What do you do when you are faced with several different gods each claiming the same territory? The Babylonian Marduk and the Greek Zeus was each considered master of the sky and king of gods. You might also decide, since they had quite different attributes, that one of them was merely invented by the priests. But if one, why not both? And so it was that the great idea arose, the realization that there might be a way to know the world without the god hypothesis; that there might be principles, forces, laws of nature, through which the world could be understood without attributing the fall of every sparrow to the direct intervention of Zeus.
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About Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan was a 20th-century American scientist and science communicator. Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist and science communicator. Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell, where he was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Science — Discovery, inquiry, and the wonders of the natural world