Sunday marked the 80th birthday of Carl Sagan, the spiritual scientist. Author James Croft writes that Sagan, who died in 1996 at age 62, found science to be a profoundly spiritual pursuit.

For Sagan, science was not just a technical pursuit, nor was it simply about the discovery of new facts, Croft writes.

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship, Sagan wrote in The Varieties of Scientific Experience.

Croft writes, "This may be surprising to some, but one of the foremost icons of todays rationalist movement believed passionately that to preclude spirituality from a relationship with science was to demean science, as well as spirituality."

But here is Sagan's definition of Nature (with a capital N): reverence; awe; celebration; magnificence; intricacy; beauty; soaring; elation; humility; joining and merging with the Cosmos.

Sagans spiritual approach to science, Croft writes in a Religion News Service piece, is important for atheists, skeptics, and Humanists to rememberbecause it offers a different view of the relationship between science and religion than the battleground itis so often portrayed as today.

Read the rest of the story here: http://chrisstedman.religionnews.com/2014/11/09/atheists-carl-sagan-lead/

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Carl Sagan: the spiritual scientist

If the pseudoscientific woo about love and time travel in Interstellar pissed you off, you aren't alone. Though Christopher Nolan's gorgeous space opera isn't the first science fiction film to descend into a morass of new age platitudes, here's why it should be the last.

Spoilers for Interstellar ahead.

Let's get something clear. There are no science fiction movies that "get it right" perfectly when it comes to physics and other areas of science. Any story that involves interstellar travel is by definition based on speculation. We have no idea how faster-than-light travel would work, so we rely on semi-scientific tropes, from wormhole travel and interdimensional jumps to hypersleep and brain uploading. These tropes are all based on contemporary scientific understanding, but of course they are also wild extrapolations that may ultimately turn out to be complete bullshit.

But there's a difference between wormhole travel, which is depicted superbly in Interstellar, and the idea that love is a "fifth dimension" that can allow a man to jump inside a black hole and travel backwards in time to communicate with his 10-year-old daughter. This is what we are asked to believe in Interstellar, whose climactic scene involves Cooper flying into the black hole Gargantua. Once he's gone inside, he's rescued by mysterious, fifth-dimensional beings who put him inside a tesseract box where time behaves like space we can see millions of versions of his daughter's room around him, each representing a slice of time.

So far, we're on weird but still relatively solid ground when it comes to speculative science. Physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted on the movie, writes in a book called The Science of Interstellar that he could imagine such an event being plausible. Other physicists disagree with him, but that's not the problem. The real issue is that Cooper figures out how to contact his daughter by recalling what his colleague Brand told him that love is a "force" that transcends dimensions just like time does. Using the force of "love" to guide him through the bewildering array of time-rooms, he finally finds the exact right version of his daughter to communicate with. And then he sends a message to her through time.

This is an example of confusing physics with metaphysics, or assuming that observable phenomena like gravity are the same as psychological states like love. Put another way, it blurs the line between science and spirituality without ever admitting that's what's going on.

Anyone who has seen the movie The Fifth Element is no stranger to this idea. The "fifth element" of the title is, in fact, love. Which turns out to be a physical force that can save the world. This idea is hinted at in widely-condemned pseudoscience documentary What the Bleep Do We Know, which suggests that quantum mechanics have revealed that anything we believe can come true because our minds affect quantum reality. That is most definitely not what quantum physics suggests.

Again, the issue here isn't with saying that spiritual beliefs can intermingle with scientific reality. The problem is with category confusion. Just because two things are equally important does not mean they are the same. There is absolutely no evidence that love transcends time, but there is significant physical evidence that other dimensions do.

This notion that love "transcends" space and time also makes an appearance in the otherwise rationality-centric movie Contact. In that film, based on work by Carl Sagan, the main character takes a journey through space/time and communicates with aliens who take the form of her father. The idea is that they are so alien that they can only appear to her by taking on the form of a person she loves. Ultimately, the suggestion in Contact like in Interstellar is that love is a force we can measure using physics.

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Stop Putting New Age Pseudoscience in Our Science Fiction