The God Hypothesis

You can read a chapter from The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan called The God Hypothesis by clicking on the picture of the author’s gravestone below. The book is mostly transcripts of the Gifford Lectures Sagan gave in 1985, along with some Q&A and more up-to-date pictures of what he was talking about when it came to astronomy.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt of his conclusion, after brilliantly disecting and dismissing popular arguments for the existence of God, and I wanted to quote it because I’ve already seen people try to paint him as a theist or even as an “Intelligent Design proponent” (aka creationist):

So if I then run through these arguments, the cosmological argument, the argument from design, the moral argument, the argument from consciousness, and the argument from experience, I must say that the net result is not very impressive. It is very much as if we are seeking a rational justification for something that we otherwise hope will be true.

Putting that in a less polite way, religious apologists are lying, and they know it.

Tags: Carl Sagan, counter-apologetics