Review by: the
wandering storyteller"If you want to see what's inside a blackhole -- look around."
"We are made of star stuff."
These are just a few of the fantastic but well-supported claims that
Carl Sagan made in his wonderful science book,
Cosmos, that popularized astronomy and astrophysics to thousands.
The scope of the book is staggering -- it's a history of the universe, the formation of galaxies, the birth and death of stars, the miracle of life from the terran primordial soup, the rise of mammals, the development of science, the human voyage to the stars. After billions of years of evolution, Sagan says we are finally coming home.
This theme is echoed throughout the book -- that we humans have always dreamt of the stars. For Sagan, the human race has no higher aspiration than to explore and understand the mysteries of the cosmos. And he says it with such beauty, such hope and enthusiasm that i won't be surprised to find young boys signing up for space camp after reading this book.
Sagan's language is also something to admire. He was able to simplify scientific concepts into explanations understandable by most. The book is easy enough to read that I would recommend the book as required reading for every evangelist.
When I was still a seething agnostic, one of my pet peeves are evangelists who use circular arguments to support their beliefs when they explain things to a non-believer. They argue that God exists and Jesus is Lord simply because the bible says so. Of course, for the millions who treat the bible as just a literary book and nothing more, these 'proofs' are just the babblings of narrow-minded zealots who just spew out what they've been told. The least we could do for people whom we expect to change their worldviews, I think, is to support our claims in terms relevant to them.
As an introduction on how current science explains our existence, Carl Sagan's Cosmos is a great learning tool for evangelists. That way, we can have substantial conversations with non-believers who have yet to put their faith in the bible.
In the end, I fervently wish we at the church will be versed well enough on the science of the world that we will be able to hint of something more than Carl Sagan's opening statement in his book that "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."
