God exists and there are all sorts of other nuances there is for example the deist god that many of the founding fathers of this country believed in although it is a secret whose name may not be spoken in some circles a Hawaiian yield a do-nothing King the God who creates the universe and then retires and to whom praying to is sort of pointless he's not here he went somewhere else he had other things to do now that's also a God so when you say do you believe in God if I say yes or if I say no you have learned absolutely nothing I guess I'm asking you to define yours if you have one but why would we use a word so ambiguous that means so many different things it gives you freedom to fine freedom to seem to agree with someone else with whom you do not agree it covers over differences it makes for social lubrication but it is not an aide to truth in my view and therefore I think we need much sharper language when we ask these questions sorry to take so long and answering this but this is an important issue [Applause]

Channel: Orson Hyde

Views: 1,213,895

Rating: 4.7345777 out of 5

Keywords: carl sagan, god

Id: ML4kiFCKZGo

Length: 5min 1sec (301 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ignost]

Basically the origin of my username. I'm not going to tell you what I think about the existence of "god" until you tell me what you mean by "god". Zues? Strong atheist. A god who gave us a book and can't be bothered to confirm which one or what we should do, but expects us to follow one of them? Count me extremely skeptical.

The way most people define god I would define myself as an atheist or agnostic, but I've also met plenty of people who have a non-mystical view of god as either "love" or "physical laws." There are some gods I believe in, then.

[u/BrasaEnviesado]

perfect reasoning, wit, and grace

a lost art

[u/Used-Ad7891]

How much water could he really fit into that tiny cup. Dude sipped it like 37 times in this 5 minute clip. Truly a star.

[u/bikeclimb2]

The real miracle is how he fit gallons of liquid in that cup. He was drinking the whole time.