Carl Sagan

I first discovered Carl Sagan through the book “Contact”, which I read a year or so before the movie arrived at cinemas. The closing chapter has always stuck in my mind, where pi is researched on the advice of the aliens we make contact with, and the binary segment of it’s data found - uncovering a circle, and potentially the signiature of the race that seeded our universe. Carl Sagan has always interested me because he was American, and would have fought the same right wing religious bigots that Neil DeGrasse Tyson continues to face. He walked a very thin line between educating millions of children, and being branded a heratic by millions more, and did so by cleverly denying the existence of a diety in terms that many would not understand; An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.