[In Cosmos Carl Sagan] is an enormously gifted juggler, at one time keeping aloft a dizzying melange of balls, dishes, Indian clubs, dinosaurs, and Dopplered red shifts. His ability to explain the complex in terms of the commonplace is mesmerizing; his encyclopedic knowledge is humbling; his articulateness captivates. His staff of illustrators and technicians is skilled and inventive. On camera or in print, Dr. Sagan is artfully at ease with the arcane and his love affair with the cosmos is infectious. He is an irresistibly stimulating teacher.

And there's the rub.

Dr. Sagan and the televised "Cosmos" series reached a vast audience. He intrigued adults, who since college have had to leave behind pondering the ponderous and concentrate on the more pedestrian process of making a living. And he fascinated young students, especially very intelligent students, who still have the leisure and curiosity to ask what living is for. I rejoice that Dr. Sagan has opened our parochial eyes to the enormity and variety and aliveness of the universe in which we find our meaning. But I wince at the fact that, in almost every program and chapter of Cosmos, Dr. Sagan rejects outright (and, to me, gratuitously) any possibility of a Mind behind that universe; he carps captiously at religion; he insists on the exclusivity of accident as the cause of evolution. Amid all the glorious, mind-boggling, uplifting exposition of science, there is too often a discordant sneer. Always muted, always elegant, but nonetheless a sneer.

What was its effect on the audience, especially on the bright young audience? Well, if Dr. Sagan is intimidatingly knowledgeable and articulate, he must know about that God stuff, too, right? Trying to counterbalance Dr. Sagan's subtle assertions of atheism (with $8 million of media know-how to enhance it) is like a first-grade teacher trying to upstage "Sesame Street."…

Dr. Sagan rejects out of hand even the possibility of the transcendent in the first sentence of his book: "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." Later he says, "By definition, nothing we can ever know about was outside (the physical universe)." This seems, at least to me, somewhat arbitrary, especially from a man who pleads so eloquently for openmindedness. (p. 95)

One major argument against a Designer that Dr. Sagan makes early in his text is that the fossil record indicates that some exquisitely made species have died out. "Should not a supremely competent Designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start?" He finds that "inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer." Of course. But perhaps the reason is that efficiency is not as high on the Designer's list of priorities as it is on Carl Sagan's, just as explanations meant less to the Voice from the Whirlwind than they did to Job. Perhaps the Designer just delighted in new things and, out of all eternity, 50 billion years was not too long a time to dally with them.

In searching for a word to describe the set of rules which would dictate the unchangeables, the non-negotiables, in a reshuffling of the laws of physics, Dr. Sagan says that both the words "paraphysics" and "metaphysics" have unfortunately been "preempted by other rather different and, quite possibly, wholly irrelevant activities." (The phrase "quite possibly" is the condescending smile around the sneer.) As my contemporaries can testify, I would be the first to confess the inadequacy of much of the metaphysics I struggled through for several years in the seminary, without even Leah as a reward. But the inadequacy of the symbols does not negate the presence of the reality, any more than debunking feathery hermaphrodites negates messages from God, nor Heisenberg's discovery of indeterminacy negates the usefulness of the Bohr model of the atom. If God is really there—like the New World and neutrinos—His reality is not destroyed by the inadequacy of our maps and concepts.

As a result, Carl Sagan often becomes carping about religion, occasionally even just plain snotty. Sometimes he equates it with superstition, sometimes with though control. Now it would be foolish to deny that the churches have too often taken their cues from Caesar rather than from Christ. They have at times been downright, bullheadedly obstructionist to new learning. But it is not quite decent to say, almost in an aside, "The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge." Conversely, he makes the scientific community sound universally and immediately tolerant, even to the subversion of ideas its members have long cherished, as though Tycho Brahe had embraced Kepler with open arms….

Twice, in almost the same words, Dr. Sagan writes that "until one day, quite by accident, a molecule arose that was able to make crude copies of itself." That was one shrewd molecule! And he dances gingerly away from that one….

Along the same line, Dr. Sagan writes; "It is only by the most extraordinary coincidence that the cosmic slot machine has this time come up with a universe consistent with us." And with no one to insert the silver dollar and pull the lever! "Extraordinary" is far too puny a word. That's a 10n chance. "If things had been a little different, it might have been some other creature whose intelligence and manipulative ability would have led to comparable accomplishments." He seems to assume that intelligence is inevitable. Yet the marriage of accident and inevitability is, at best, an uneasy one. (p. 96)

Chapter XI of Cosmos, "The Persistence of Memory," deals with [Sagan's presumption that all intelligent activities are reducible to the electro-chemical activity of the brain] in painstaking detail. The brain has two lobes, one which functions inferentially, one which functions intuitively. One side uses a ruler to measure the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; the other side envisions God's finger inches away from Adam's. But Dr. Sagan seems to restrict the function of intelligence to solving problems and creating, two activities at which he is extraordinarily gifted. Yet in the facility of his assertion several other exclusively human modes of acting get lost: all the activities less scientific folk associate with the human spirit. There is no place, as far as I can judge, for the very real difference between information and wisdom, between being interested and being moved, between shrewdness and love. Is it merely electrons traveling along his neurons that explain the almost palpable awe Dr. Sagan shows when he looks at the stars? I am left unconvinced….

Again and again, Dr. Sagan reminds us that the laws of Nature, the patterns of Nature, the laws of physics are always and everywhere the same. I have no quibble with that, but both lobes of my brain keep itching to know why. Both lobes rebel at the Sisyphean task of drawing order out of the fortuitous. Variety, yes, but not the immutable laws of physics, not the periodic table. And Dr. Sagan agrees, there is surely a design. But he balks at a Designer.

As a result, he is very often trapped into personifying the universe, evolution, Nature and many other nonintelligent forces as if they did have intelligence….

But personification and anthropomorphism are hazards to any popularizer trying to explain, through metaphor, realities his audience does not know in terms of realities they do know. The scripture writers found the same problem.

Dr. Sagan asserts, on the one hand, that to say God created the universe out of nothing is "mere temporizing." And yet he also suggests, on the other hand, that before the Big Bang, "all the matter and energy now in the universe was concentrated … perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all." That seems to be one micromillimeter from "nothing." Perhaps it is only words which block both Dr. Sagan and me from apprehending the same reality—just as neither "pellet" nor "wave" quite captures the reality of an electron.

A similar situation may exist in Dr. Sagan's apprehending "other universes" and my apprehending "heaven." (p. 97)

[The] analogy of black holes and time-warps—available to us now through men and women of science like Carl Sagan—might be a less inadequate metaphor to understand the Ascension than is the first-century metaphor of rising up to heaven, especially since in the Einsteinian cosmos "up" has no meaning. Jesus went into another way of existing.

In Chapter X, "The Edge of Forever," Dr. Sagan has a long and ingenious explanation of how Einstein's theory of curved space gave reality a fourth dimension beyond the length, breadth and depth we are immediately in touch with. (pp. 97-8)

If he can conceive of a fourth dimension to our reality, can he not also allow the possibility of a fifth—where the laws of physics do not apply and where space and time have no meaning? It would be a dimension we are in now, thoroughly penetrated by it yet as unaware of it as we are of the neutrinos that are knifing through us every instant—as if we weren't even here. We get intimations of this fifth nonphysical dimension—in moments of ecstasy, awe, joy, prayer—when we are "takenout of ourselves," as Paul says (again inadequately) into "the Seventh Heaven." All trustworthy receivers need not be metallic to be trustworthy. They need not be restricted even to the two lobes of the brain. The receiver of messages from the transcendent dimension is that presence within us which we have always called the human spirit. Science cannot dissect that receiver because it is not itself subject to space and time. It is the infection of God in us….

Carl Sagan is, very truly, an authority. He asks me to deny the evidence of my senses (including my "common sense") and accept the fact that the desk on which I write is not oak-solid but rather aswarm with galaxies upon galaxies of moving particles. He asks me to believe him when he tells me I am being skewered at every instant by neutrinos, which pass through the whole earth without even slowing down. He offers me antimatter, electronics moving backwards in time, black holes which flush into another universe and other entities "bizarre beyond our most unconstrained fantasies." And I accept them all, gratefully, gleefully. As I said from the outset, they liberate my imagination from my skepticism and enable it to attempt capturing God in metaphors less inadequate than those to which cosmology was limited 20 centuries ago. I accept his claim because I trust Carl Sagan's experience and veracity.

But I would like him to give more than mere condescension to my experience and veracity—to say nothing of the experiences and veracity of the great giants of the last 3,000 years….

Carl Sagan writes: "The incompleteness of our understanding humbles us." Not quite thoroughly enough, I believe. (p. 98)