Carl Sagan, Complete Disbelief, and Current Creative Projects · 12:47pm Jul 25th, 2012
My latest one-shot is up for everyone's consideration and, hopefully, entertainment. The idea came to me months ago when I saw pony artist Esuka's picture depicting filly Twilight peering into a telescope next to a ponified Carl Sagan. A brief story bit formed in my head and I wrote it out as a comment to the picture. A few weeks ago, Esuka finally responded to said comment with how much they liked it. After asking Esuka's permission, I crafted the rest of the story and used the picture as the cover art.
The story isn't just me placing a pony version of Dr. Sagan into Equestria, it's also a reflection of a number of discussions I've had with a longtime friend of mine (and fellow brony of course) who is working to enter the world of ministry. I, myself, am really not much of a religious person, but I've been friends with this guy for years now and we share a lot of similar thoughts and ideas. One of which is regarding the dichotomy of holding beliefs based in both scientific fact and religious dogma. The conclusion we've both come to is religion and science aren't necessarily antithetical to each other. They can co-exist regardless of what the most rabid adherents to either side will tell you. Even Sagan himself, though far from a pious individual, was not an atheist as he could not discount the possible existence of God due to a lack of proof that God doesn't exist.
I don't expect this story to be anywhere near as popular as my other stories, but it's something I really wanted to write and get out there anyway. If you choose to read it, I hope it entertains you and maybe you'll get something out of it to think about as well.
Speaking of story popularity, as of this blog's writing A Simpler Time is drawing close to the one thousand thumbs up mark. It boggles my mind that so many people have found enjoyment in what is one of the shortest stories I've ever written. I thank each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart, and know that if I can swing it I may try and put together something of a special "thank you" for all your support. Just have to see if I can make it happen is all.
Finally, for the moment, a quick update on other things I'm working on. Tarnished Feelings is indeed being worked on bit by bit. I was on vacation earlier this month and between that, work, other writing projects and another family emergency it's kind of been slow going. A new chapter will hopefully be up within a week or so, and I've got a clear plan forming for the rest of the story.
I also have a side story to Tarnished Feelings that I will begin working on in the near future. It'll be my first attempt at something romantic for an MLP:FiM story and I hope you'll all like it, though I am toying with either putting a Mature rating on it or at least splitting off one chapter of it to be marked Mature. Not sure which way I'm going to go with that just yet though. Thoughts and comments on this would be appreciated.
And I have a couple other story ideas percolating in my head as well. One would be yet another one-shot that I need to outline some. Yes, yet another one. What can I say? Slice of Life is my main genre. Another would potentially be something a bit more epic in scope and kind of out there. It's an idea I really kind of like, but to say it'd be ambitious for me to tackle would be an understatement. And that's not to mention more story ideas I have that would fall in the Raiders of the Cutie Mark/Tarnished Feelings continuity. So yeah, I've got plenty of story ideas. Just not enough hours in the day to get them all written. Oh well, at least I'll be keeping myself busy with ponies! Not a bad way to fill the hours until S3 lands. ^_^
That was a really touching story that you have just written, don't sell yourself short.
Carl Sagan ponified? And talking to Twilight?
Now this I gotta see. I'm putting your one-shot on my reading list. 
The conclusion we've both come to is religion and science aren't necessarily antithetical to each other. They can co-exist regardless of what the most rabid adherents to either side will tell you. Even Sagan himself, though far from a pious individual, was not an atheist as he could not discount the possible existence of God due to a lack of proof that God doesn't exist.
I agree religion and science can co-exist. But for the record, and as far as I can tell from his writings, Sagan was an atheist because all the word means is that he didn't think a god of any sort existed. Whether he absolutely or nearly-entirely-but-left-a-tiny-bit-of-room-of-doubt thought so doesn't really matter. It's like saying the only true "theist" is a religious fundamentalist who absolutely believes a god exists and doesn't leave room for doubt.
All the word atheism means is a- (not) theism (one who believes in god), so atheism is one who does not believe in god or any gods. That can range from sitting on the fence to very low confidence a god exists.
Not that I'm trying to open up a can of worms, far from it, but rather to help out both sides. If you pay attention, the fundamentalists among atheists are more accurately anti-theists. It also shouldn't be confused with someone who is anti-religion. A lot of atheists follow Buddhism or Confucianism, for example, and they're religions. Others condemn religions outright, in all shapes and forms.
"...a reflection of a number of discussions I've had with a longtime friend of mine (and fellow brony of course) who is working to enter the world of ministry."
Hey, I think I know that guy!
I've actually received some private comments from a few people expressing concern about the fact that I am a Christian, working toward ministry, who finds a great deal of spiritual *and* scientific value in the writings and musings of Carl Sagan. As DJL has already indicated, we have discussed at length the concept that science and religion need not be mutually exclusive, and that questioning and a certain level of skepticism can actually serve to *increase* one's faith, not diminish it. In my mind, when there is questioning, there is a quest for answers, and answers build faith. Similarly, when others ask questions and challenge your faith, it forces you to think critically. Faith is something that, if it is going to be of practical application in your life, requires just as much critical thought as a scientific endeavor... and the harder the question, the more affirming the answers usually are.
And that's not to mention more story ideas I have that would fall in the Raiders of the Cutie Mark/Tarnished Feelings continuity. So yeah, I've got plenty of story ideas. Just not enough hours in the day to get them all written.
You and me both.
If it helps at all, I quite liked the second way you ended Raiders of the Cutie Mark and would gladly read something in the same vein. Maybe an interquel?
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I certainly do appreciate where you're coming from here, and for the most part I agree with you. Thank you very much for your thoughts. Whether Dr. Sagan was an atheist or agnostic, depending on how you define those terms, here's what he himself had to say on atheism:
"An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed."
Another Sagan-ism about the concept of God, and the value of human curiosity:
"My deeply held belief is that if a God of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of those gifts (as well as unable to take such a course of action) if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional God does not exist, our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival. In either case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent with both science and religion, and is essential for the welfare of the human species.”
I truly and honestly believe that human curiosity and our nature to inquire about, probe and investigate our surroundings and beliefs are a God-given gift that, sadly, few people within faith who call themselves "truth-seekers" care to exercise. Taking your faith and the teachings of your religion at face value make for just as empty (and dangerous!) an existence as going through life without exercising your natural inquisitiveness about the world around you.
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Too true. After all, how could you possibly prove that something outside of time and space did not exist? The scientific position is that you can't.
I like that quotation; which one of his books did he write it in? I've read Cosmos and extracts from Pale Blue Dot and The Demon-Haunted World.
Since it would only seem fair, my personal favourite quotation is this, from the latter:
'Spirit comes from the Latin word 'to breathe'. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word 'spiritual' that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.'
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That's my position, too. It doesn't matter whether you believe in a god or not, so long as you do your best to live a good life and help others.
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Wikipedia attributes it to him in an interview done in 1981. I would direct you to hit Wikipedia's page on Carl Sagan and look for the section on atheism for the reference.
The theme underlying all of this is the concept of certainty and how dangerous it can be. People love to misuse information to imply certainty about many things both religious (in terms of moral issues and the eternal salvation of one's soul respective to "damnable" offenses - homosexuality, anyone?) and scientific (in terms of motivating people towards certain ends by implying horrific fates based on incomplete or erroneous data - I'm looking straight at all you global warming doomsayers). It's when we let ourselves be convinced of certainty in things with absolutely no further curiosity or skepticism applied that we run into trouble.
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Wikipedia attributes it to him in an interview done in 1981. I would direct you to hit Wikipedia's page on Carl Sagan and look for the section on atheism for the reference
Ah, found it. I couldn't find the article in question, but ta all the same.
The theme underlying all of this is the concept of certainty and how dangerous it can be. People love to misuse information to imply certainty about many things... It's when we let ourselves be convinced of certainty in things with absolutely no further curiosity or skepticism applied that we run into trouble.
I agree. One of the scariest things possible is a person who's so convinced of themselves that they refuse to listen to anybody else. You can play along with a madman and you can talk a frightened or angry person down, but you can't persuade someone who doesn't leave room for doubt because there's no way to get through to him. It's like a defence mechanism.
both religious (in terms of moral issues and the eternal salvation of one's soul respective to "damnable" offenses - homosexuality, anyone?) and scientific (in terms of motivating people towards certain ends by implying horrific fates based on incomplete or erroneous data - I'm looking straight at all you global warming doomsayers).
I would've picked the Autism vaccine scare for the science one. It's a bad example of what happens when you don't stop and think, and just take the reports as absolute truth.
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Re: global warming doomsayers, the former. Not the latter. It's a matter that certainly warrants looking further into to be sure, but I have a hard time taking seriously the people who are effectively the Chicken Littles of this phenomenon whose arguments are based on data from sample sizes so small any self-respecting scientist would point and laugh at them for the conclusions they've drawn.
Though I agree, your example of the autism vaccine scare is definitely a better one here. Nothing like an attitude based on and fueled by media furor that equates to sanctioned child abuse and endangering.
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Yes. The forecast isn't exactly encouraging, but it's not like nothing's already being done about it. Those who turn it into a scare tactic (Al Gore, I'm looking at you) discredit the whole scientific enterprise by making everybody look like "End of the World" loonies. It's a classic case of shooting oneself in the proverbial foot.
That said, I usually find the opposite: people who are adamantly sure it isn't happening. At all. This observation gets a LOL out of me every time because it seems to say it all:
No scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion; the last was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which in 2007 updated its 1999 statement rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position.[10][11] Some other organizations, primarily those focusing on geology, also hold non-committal positions. There are also groups of individuals outside national or international organizations that have expressed their dissenting opinions and counterarguments in venues such as public petitions.
On the plus side, it means David Attenborough gets to make some awesome documentaries.
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To me the best way to look at it is that something is happening. We're not sure exactly what, why, or how, but it is and it deserves the same level of rigor and scrutiny as any other scientific endeavor and should not be sensationalized for the sake of money grubbing or pulling votes to one's side. But of course that attitude doesn't make for TV face time with scrolling bars of text all over the damn place.
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Yes, I gave up trying to glean what was going on from the media and just decided to look it up on Wikipedia first, then look around at as much of the science as I could get before tackling the actual political and social controversies. Learned a fair bit about being impartial that way:
For instance, if someone tells you Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming, they're doing bad science. The weather is controlled by so many factors all happening at once in a chaotic system (not Discord-style chaos, I mean the butterfly-causing-a-hurricane sort) that no one can tell if any one hurricane was caused by an increase in temperatures or if it was going to happen anyway.
It would be like saying Jesus' resurrection was improbable because people don't get resurrected normally. You just can't measure one-offs using event-based probability, because they only work for lots of events being repeated. You could say you had more or less confidence in it being true, though. The best you can do is look at the evidence for that one event or to look at trends and say that, if global warming were true, hurricanes would generally be more powerful than usual.
But of course that attitude doesn't make for TV face time with scrolling bars of text all over the damn place.
After all, they gotta earn money, and how better than to show interesting rather than accurate stories? Wasn't the brony community caught up in a bit of media distortion once or twice?
Pity we're not in Equestria. If global warming happened there, they'd just have to ask the Princess to move the sun away.