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Sagan (like Dawkins) was way out of his depth where philosophy and theology are concerned. I don’t know if he was just lazy or presumptuous or had an agenda or

Sagan (like Dawkins) was way out of his depth where philosophy and theology are concerned. I don’t know if he was just lazy or presumptuous or had an agenda or somehow managed to pass through life criticizing things he didn’t understand without ever thinking to himself “gee, maybe I should actually familiarize myself with these views I keep criticizing”, but he seemed to be completely unaware of the actual work in this space. He was incredibly amateurish, the sort of person unintellectual people think is “an intellectual”. He was sort of a watered-down logical positivist/advocate of scientism mired in misconceptions and stereotypes who wasted his time jousting with straw men. Talk about hubris, and a comically unsophisticated sort. There are much more intellectually interesting atheists out there (in recent history in the Anglosphere, someone like Thomas Nagel, for example; Nietzsche, of the historically most famous ones). Sagan, Dawkins, the New Atheists are lightweights.

card_zero 1y ago
You say "logical positivist/advocate of scientism", but what I'm hearing is "he liked science, and I don't". I'm mischaracterizing your viewpoint, I hope? What do you specifically mean, how were his arguments scientistic? (For bystanders who don't know the term, scientism is like when an advert says our shampoo contains hilyironic acid which nourishes the growing hair or some similar sciency-sounding nonsense, maybe with 3D graphics of molecules, to sell you on a thing just by association with science.)
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion. I value true science, I appreciate science, but for what it is, not what it is not. A robust philosophy of science helps in this regard, as it allows us to examine and to understand the nature of science, its methods, its limits, the nature of the knowledge its gives us, and so on. Scientism is incoherent from the start, as its basic proposition is self-refuting, as it is not itself a scientific claim. W.r.t. Sagan, it is the general character of his work that it privileged science (and I mean this in the modern sense of the term, i.e., “empirical science”) to the exclusion of other rational modes of knowing. Indeed, if anything is paradigmatic of rationality, it is philosophy, not empirical science. And Sagan’s insistence on evidence of does not square with things like his views on mathematics (never mind some of the superficial commentary on numerical representation) or what proofs for the existence of God can consist of. Sagan’s views were also often guided by sentiment rather than reason. The first that comes to mind if the childish and fallacious inference involving the tacit assumption that size is proportional to significance. But of course, they were presented as if they were reasoned. My point is, whatever his merits as an astronomer and the practice of astronomy (I have heard varying opinions), he was a mediocrity in areas like philosophy and theology. He should have had the humility to recognize the limits of his knowledge.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    > I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion By guessing, of course! Gotta start somewhere. You still haven't supplied details of exactly ... ah, don't worry about it, I suppose I'll just bear your observation in mind when I come to read a Sagan book. Or a Dawkins book. But I don't remember Dawkins sidelining philosophy? It still sounds kind of like "oh he should have said something apologetic about religion because of metaphysics instead of being so damn certain", the kind of thing any wet agnostic would like - not because there's quality philosophy being overlooked, just because wishy-washy people want their spirituality placating.
    - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
      I think you have a good deal of odd baggage that's clouding your judgement. You seem to believe that anyone who is critical of any kind of intellectually flaky stance toward "religion" must therefore be an apologist for intellectual flaky religious views. This is childish. I encourage you to develop more intellectually rigorous and less tendentious habits of mind. An intellectual horizon where Sagan and Dawkins are intellectual heroes is highly parochial. In the case of Dawkins, that he was whiggish and philosophically weak is not some novel criticism. His criticisms of Aquinas, for example, were laughably uninformed. And unlike Aquinas, who charitably advised people to attack an interlocutor's views at his strongest points, Dawkins happily sought out the weakest and their weakest for cheap show. He didn't seek out highly regarded scholars who disagreed with him, but ones he could easily ridicule, and he found them. It is buffoonish to think Dawkins et al. have some kind of intellectual high ground here. Only someone ignorant of philosophical work of the last two millenia could find Dawkins impressive here. For you and others here, I would recommend beginning with Edward Feser's "The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism" [0] to begin to grasp how crude, unsophisticated, and incoherent their intellectual positions are. The author wrote this book during the height of the New Atheist craze when the polemic of the "Four Horsemen" was particular aggressive, and so he rightly returns some of those polemical barbs, though unlike the New Atheists, his comes from a position of intellectual substance. [0] https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstition-a-refutation-of-the-new-atheism https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstiti...
  - 1y ago
- popalchemist 1y ago
  Scientism is the name of an ideology to which Sagan subscribed. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/scientism https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philoso...
  - card_zero 1y ago
    That's the sympathetic version of it.
rpdillon 1y ago
It's a lot of very strong language with very little evidence.
popalchemist 1y ago
I absolutely adore Sagan -- I have a first edition of both this book and Cosmos in a prize position on my book shelf -- and yet I agree. He had a disdain for all things irrational, yet man himself and his psyche is irrational. He would have done well to assimilate Carl Jung et al into his academic diet. But he didn't because he had the classic atheist's arrogance to him. Still, he was a treasure. You just have to know which domains he had authority to speak about and which he didn't.
tim333 1y ago
I did ^F for religion in The Demon-Haunted World and he mentions it 170 times with quite a lot of examples. Maybe he knew enough for his purposes? If you think something is bunk it's not required to understand every detail of that bunk to disbelieve it.

card_zero 1y ago

You say "logical positivist/advocate of scientism", but what I'm hearing is "he liked science, and I don't". I'm mischaracterizing your viewpoint, I hope? What do you specifically mean, how were his arguments scientistic? (For bystanders who don't know the term, scientism is like when an advert says our shampoo contains hilyironic acid which nourishes the growing hair or some similar sciency-sounding nonsense, maybe with 3D graphics of molecules, to sell you on a thing just by association with science.)

lo_zamoyski 1y ago
I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion. I value true science, I appreciate science, but for what it is, not what it is not. A robust philosophy of science helps in this regard, as it allows us to examine and to understand the nature of science, its methods, its limits, the nature of the knowledge its gives us, and so on. Scientism is incoherent from the start, as its basic proposition is self-refuting, as it is not itself a scientific claim. W.r.t. Sagan, it is the general character of his work that it privileged science (and I mean this in the modern sense of the term, i.e., “empirical science”) to the exclusion of other rational modes of knowing. Indeed, if anything is paradigmatic of rationality, it is philosophy, not empirical science. And Sagan’s insistence on evidence of does not square with things like his views on mathematics (never mind some of the superficial commentary on numerical representation) or what proofs for the existence of God can consist of. Sagan’s views were also often guided by sentiment rather than reason. The first that comes to mind if the childish and fallacious inference involving the tacit assumption that size is proportional to significance. But of course, they were presented as if they were reasoned. My point is, whatever his merits as an astronomer and the practice of astronomy (I have heard varying opinions), he was a mediocrity in areas like philosophy and theology. He should have had the humility to recognize the limits of his knowledge.
- card_zero 1y ago
  > I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion By guessing, of course! Gotta start somewhere. You still haven't supplied details of exactly ... ah, don't worry about it, I suppose I'll just bear your observation in mind when I come to read a Sagan book. Or a Dawkins book. But I don't remember Dawkins sidelining philosophy? It still sounds kind of like "oh he should have said something apologetic about religion because of metaphysics instead of being so damn certain", the kind of thing any wet agnostic would like - not because there's quality philosophy being overlooked, just because wishy-washy people want their spirituality placating.
  - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    I think you have a good deal of odd baggage that's clouding your judgement. You seem to believe that anyone who is critical of any kind of intellectually flaky stance toward "religion" must therefore be an apologist for intellectual flaky religious views. This is childish. I encourage you to develop more intellectually rigorous and less tendentious habits of mind. An intellectual horizon where Sagan and Dawkins are intellectual heroes is highly parochial. In the case of Dawkins, that he was whiggish and philosophically weak is not some novel criticism. His criticisms of Aquinas, for example, were laughably uninformed. And unlike Aquinas, who charitably advised people to attack an interlocutor's views at his strongest points, Dawkins happily sought out the weakest and their weakest for cheap show. He didn't seek out highly regarded scholars who disagreed with him, but ones he could easily ridicule, and he found them. It is buffoonish to think Dawkins et al. have some kind of intellectual high ground here. Only someone ignorant of philosophical work of the last two millenia could find Dawkins impressive here. For you and others here, I would recommend beginning with Edward Feser's "The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism" [0] to begin to grasp how crude, unsophisticated, and incoherent their intellectual positions are. The author wrote this book during the height of the New Atheist craze when the polemic of the "Four Horsemen" was particular aggressive, and so he rightly returns some of those polemical barbs, though unlike the New Atheists, his comes from a position of intellectual substance. [0] https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstition-a-refutation-of-the-new-atheism https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstiti...
- 1y ago
popalchemist 1y ago
Scientism is the name of an ideology to which Sagan subscribed. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/scientism https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philoso...
- card_zero 1y ago
  That's the sympathetic version of it.

rpdillon 1y ago

It's a lot of very strong language with very little evidence.

popalchemist 1y ago

I absolutely adore Sagan -- I have a first edition of both this book and Cosmos in a prize position on my book shelf -- and yet I agree. He had a disdain for all things irrational, yet man himself and his psyche is irrational. He would have done well to assimilate Carl Jung et al into his academic diet. But he didn't because he had the classic atheist's arrogance to him. Still, he was a treasure. You just have to know which domains he had authority to speak about and which he didn't.

tim333 1y ago

I did ^F for religion in The Demon-Haunted World and he mentions it 170 times with quite a lot of examples. Maybe he knew enough for his purposes? If you think something is bunk it's not required to understand every detail of that bunk to disbelieve it.