Dance at Bougival

"Dance at Bougival"
1882-83, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
-- Pierre-Auguste Renoir --
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→ TO THE DANCE ←

Sagan's Response

Questioner:
In reality He is there. God is love.

Carl Sagan:
Well, if we say that the definition of God is reality, or the definition of God is love, I have no quarrel with the existence of reality or the existence of love. In fact, I’m in favor of both of them. However, it does not follow that God defined in that way has anything to do with the creation of the world or of any events in human history. It does not follow that there’s anything that is omnipotent or omniscient and so on about God defined in such a manner. So all I’m saying is, we must look at the logical consistency of the various definitions. If you say God is love, clearly love exists in the world. But love is not the only thing that exists in the world. The idea that love dominates everything else, I deeply hope is true, but there are arguments that can very well be proposed, from a mere glance at the daily newspapers, to suggest that love is not in the ascendant in contemporary political affairs. And I don’t see that it helps to say, forgive me, that God is love, because there are all those other definitions of God, that mean quite different things. If we muddle up all the definitions of God, then it’s very confusing what’s being talked about. There is a great opportunity for error in that case. So my proposal is that we call reality “reality,” that we call love “love,” and not call either of them God, which has, while an enormous number of other meanings, not exactly those meanings.

-- from The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan --

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