{"id":1296,"date":"2014-06-19T19:56:56","date_gmt":"2014-06-20T02:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=1296"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:56:22","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:56:22","slug":"ann-druyan-on-cosmos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2014\/06\/19\/ann-druyan-on-cosmos\/","title":{"rendered":"Ann Druyan on Cosmos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Salon: Interview by film critic Andrew O\u2019Hehir of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2014\/06\/18\/why_is_god_telling_me_to_stop_asking_questions_meet_the_woman_behind_neil_degrasse_tysons_cosmos\/\">Comos writer and executive producer Ann Druyan<\/a>. Neil deGrasse Tyson was the visible host, but he didn\u2019t write the show; Druyan, the widow of Carl Sagan, did.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<b>You\u2019ve been pretty outspoken over the years about your views of religious myth and its relationship to science. You\u2019ve talked at times about the desire to reclaim some of the sense of mystery or daring or even spirituality that could hypothetically be associated with science. Is this show to be considered as part of that struggle, as an attempt to recapture the mystery and power of science in the public imagination?<\/b><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s beautifully said. And you know, I could speak to that. Yes, I mean, what always has surprised me personally is that the revelations about nature and the universe that science has presented to us are not just, you know, more likely to be better approximations of natural reality than we\u2019ve gotten from any other source, but they\u2019re also way more spiritually satisfying than anything we\u2019ve ever been able to make up. You know, our interpretations of nature that are not rooted in nature at all and that are anthropocentric are kind of the infantile idealized visions of us as the center of the universe. As the children of a very disappointed father. [Laughter.]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Infantile, yes. <\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m fascinated by the reference to Druyan\u2019s<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nbrilliant rereading of the story of the Garden of Eden, which she sees as the story of humanity\u2019s escape from \u201ca maximum-security prison with 24-hour surveillance.\u201d Adam and Eve\u2019s capital offense is that they seek knowledge and ask questions, precisely the qualities that define the human species. At least in that story, God appears to demand a subservient and doctrinaire incuriosity, and many of his followers continue to insist on that path to this day.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And am not sure where her exegesis was published, but I\u2019ll try to track it down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Salon: Interview by film critic Andrew O\u2019Hehir of Comos writer and executive producer Ann Druyan. Neil deGrasse Tyson was the visible host, but he didn\u2019t write the show; Druyan, the widow of Carl Sagan, did. You\u2019ve been pretty outspoken over &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2014\/06\/19\/ann-druyan-on-cosmos\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1297,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions\/1297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}