Carl Sagan Quotes
Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone.
Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House, 1996, p. 16.
One of the reasons that this quotation is so significant is that the Roman Catholic Church had been historically antithetical to science and scientists. It took hundreds of years before the church would admit that Galileo was right and the church wrong about the earth revolving around the sun. But Pope John Paul II, along with his other major accomplishments removed the traditional Catholic hostility in theology and tradition. He even acknowledged the validity of the Theory of Evolution and taught that there was nothing inherent in evolution that denied God or scripture.
Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims.
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages intended to be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them.
