carl sagan sagt hier eigentlich alles was man so sagen kann zur frage „is there any type of God to you?“. in einem satz: man muss da schon differenzieren und sehr genaue sprache benutzen. mir gefiel das alles sehr, auch die art wie fragender und antwortender miteinander umgingen. das ist bei dieser art diskussion ja nicht immer gegegebem.
weil mir das video so gut gefiel, habe ich aus der youtiube transkription und mit hilfe von chatGPT und etwas korrekturlesen einen lesbaren text erstellt. wer das auf deutsch lesen will kann ja selbst ein LLM in der nähe fragen.
Q: My question is: Given all these demotions, what is your personal religion, or is there any type of God to you? Like, is there a purpose, given that we're just sitting on this speck in the middle of this sea of stars?
Now, I don't want to duck any questions, and I'm not going to duck this one, even though I have high religious personages who are close friends of mine in this room.
But let me ask you: What do you mean when you use the word God?
Q: Well, I guess what my question is… it's like: Is there a purpose? I mean, given all these demotions, why don't we just blow ourselves up?
Why don't we?
Q: Yeah… What is our purpose?
I mean, let me turn the question around: If we do blow ourselves up, does that disprove the existence of God?
Q: No, I guess not.
I mean, it'll be a little late to make the discovery, but still, yeah…
Q: I guess what I'm asking is, since we kind of make God almost go away in this — and I don't mean he, because who knows what God is
But still, saying he makes it sort of icky, doesn't it?
Q: Yeah. It's tough.
We like it to be a he, don't we?
Q: Yeah. We've been trained to think of it as a he. It seems that through the ages, humans have created a mythological framework that has always involved some kind of higher spiritual powers.
Every human culture has done that.
Q: As that goes away — as we know more and more — it seems harder and harder to prove that anything might exist like that. Where does that leave us?
On our own.
Which, to my mind, is much more responsible than hoping that someone will save us from ourselves, so we don't have to make our best efforts to do it ourselves.
And if we're wrong, and there is someone who steps in and saves us — okay, that's all right. I'm for that. But we've, you know, hedged our bets. It’s Pascal's bargain run backwards.
I'll say another word. The word God covers an enormous range of different ideas. And you recognize that in the way you phrased the question — running from an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow (for which there is no evidence to my mind — if anybody has some, I sure would like to see it) — to the kind of God that Einstein or Spinoza talked about, which is very close to the sum total of the laws of the universe.
Now, it would be crazy to deny that there are laws in the universe. And if that’s what you want to call God, then of course God exists.
And there are all sorts of other nuances. There is, for example, the deist God that many of the founding fathers of this country believed in — although it is a secret whose name may not be spoken in some circles — a do-nothing king, the God who creates the universe and then retires, and to whom praying is sort of pointless. He's not here. He went somewhere else. He had other things to do.
Now, that's also a God. So when you say “Do you believe in God?” — if I say yes, or if I say no, you have learned absolutely nothing.
Q: I guess I'm asking you to define yours, if you have one.
But why would we use a word so ambiguous, that means so many different things?
Q: It gives you freedom to define it.
It gives you freedom to seem to agree with someone else with whom you do not agree. It covers over differences. It makes for social lubrication.
But it is not an aid to truth, in my view. And therefore, I think we need much sharper language when we ask these questions.
Sorry to take so long in answering this, but this is an important issue.