A Stitch in Haste

As part of Blog Against Theocracy, I have assembled a collection of three clips from Carl Sagan's masterpiece of popular science, Cosmos. Each is directly related to the clash between dogma and science — the front line in the battle against theocracy.

First up, Sagan provides a narrative of one of history's greatest scientists — who unfortunately had suffered from terrible timing:


Some parting thoughts from Sagan:

When he found that his long-cherished beliefs did not agree with the most precise observations, he accepted the uncomfortable facts. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions. That is the heart of science.

If there can truly be such a thing as a "saint," then Johannes Kepler was one of the first, and one of the greatest.

In today's Cosmos clip, Carl Sagan asks, and answers, an esoteric but powerful question:

Who "intelligently designed" Japanese crabs?


Evolution is a fact, not a theory. The theocrats who abuse the word "theory," replacing its proper scientific denotation with the uninformed populist connotation of "guess" are engaging in the same form of insolent intellectual fraud that underlies so much of organized religion. They should be ashamed of themselves.

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Meanwhile, here's another tale — more indelicate than Sagan's — about humans, crabs and evolution. (See also this post.)

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In our last clip from Carl Sagan's Cosmos this weekend, we see an extraordinary display of magnanimity — the kind that can only come from someone who is unarguably correct — in the form of a defense, by one of the greatest scientists of the modern era, of one of the worst pseudo-scientists (and creationist rationalizers) of the modern era.


Unlike the theocrats who war upon them, scientists and those who respect science do not (or should not) fear or hate pseudo-scientists and those, including the theocrats, who scorn science.

We must only continue, relentlessly, to expose and debunk them.

More on Velikovsky, and his would-be censors, here.