Carl Sagan Quotes
It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.
Sagan, Carl. The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Random House, 1977, p. 128.
Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was, perhaps, the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews, and the Muslims.
See {589333} for a similar theme of God vis a vis man.
This quotation produces much angst among some fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Muslims for whom any concept of multiple deities is distressing as is the notion that man might aspire to become God. This and polygamy are two of the central reasons that some Christians deny that Mormonism is a Christian religion.
The original was in German. Spinoza was a Dutch Philosopher who originated this abstract notion of a universal God. This was one of the reasons fro his excommunication. Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims.
His concept of the devine however was quite different and much more abstract than the Rabbis, Priests and Imams of the time. Albert Einstein, was a religious Jew, but his view of God was that of Spinoza (See Quotation 631763) who had been excommunicated by the Jews. Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. Spinoza did not believe in a kins of anthropromorphic God who fabricated the earth and the stars. He saw God in the devine nature of the earth and the heavens and the mathematical rules that govern everything. It was this abstraction that was Spinoza's God which made sense to Einstein. Got was in the order, physical laws and mathematics of the universe. Modern scientists who are religious have no difficulty with the probablsitic nature of much of the physics that governs the univrese. It was God who created or more abstractly, was the mathematical and physical laws that in turn allowed the universe to be created from nothing.
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages intended to be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them.
