Carl Sagan

I finally had a chance to look at our church bulletin this morning and what I saw there encouraged me a great deal. It wasn’t the fact that we are making budget this year or the fact that they finally got the time right on my wife’s scrapbooking outing tomorrow night. No, it was a quote…from Carl Sagan. The quote was excellent, but I never thought I would see the day that there would be a quote from an ardent atheist astronomer (albeit a very spiritual atheist) in a Baptist church bulletin. This is good because he had a lot of knowledge in this area. Knowledge that we ignore and forget exists as we draw nigh to our holy huddle. And, without being conscious of it, Sagan glorifies God as he wonders about the universe He created.

Sagan thrilled us as kids when we watched the PBS special and read the book. Leafing through the pages we saw things that any normal kid could see, but with eyes that grew wide with exciting thoughts of parsecs, the google plex, septillions of stars, and billions of light years. We we got older we realized how religious Sagan was when he said that “The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” We also were transported to Earth yet again when we read Contact and realized that the challenges of extra-terrestrial life lie with us, not with “them.”

Thank you Carl Sagan for your spiritual journey into the vast cosmos that God created. You dipped your toe into the wonder of it all. You would have drowned and lost your life if you had only seen the Master Himself as the Prime Mover.