The Universe Revealed By Science Is One

It Takes A Fearless, Unflinching Love And Deep Humility To Accept The Universe As It Is. The Most Effective Way He Knew To Accomplish That, The Most Powerful Tool At His Disposal, Was The Scientific Method, Which Over Time Winnows Out Deception. It Can't Give You Absolute Truth Because Science Is A Permanent Revolution, Always Subject To Revision, But It Can Give You Successive Approximations Of Reality.

Carl Sagan Always Used To Say That When He Was Trying To Explain Something To Someone, He Would Go Back To That Time When He Didn't Understand It, And Then He Would Retrace His Thought Steps So That He Could Make It Absolutely Clear, And That's One Of The Infinite Number Of Things I Learned From Him.

Interviewer: "didn't [sagan] Want To Believe?" Druyan: "he Didn't Want To Believe. He Wanted To Know.

Contrary To The Fantasies Of The Fundamentalists, There Was No Deathbed Conversion, No Last Minute Refuge Taken In A Comforting Vision Of A Heaven Or An Afterlife. For Carl, What Mattered Most Was What Was True, Not Merely What Would Make Us Feel Better. Even At This Moment When Anyone Would Be Forgiven For Turning Away From The Reality Of Our Situation, Carl Was Unflinching. As We Looked Deeply Into Each Other's Eyes, It Was With A Shared Conviction That Our Wondrous Life Together Was Ending Forever.

I Remember That One Time Carl Sagan Was Giving A Talk, And He Spelled Out, In A Kind Of Withering Succession, These Great Theories Of Demotion That Science Has Dealt Us, All Of The Ways In Which Science Is Telling Us We Are Not Who We Would Like To Believe We Are. At The End Of It, A Young Man Came Up To Him And He Said: "what Do You Give Us In Return? Now That You've Taken Everything From Us? What Meaning Is Left, If Everything That I've Been Taught Since I Was A Child Turns Out To Be Untrue?" Carl Looked At Him And Said, Do Something Meaningful.