-------------------------------------------------------------------------------February 13, 2007 A Familiar and Prescient Voice, Brought to Life By DENNIS OVERBYE It s been a long 10 years since

we ve heard Carl Sagan beckoning us to consider the possibilities inherent in the billions of stars peppering the sky and in the billio ns of neuronal connections spiderwebbing our brains.

In the day, the Cornell astronomer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books like T he Dragons of Eden, Contact, Pale Blue Dot and The Demon-Haunted World, impresario o he PBS program Cosmos and Johnny Carson regular was one of the world s most famous a nd eloquent unbelievers, an apostle of cosmic wonder, critic of nuclear arms and a champion of science s duty to probe and question without limit, including the c laims of religion. He died of pneumonia after a series of bone marrow transplant s in December 1996. In his absence, the public discourse on his favorite issues the fate of the plan et, the beauty and mystery of the cosmos has not fared well. The teaching of evo lution in public schools has become a bitter bone of contention; NASA tried to a bandon the Hubble Space Telescope and censor talk of climate change; and of cour se, religious fanatics crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center, leading to a war in the Middle East that has awakened memories in some corners of the Crus ades. Now, however, Dr. Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave. The occas ion is the publication last month of The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Pe rsonal View of the Search for God (Penguin). The book is based on a series of lec tures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985, and it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator. Reading Dr. Sagan s new book is like running into an old friend at a noisy party, discovering he still has all his hair, and repairing to the den for a quiet, con genial drink. I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship, the beginning of a discussion that includes the history of cosmology, uide to the solar system, the reason there are hallucinogen receptors in, and the meaning of the potential discovery or lack thereof of al intelligence. he writes at a travel g in the bra extraterrestri

Never afraid to venture into global politics, Dr. Sagan warns at one point of th e danger that a leader under the sway of religious fundamentalism might not try too hard to avoid nuclear Armageddon, reasoning that it was God s plan. He might be interested to see what that would be like, down? Dr. Sagan wrote. Why slow it

Almost in the same breath, Dr. Sagan acknowledges that religion can engender hop e and speak truth to power, as in the civil rights movement in the United States , but that it rarely does. It s curious, he says, that no allegedly Christian nation has adopted the Golden R ule as a basis for foreign policy. Rather, in the nuclear age, mutually assured destruction was the policy of choice. Christianity says that you should love your enemy. It certainly doesn t say that you should vaporize his children.

When Saddam Hussein was hanged in December, those words had a haunting resonance . It was Ms. Druyan s impatience with religious fundamentalism that led her to resur rect Dr. Sagan s lectures, which were part of the Gifford Lectures, a prestigious series about natural theology that has been going on since the 19th century. Ms. Druyan, who co-wrote Cosmos and produced the movie Contact, based on her husband s novel, runs Cosmos Studio and was a leader in the aborted effort by the Planeta ry Society to launch a solar sail from a Russian submarine two years ago. Among her lesser-known achievements is a kiss on the cheek of the science writer Timot hy Ferris, which was recorded and included on a record of the sounds of Earth th at is part of the Voyager spacecraft now flying out of the solar system. She and Dr. Sagan had planned to use his Gifford lectures as the basis for a new televi sion show called Ethos, a sequel to Cosmos, about the spiritual implications of the scientific revolution. I know of no other force that can wean us from our infanti le belief that we are the center of the universe, she said. But Ethos never happened, and the lectures disappeared. In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this cou ntry, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed sinc e the time of Galileo started breaking down. A lot of scientists were mad as hell , and they weren t going to take it anymore, Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently. Some of the books that resulted, such as Richard Dawkins s The God Delusion, have be en criticized as shrill, but Ms. Druyan said: People like Carl and Dawkins are mo re serious about God than people who just go through the motions. They are real seekers. About a year ago, Ms. Druyan went looking for Dr. Sagan s lectures, eventually fin ding them filed under Ethos in his archive at Cornell, which occupies 1,000 filing cabinets and includes things like his baby pictures and report cards. Rereading them, she said, I couldn t believe how prophetic they were. It took about a day for her editor at Penguin to decide to publish them, she sai d. She retitled the book Dr. Sagan had named his lectures The Search for Who We Are s a nod to William James, whose Gifford lectures in 1901 and 1902 became the bas is for his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. Ever the questioner, Dr. Sagan asks at one point in his lectures why the God of the Scriptures seems to betray no apparent knowledge of the wider universe that H e or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is allegedly created. Why not a commandment, for instance, that thou shalt not exceed the speed of light? Or w hy not engrave the Ten Commandments on the Moon in such a way that they would no t be discovered until now, la the slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey ? If such an inscription were found, people would ask how it had gotten there, Dr. Sagan writes. And then there would be various hypotheses, most of which would be very interesting, he adds dryly. Near the end of his book, Dr. Sagan parses the difference between belief and sci ence this way: I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly un derstand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. The search for who we are does not lead to complacency or arrogance, he explains a

. It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our ex plorations tell us. Dr. Sagan was many things, but shrill was not one of them. The last word may as well go to Dr. Dawkins himself, who in a 1996 book nominate d Dr. Sagan as the ideal spokesman for Earth. In a blurb for the new book, Dr. D awkins said that the astronomer was more than religious, having left behind the priests and mullahs. He left them behind, because he had so much more to be religious about, Dr. Dawkin s wrote. They have their Bronze Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wi shful thinking. He had the universe.

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