Here are a few points i wrote down on a book I recently read: lectures on natural theology by carl sagan, from the mid 1980's.


A serious search for God is one with rigorous standards of scrutiny. How is it that the eternal and omniscient creator from the bible can assert so many fundamental misconceptions about creation? Is the earth 6,000 years old? Have we been created separate from all other living things, or have we evolved over the eons through natural selection? Which offers the more satisfying spiritual experience? Science or Genesis?
Perhaps the little we know about nature suggests that we know even less about God. The laws of the cosmos guide the evolution of trillions if not infinite amounts of stars and worlds. With our new knowledge, we've made the God who created "THE" world seem hopelessly local and dated, bound to transparently human misconceptions of the past. Why separate science from sacred; searching for what is true from the truths which inspire love and awe. our understanding of the sacred is complete, while the search for Truth is never ending. One should search for sacred knowledge, not a pallative for ones fears. What should be wanted is not the will or faith to believe, but the desire to find out; which is the exact opposite.
Institutional religion, choosing to deny new revelation, can do little more than build a protective wall around itself. We cling to a spiritual ideology that is rootless in nature, and in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. We are star stuff, pondering the stars; organized assemblages of 10 billion billion billion atoms. And we humans are tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.
Is God but the wall that stops all further questioning? Why does something exist rather than nothing? Who are we? Why are we here? It's through errors, and asking questions, that insights emerge.
We sit somewhere between godlessness and superstition; superstition being belief without evidence.
The word religion comes from the latin for 'binding together.' The objectives of religion and science are identical, or nearly so, but the question has to do with the reliability of the truths claimed by the two fields, and their methods of approach.
It's difficult to know WHO we are without knowing WHERE and WHEN we are. The universe is mainly made of nothing; something is the exception. Darkness is common; light the exception. The universe is almost complete impenetrable darkness, and the sparse sources of light, the stars, dot the prevalence of black. The world we live on is part of a vast collection of worlds, many of which are much smaller, few of which are much larger. There are about a trillion such worlds around our sun. And our star , of course, is one of a vast multitude. The stars we see in the night sky are part of a huge concentration of stars that we now call the Milky Way Galaxy; one with a specific shape, and specific center; 400 billion stars,of which our sun is one. The sun is a reasonably typical star in the Milky Way, located somewhere on the edge, far from the center. And there are many galaxies; more galaxies in the universe than stars in the milky way. This vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, has not been taken into account, even superficially, by the religions of the world- especially the western religions....
It seems the earth is of very little consequence. We've learned that the earth is not the center of the solar system; in fact we have learned that there are a great many solar systems. It was unsettling to discover these facts. The church threatened to torture Galileo if he persisted in the heresy to claim that the earth moved around the sun. It was serious business. When we see a comet or a supernovae explosion with the naked eye, what does that do for the idea of perfect unchanging heavens? Geological and paleontological evidence accumulates, proving that the earth is much older than a few thousand years. And so, in time, as in space, we've been wrong; we know know that the earth is 4,500 million years old. The debate continues.
And what about creationism? Does the complexity of a single bacteria show evidence for a creator? Or, is it possible for enormous order to emerge from a more disordered natural world, without a creators 'hand.' The idea behind natural selection is that there is hereditary material which had the potential for spontaneous change, expressed in external form or function of an organism, and that organisms made many more copies of themselves than the environment could support, and therefore that some selection among various natural experiments was made by the environment for reproductive success; this means that some organisms, by pure accident, were better suited to their environment and to leaving offspring than others. Over immense vistas of time, the complexity and beauty of the biological world on earth may evolve. The universe is consistent of the evolution of stars and planetary systems; life and intelligence have evolved- at least here.
Is the universe designed with the goal of generating and sustaining observers? Are there multiple universes? Alternative universes splitting off at every instant?
It was long believed that the planets were held in their orbits by crystal spheres, controlled by the gods or god. Once, god was thought to control the bloom of each and every flower; which we now know to be false. As sciences advance, there seems to be less and less for a god to do. It seems that whatever we can't explain lately is attributed to a god- and then after a while, we explain it, and so it's no longer gods realm. Now, it seems that maybe god got the universe going, established the laws of nature, then retired, or went somewhere else. The most major question is now the origin of life. The evidence is fossil record. Animals over the eons are too similar, chimps and humans are very similar too. We see the remains of species extinct, even recovering their organic matter. What we have today is quite different from what was present at the time of the origin of life. But we have seen organic molecules in the comets, and data that suggests complex organic molecules in the outer solar system, and everywhere else for that matter. There is evidence to suggest that the origin of life is in some sense, located in the laws of physics and chemistry.
When a religion believes the world will end, or that with enough faith its believers can levitate, what are the skeptical to think. Perhaps with more faith it would work. In reality, there are probably more liars than believers. Because the same motivations, people claim they were abducted by aliens, or that they have an original religious relic like a piece of the true cross. And of the ancient religions- history is re-written over time. If all wisdom passes through a small group, or priesthood, think of how they could change the facts or fabricate new fantastic tales of gods and men.
In religious questions, if we have an emotional stake in the answers, if we want so badly to believe, then it should be important to know the truth and be skeptical. Like buying a used car, it needs to work; a friendly salesman is insufficient. Natural theology is theological knowledge based on reason, experience and experiment alone; a somewhat novel look at religion.
The Romans called the Christians atheists, because they didn't believe in the Olympian gods. Judiasm, christianity and Islam are very similar, having a god that is omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, loving, created the universe, responsive to prayer, intervenes in human affairs, and so on.... but what if we had proof of a being that had some of these qualities; originated the universe but indifferent to prayer, omnipotent but not omniscient, or oblivious to the existence of humans? The range of hypotheses covered under the idea of 'god' is immense. God could be thought of as the total number of physical laws in the universe; gravitation, plus quantum mechanics plus unified theory, plus more. Laws that apply to the most distant galaxies. There is great power in this regularity- no one can deny the laws of nature.
There is a huge range of belifs, and a grab bag of religions and alternatives. Usually, a religious convert joins the religion of their community; people from the west rarely have visions of a blue headed elephant god, as is common in india. How is it that appreciation of an elephant god happens only in India, or in places with a strong indian tradition? Why are visions of virgin mary common in the west and not the east? Why don't religious belifs cross cultural barriers? Religion is culture, music, art, ritual; attractive to the young.
Would you accept a new prophet, claiming revelation from god, and saying all previous religions are false? First, I woudl ask, what is the evidence? It is insufficent to say "well, a really charisthmatic person told me!" We cannot depend entirely on what is said or written.
But, you may ask, with the world full of things, who made them? You could say: the universe was always here, or, god was always here. Or ask, what happened before the 'big bang'? Or do we live in an oscillating universe with an infinite number of expansions and contractions? The answer will surely be found in contemporary satellite astronomy.
The universe and god- Is there no beginning and no end? Maybe beginning with no end, or no beginning with an end? A universe with a finite or infinte age?
And what of intellegence? Did god put it there or was it natural selection? Is consciousness a function of the number and complexity of neuronal linkages, archetecture of the brain?
THESE 4 STATEMENTS CANNOT ALL BE TRUE
God is benevolent.
God is omniscient.
God is omnipotent.
Evil exists.

Arguments for the existence of god, in the western sence, are not very compelling- they go after the emotions. Why is god so clear in the bible, yet so obscure in the world? Why is god never seen?
Hammurabi said that his code of laws was given to him by the god Marduk; a claim that probably isn't true because, when you think about it, his subjects would be more likely to follow the laws if a they were given to hammurabi by god, more so than if hamurabi wrote them up himself.
What does religion offer? Ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in times of bereavement, continuity with the past, faith in the future. But there is much that religion does not provide....
Tradition is a precious thing- it is a gift from our ancestors, but it is important to remember that it is created by humans for their purposes. In a changing world, our survival depends on our ability to change rapidly. Indeed, there is unprecedented change occuring right now, in 2008. We've moved from the spead of horses to the speed of rockets; and in communications, the speed of light.
We, as humans, want to investigate the natural world, and the nature of ourselves. Many different animals have intellegence and emotions, but it is our intellegence- our interest in figguring things out; our manipulative abilities coupled with our engineering talents- that is responsible for our success. Our populations are HUGE, with outposts everywhere, including antacrtica, the ocean depths, earths orbit,moving outwards to other planets, and with the voyager space probes, beyond the solar system.
We started out as itinerant tribespeople millions of years ago, with loyalty only to a small group, an allegiance to about a hundred people. Groups merged and grew large, became city states, settled nations, and empires. Today, a person is typically a mix of political, economic, ethnic and religious identifications, owing allegence to a group or groups consiting of a hundred million or more. Soon, identity will be with the Human Species.
But our history is, in part, a battle of inadequit myths. The idea that I have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to an external reality is something to consider. It's a painful realization; but in a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question Everything? Very few religions accomodate the astonishing discoveries of the last few centuries.
How rare is it that we see a projection 20, 50 or 100 years in the future of a world in which we have come to our senses and figgured things out? There is nothing that says we will fail. We have solved many difficult problems. It used to be argued that all kings were divinely selected by god- yet we are now enlightened and know that they are not. Slavery has been eliminated. The status of women has improved. Diseases, thought as inevitable and god given facts of life have been cured. We have accomplished much, yet there is still much to be done...
Kings and slaveholders claimed the divine right of their rule over others. We cannot limit ourselves to one idea, one religion, one language, or one planet. It takes courage to greet the universe as it really is; to avoid putting our emotional dispositions onto it, but to explore.
It is wrong for a religion to make false pronouncements on matters astronomical, physical and biological ( the Bible is quite clear about the earth being flat for example), even if they have made significant contributions to human behaviour. Isn't the goal of religion to have a personal god, to have a purpose for individuals? What is the purpose of life? Surely, you could say, it's not in the stars. But lifes purpose is not imposed from the outside. We make our purpose, we don't find it in a book written thousands of years ago.
If we can understand the issues, pose the right questions, point out the contradictions, then we can make some progress. It is within our capability to survive; yet if we don't make a change in our thinking, all is lost.