(3089/898) Sagan on religion

2026) By making pronouncements that are, even if only in principle, testable, religions, however unwillingly, enter the arena of science. Religions can no longer make unchallenged assertions about reality - so long as they do not seize secular power, provided they cannot coerce belief. This, in turn, has infuriated some followers of some religions. [...] Of course many religions - devoted to reverence, awe, ethics, ritual, community, family, charity, and political and economic justice - are in no way challenged, but rather uplifted, by the findings of science. There is no necessary conflict between science and religion. On one level, they share similar and consonant roles, and each needs the other. Open and vigorous debate, even the consecration of doubt, is a Christian tradition going back to John Milton's Areopagitica (1644). Some of mainstream Christianity and Judaism embraces and even anticipated a least a portion of the humility, self-criticism, reasoned debate, and questioning of received wisdom that the best of science offers. But other sects, sometimes called conservative or fundamentalist - and today they seem to be in the ascendant, with the mainstream religions almost inaudible and invisible - have chosen to make a stand on matters subject to disproof, and thus have something to fear from science.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2027) Instead of acknowledging that in many areas we are ignorant, we have tended to say things like the Universe is permeated with the ineffable. A God of the Gaps is assigned responsibility for what we do not understand.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2028) Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

Hippocrates of Cos
quoted by Carl Sagan in
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2029) Societies that teach contentment with our present station in life, in expectation of post-mortem reward, tend to inoculate themselves against revolution. Further, fear of death, which in some respects is adaptive in the evolutionary struggle for existence, is maladaptive in warfare. Those cultures that teach an afterlife of bliss for heroes - or even for those who just did what those in authority told them - might gain a competitive advantage.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2030) [Societies] with a supreme god who lives in the sky tend to be the most ferocious - torturing their enemies for example. But this is a statistical correlation only; the causal link has not been established, although speculations naturally present themselves.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2031) The Spanish Inquisition sought to avoid direct responsibility for the burning of heretics by handing them over to the secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles. Few of us would allow the Inquisition thus easily to wipe its hands clean of bloodshed; it knew quite well what would happen. Equally, where the technological application of scientific discoveries is clear and obvious - as when a scientist works on nerve gases - he cannot properly claim that such applications are "none of his business," merely on the ground that it is the military, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or kill. This is even more obvious when the scientist deliberately offers help to governments, in exchange for funds. If a scientists, or a philosopher, accepts funds from some such body as an office of naval research, then he is cheating if he knows his work will be useless to them and must take some responsibility for the outcome if he knows that it will be useful. He is subject, properly subject, to praise or blame in relation to any innovations which flow from his work.

John Passmore
Science and Its Critics (1978)
quoted by Carl Sagan in
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

[Note: See #1754-1757, #2007-2014, #2015-2025, #2032-2038 and #2039-2046 for additional quotes from The Demon-Haunted World]