SOURCE: "Science and the Sacred Cosmos: The Ideological Rhetoric of Carl Sagan," in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 71, No. 2, May, 1985, pp. 175-87.

[In the following essay, Lessl examines elements of religious discourse and rhetoric in Sagan's television program Cosmos. According to Lessl, Sagan's Cosmos provides "a mythic understanding of science which serves for television audiences the same needs that religious discourse has traditionally satisfied for churchgoers."]

A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive…. You anarchists should make it clear that you are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation. But how to get that appallingly absurd notion into the heads of the middle classes so that there should be no mistake? That's the question…. A bomb in the National Gallery would make some noise. But it would not be serious enough. Art has never been their fetish…. But there is learning—science. Any imbecile that has got an income believes in that. He does not know why, but he believes it matters somehow. It is the sacrosanct fetish.

                   —Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

The sanctity of science in modern society is perhaps greater than that observed by Conrad's fictional anarchist seventy years ago. Like the archetypal Sky Father of primitive religion, who in his union with Earth Mother brought forth the sustenance of life, science as the great modern provider is likely to be deified by the society reaping its benefits. But like other sacred objects, science is a symbol of both hope and despair. American society wavers between regarding modern science as Prometheus and as Pandora.

Although science's privileged status may result from the material benefits it affords, in many situations scientists find it expedient actively to promote their status. In such cases the intermingling of scientific and cultural symbols produces a rhetoric often more characteristic of religious than scientific discourse.

A particularly useful example is the popular television series Cosmos, written and narrated by Carl Sagan, professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University. Cosmos does not easily fit any of the descriptions previously set forth in the science-as-rhetoric literature. Clearly targeted for nonscientists, it seems to have only minimal concern for maintaining scientific integrity. While it bears marks of science journalism, Cosmos also seems not to be bothered by journalistic standards of neutrality; it is at times plainly polemic. While in the genre common to previous expeditions into science education by public television, Cosmos is a hybrid generic form; it sets the instructional elements of the series within a larger mythical framework reminiscent of numerous works of science fiction. This presentation of science, I believe, creates a mythic understanding of science which serves for television audiences the same needs that religious discourse has traditionally satisfied for churchgoers.

Science is often carefully distinguished from religion, but this differentiation is much more the consequence of the history of the conflict between scientists and the church than a conflict inherent to science and religion. Indeed, science gained a good deal of momentum in previous centuries because it was regarded as a sub-branch of natural theology which, if properly executed, could reveal God in His creation. Until science was secularized in the late nineteenth century, it was legitimated both for scientists and for the public as an enactment of religious mission. Although modern scientists are less willing to justify their work as empirical support for theological positions, science must be legitimated by the institutional powers that allow its continuation. When scientific rhetoric satisfies religious impulses, as I shall argue is the case with Cosmos, it serves two purposes—the practical purposes of maintaining the privileged status of science in society and the religious purpose of grounding faith in an unimpeachable body of knowledge.

Science in the Public Realm

Four characteristics of rhetoric as defined by [Kenneth] Burke are particularly applicable to popular treatments of the brand of science seen in Cosmos. First, rhetoric is an attempt to create consubstantiality, a sense of shared substance. For the scientist, the need for identification with a nonscientific audience creates a rhetorical dilemma, because the material of science is intrinsically foreign to the uninitiated layman, and to step outside of science to find common ground is to betray the ethos of the scientific community. In this light, one should not be surprised to find the popularizer of science regarded by his professional peers as an outcast or heretic.

Second, the situation that brings forth rhetoric will always be characterized by divisions which occur at several levels. Scientists fight a continuous political battle over allocations of funds for research programs which are increasingly expensive, while numerous critics, Senator William Proxmire being most prominent, press scientists to make other than scientific justifications for their work. Scientists are also in perennial conflict with other interest groups over control of the educational system. A salient example is the most recent resurgence of arguments over whether the biblical story of creation should be given status in public schools equal to that of the scientific theory of evolution. This confrontation must be regarded as more than just a debate centering on the differences between science and religion. The educational system is the very lifeline of science; it is the means through which the scientific community renews and socializes its membership.

Such divisions are resolved, according to Burke, through a third characteristic of rhetoric—presentation of symbols of identification through which people can mediate reality and organize their actions. The artifacts of science sometimes become the symbols of nonscientific culture (as did the mammoth Saturn rockets of the national space program), but, for the most part, the machines of scientific research are not only revered but also regarded mysteriously by the uninitiated; moreover, they rarely serve as objects of identification. Science seems to be more successful with the general public when it uses its own natural objects of inquiry (stars, planets, galaxies, living organisms) as its symbols. Unlike technological artifacts, the natural objects of scientific inquiry already have a sacred quality for the public at large and can act as common symbols uniting science and society.

Fourth, in acting together, people share a common substance; they share common sensations, concepts, images, and ideas that unite them in attitude and spirit. Rhetoric that successfully mediates between science and society symbolically brings the layman into the scientific frame of mind. The lay person needs to view himself metaphorically, "as if" he were a scientist, just as the religious believer needs to see himself as saint-like, or the political activist as an important part of the electoral process. Since the nonscientist can only participate in a limited portion of the scientific enterprise, mediational rhetoric like Cosmos is likely to focus on the underlying values and premises guiding scientific research and to identify those values and premises with public needs. The particular attention paid by Sagan to instructing the audience in the ethos of science, attention which can be construed as a rhetorical attempt to establish a common ground, sets the series apart as an explicitly persuasive venture.

Cosmos, which as a television series is comparable only to Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man after which it was modeled, is an ambitious attempt to bridge the division between the scientific community and the general public. With a budget of eight million dollars, it is the most expensive program in the history of public television. Sagan estimates that the scries has been viewed by 140 million people worldwide since its first appearance in the fall of 1980, approximately three percent of the world's population. The series, which is the joint product of Sagan's own company (Carl Sagan Productions) and KCET-TV of Los Angeles, consists of thirteen one-hour episodes. While each of the episodes is self-contained and can be viewed meaningfully in isolation, there arc numerous symbols and themes which acquire special meaning when the programs are viewed consecutively. As Carl Sagan has said, Cosmos is about science in the "broadest sense." Most fundamentally, it is an exploration of the methods and premises of science through a historical overview of science, through biographical vignettes of great scientists, and through speculations into the future of science. The thesis advanced by Sagan is that the scientific perspective, as a manner of perceiving the cosmos, is in fundamental harmony with nature itself. Sagan's concept of science as the "cosmic perspective," or natural way to knowledge, is developed as the series progresses through Sagan's various metaphoric elaborations of the concept of evolution.

Evolutionary Myth

Evolution, as the term is applied in Cosmos, might be best understood as an example of a world hypothesis or root metaphor. Just as in countless religions where human activities and experiences have divine archetypes in the eternal realm, so also in scientific messages such as Cosmos we find that the activities and experiences of the scientist have an eternal paradigm, in this instance, cosmic evolution. Conformity to evolution is the defining quality of the scientific temperament, as demonstrated in Sagan's various biographical portrayals of notable scientists in the series. Conversely, Sagan attempts to show that the failure of various individuals and societies to surrender to the progressive movement of cosmic evolution accounts for human evils and, ultimately, for the potential extinction of the species. With evolution as the empirical basis for all values in Cosmos, scientists, as the individuals best equipped to understand and interpret evolution, become by implication both seers and saints. As seers, scientists hold the keys to all cosmic secrets, making the ways of evolutionary progress known to the human species. As saints, they are in closest touch with the evolutionary essence of the cosmos; they purify the human species by their redeeming presence among us, and as teachers they bring us closer to what will pass as ultimate.

The groundwork for Sagan's evolutionary mythology is laid in the second episode of the series, "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue." Because so much is at stake (rhetorically and philosophically) with the evolutionary metaphor, Sagan spends a good deal of time reaffirming the soundness of evolutionary theory and refuting theistic notions of creation. While the validity of evolutionary theory is well established among most scientists, Sagan asserts flatly that "evolution is a fact, not a theory." Many scientists would privately agree with Sagan's statement, but within the world of scientific talk, such an assertion may be regarded as an heretical violation of the principle of falsification, and is therefore a patently unscientific statement. A factual treatment of evolutionary theory is, however, rhetorically important to the cosmic myth. By calling evolution fact, the process of evolution is removed from dispute; it is no longer merely a scientific construct, but now stands apart from humankind and its perceptual frailties. Sagan apparently wishes to accomplish what Peter Berger calls "objectification," the attribution of objective reality to a humanly produced concept. If Sagan's audience can accept the factuality of evolution, all the meanings that can thereafter be derived from evolutionary doctrine are likely to be taken as truths about the universe. The theory of evolution and the universe appear to be co-extensive.

With evolution no longer regarded as a mere human construct, but now as part of the natural order of the cosmos, evolution becomes a sacred archetype against which human actions can be weighed. Evolution is a sacred object or process in that it becomes endowed with mysterious and awesome power, a power distinct from, but yet related to, humankind. In Biblical and tribal religions, the co-extension of the human social world and the sacred cosmos was demonstrated through geneological tracings of the lineage of present members of the faith back through time to some ultimate beginning in sacred time. In this way the integrity and authority of the present social order is reaffirmed and legitimated as part of the natural order. Mircea Eliade would want to place evolution (as Sagan uses the term) outside the temporal cycles of time as a divine model within which the events or experiences of history are conceptualized. By placing history within cosmic evolution, Sagan in effect reidentifies it with nature, and thus stabilizes the transient and disordered events of the present within an eternal spectrum of evolution. The events of human history take on a new reality to the extent that they retrace natural evolutionary time.

Sagan makes his most explicit identification of scientific history and the eternal cosmic order in the second episode of Cosmos. Cosmic evolution, beginning with the "Big Bang," begets chemical evolution, which begets biological evolution, which begets human evolution, which begets scientific evolution. In such a progressive time spectrum, science is clearly made to stand at the pinnacle of history. Science is the crowning feature of evolution and is endowed with natural authority as the descendent of the cosmos. Just as the Church is regarded as the "body of Christ," and thus given its authority as the consubstantial representative of God on Earth, Sagan refers to science as the "way for the Cosmos to know itself." Scientists are the "eyes, and ears, thoughts and feelings of the Cosmos."

Neurological Hierarchy

Implicit in the "cosmization" of science is an epistemological chain-of-being rooted in the spectrum of evolution. Given its assumptions, some modes of consciousness are likely to be deemed superior to other ways of knowing because they are further along the evolutionary spectrum. The criterion for superior development is natural selection, the mechanism of evolution. Through natural selection the trait of the individual or group that is likely to allow that individual or group to survive is going to be passed on to future generations. With time, certain traits that were once serviceable for survival no longer contribute to evolutionary success. In a chain-of-being that places science at its forefront, scientific modes of thought are consequently valued and prescientific ways of thinking are regarded as deleterious to survival, if not merely obsolete. In human terms, then, conformity to scientific modes of thought becomes the standard against which good and evil are defined.

The moral superiority of science is illustrated in "The Persistence of Memory," the eleventh episode of Cosmos, where Sagan outlines an evolutionary model of the brain borrowed from biologist Paul MacLean. According to this model, the brain is divided into three parts which are hierarchically ordered on the basis of evolutionary age. The oldest portion, the R-complex or "reptilian brain," is the part responsible for what Sagan suggests are our more sinister propensities: "Aggression, ritual, territoriality, and social hierarchy." The R-complex is, for Sagan, a scientific version of original sin. The second part of the brain, the limbic system, inherited from our mammal ancestors, brings both good and bad. Sagan attributes to this part of the brain "our concern and care for the young," but also "moods and emotions" that obscure our rationality. The newest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is the seat of art and science, "the point of embarkation for all our cosmic journeys." The cerebral cortex is the biological counterpart to science, which Sagan depicts as a great library filled with loose leaf notebooks to which humans can add and subtract knowledge.

In telling his tale, Sagan is teaching more than a science lesson. His moral becomes quickly apparent. In contrast to the unlimited logicality and flexibility of the cerebrum, Sagan depicts the lower portions of the brain, "the brain's basement," as dangerously rigid, an unfortunate inheritance of outdated evolutionary "baggage":

Emotions and ritual behavior patterns are built very deeply into us. They're part of our humanity, but they're not characteristic of the human. Many other animals have feelings. What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a way of liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons, territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brain, for what we as adults want to end up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.

The inherent rectitude of the scientific mindset seems to be implied by this hierarchical view of the brain, as well as a corresponding sinfulness in what is less than scientific. Sagan depicts science as standing at the apex of evolutionary history; anything that is unscientific is anachronistic. Since the cerebral cortex is capable of liberating the individual from the bondages of the lower parts of the brain, science, as the outward expression of the cerebrum, is the way of salvation from the various human propensities for self-destruction that arise from the primitive brain and its corresponding political, religious, and social manifestations. The failure of humans to order their behavior according to this evolutionary hierarchy is the fundamental Saganian version of the fall of man.

The condition of the human species, as portrayed by Sagan, is one of evolutionary crisis brought about by the failure of the cerebral portion of the triune brain completely to subjugate the lower portions of the brain. This understanding of the human condition is implicit in Sagan's analogous comparison of these three brain systems to the evolution of modern systems of urban transportation. In the technological evolution of transportation systems, an older, outdated transit system will continue to operate during the construction (evolution) of a new system meant to replace the old, because the city (organism) cannot shut down during construction. Similarly, Sagan imagines, during the evolution of the cerebral cortex, it was necessary that the lower portions of the brain continue to function in order that the species would survive. Because of this, the lower brain portions survive, by Sagan's suggestion, as vestigial organs which must now be brought into submission to the completed cerebral cortex. If left in operation the old parts of the brain will conflict with the smooth operation of the new parts, just as an old transit system might compete with a new system.

The fact that this mandated neurological order is incomplete, finds expression throughout Cosmos in Sagan's dramatic depictions of scientific history as an epic of ongoing conflict between science and its subcortical competitors—"territoriality, and aggression, and dominance hierarchies." This depiction of the human dilemma is nowhere more clear than in Sagan's discussion of ancient Greco-Roman society, a civilization which Sagan compares to our own as having great scientific potential, but which may fail because of the reptilian influence. The villains of this drama are not the demonic emperors of Rome, nor its citizens, but the scientists, Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle, who in their contempt for the public, for experiment, and for applications of science that would serve the masses, showed the residual reptilian influences in themselves. These scientists were unable to raise the public consciousness above mysticism and superstition. Consequently, Sagan reminds us, it was the unenlightened masses who came to burn the great Alexandrian library which, for Sagan, is the key symbol of all ancient and modern learning.

Sagan's lesson is clear. Science is a redemptive enterprise, which, if turned rhetorically upon the public, can elevate society above the neurological conflict that led to the stagnation of Ionian science, and ultimately ancient civilization. Two thousand years later, the costs of this stagnation are magnified for Sagan, who believes that if the more empirically and experimentally-oriented scientists of Ionia had won out over Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle, our civilization might now be "going to the stars."

Scientific Teleology

Thus far, I have attempted to show how evolutionary thinking serves as Sagan's justification for the privileged hierarchical position of science in the cosmic scheme, and how it provides a basis for understanding the problem of evil and the related goodness of the scientific way. Evolution also operates as the scientific grounding for Sagan's teleological vision in which humankind comes to know itself through a full knowledge of the cosmos.

Throughout Cosmos, when Sagan speaks about his most fundamental premises, we find a man who fits very well into the scientific traditions of rationality and skepticism. When the subject matter is orthodox scientific theory, Sagan is hesitant to accept any argument on faith, or to ascribe other than natural causes to any phenomenon. Here Sagan seldom diverges in his description from the dominant mechanistic model of nature. But this is Sagan the scientist. When Sagan the cosmologist speaks, a different set of epistemic principles seems to be in force. Suddenly, through the subtle suggestiveness of metaphor, Sagan breathes life into the formerly dead machine universe, transforming it into a self-determining, purposive cosmos. The fact that this vitalism is given to nature through deliberate metaphor is important. The ambiguity of figurative speech allows Sagan the capacity to transgress the more rigid norms of scientific description. When Sagan refers to the early existence of a star as its "adolescence," he evokes a sense of being, and consequently purpose and meaning; but also, to the extent that he can be perceived as being "only figurative," he provides himself with a disclaimer against charges of being unscientific.

Two metaphors are of particular importance in Sagan's rhetoric. For ordinary scientific terms such as universe and evolution, Sagan substitutes the metaphors ocean and voyage. Sagan's use of the oceanic metaphor to stand, archetypally, for the scientific cosmos epitomizes the gradual reversal of the older meaning of the sea as chaos to its present more benevolent meanings. The sea is a useful scientific metaphor because of its essential connectedness to evolutionary theory, and because of the sense it has more recently achieved of being something conquerable. Translated into Sagan's cosmology, the universe becomes a familiar place, the evolutionary sea from which the human species comes. Perhaps more important, it is a sea which the human species can journey upon and thus control through science. Sagan's first episode, which is titled "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean," reveals Sagan's representation of science as a journey occurring within the almost mystical scene of macrocosmic/ microcosmic interplay:

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

In certain respects Sagan's image of the human as the microcosmic reflection of the cosmos is a naturalistic version of the Judeo-Christian idea of man created in the image of God. In both cases the belief in a fundamental identity with some absolute entity obliges the individual to behave in accordance with the character of that entity. Since the character of Sagan's cosmos is evolutionary, the appropriate business of the human species is science which actively carries on the evolutionary work of the cosmos. Sagan's journey is thus a sacred voyage, a pilgrimage to the place of our origins and beyond.

Sagan's metaphor of scientific journey would also have us draw literal parallels between science, especially space exploration, and historic seafaring. Perhaps desiring to lend support to the scientific crusade of space exploration, Sagan depicts space travel as a continuation of the oceanic exploration of past centuries, which he regards as a scientific enterprise. Sagan depicts the seventeenth century Dutch Republic, which combined a vigorous program of marine exploration with its pluralistic capitalism, as the ideal model of a scientific society. Sagan asserts that it cost the Dutch more to finance explorations in the Far East then it presently costs to send robot explorers to nearby planets. But because this society respected knowledge more than material gain, Sagan would have us believe, the Dutch Republic flourished economically. Sagan's lesson is clear: science is productive of economic and social health. By implicit contrast, current politicians who see money spent on scientific research as wasteful are a threat not only to science, but also to modern civilization as well. Again, science is depicted by Sagan as the redemptive means of humankind.

The decision to follow a vigorous program of scientific research is more than a matter of economic prosperity; for Sagan it is a question of survival. In "Who Speaks for Earth," the final episode of Cosmos, he envisions the human race standing at an intersection of choice similar to, but more severe than, that faced by the ancient Greeks, of whether to pursue science in its purity or to regress as the ancients did into subservience to the reptilian brain. The choice is not between alternative policies, but between right and wrong, knowledge and ignorance, progress or retrogression.

Like much of biblical prophecy, Sagan's prophetic vision in the final segment offers two perspectives: one of optimism and human redemption through a new scientific consciousness of cosmic citizenship, and one of apocalyptic doom through nuclear self-destruction. In presenting this message, Sagan adopts two of the rhetorical conventions of the traditional seer. First, Sagan identifies his message literally as a nightmare he once experienced. As such the message takes on a meaning of its own, as if it did not come from Carl Sagan but was passed on to him through inspiration from without. Second, Sagan adopts the perspective of extraterrestrial beings he imagines inhabiting the universe, and whom he also imagines to be morally superior to ourselves. In taking this perspective, Sagan is doing something rhetorically similar to the biblical prophet who, after uttering a moral rebuke to the people of Israel pronounces, "Thus says the Lord." Sagan gives divine authority to his analysis of the human situation by confidently attributing his own opinions to extraterrestrials who act as the scientific equivalent of deity.

In the dramatization of his vision, Sagan takes his audience, via cinematic illusion, to the outskirts of a distant planet inhabited by an advanced civilization much like our own. Though the inhabitants of this planet have the qualifications to move up the evolutionary ladder into "cosmic citizenship," they instead destroy themselves before Sagan's eyes with their own technology. Horrified, Sagan decides to return to his own planet Earth, only to find that it has also self-destructed. Sagan goes on to ponder the causes and consequences of this human tragedy from his vantage point in space as a failure to follow the scientific way:

There would be no more big questions, no more answers, never again a love for a child, no descendants to remember us and be proud, no more voyages to the stars, no more songs from the Earth. I saw East Africa, and thought: a few million years ago we humans took our first steps there. Our brains grew and changed; the old parts began to be guided by the new parts, and this made us human, with compassion, foresight, and reason. But instead we listened to that reptilian voice within us, counseling fear, territoriality, and aggression. We accepted the products of science; we rejected its methods.

Taking the judgmental mantle of the extraterrestrial, Sagan elevates himself into the prophetic office, and makes his own view of the human situation appear to be transcendent of localized considerations. As I noted previously, Sagan makes his own beliefs seem to come from some authoritative consciousness outside himself:

How would we explain all this to a dispassionate extraterrestrial observer? What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the super powers. We know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth? From an extraterrestrial perspective our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces, preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future inhabitability of the planet.

For Sagan, the tragedy of potential human extinction is magnified beyond its already unfathomable scope because it is not only the destruction of the human species but also the "waste of four billion years of cosmic evolution." Thus, to allow our species to die would be a great disservices to the cosmos that formed us, since we, as cosmic matter raised to consciousness through science, are the only way for the cosmos to come to know itself. The moral imperative of Cosmos is to think and act scientifically. This ethic is most clearly expressed in the final utterance of the series: "Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed, not just to ourselves, but to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring."

Implications

The inherent religiosity of Cosmos can best be accounted for if we view it within the context of a larger, more complex rhetorical situation. In the broadest historical spectrum, Cosmos represents an attempt to restore or to replace a culturally based scientific ethos that was originally rooted in Western religion, but gradually eroded as science became increasingly secularized in the last two hundred years.

In its history, science cannot be thought of as an expression of individual cognition or personal expertise carried out in remote isolation from social or political concerns. Science is best conceived in history as a social achievement built upon cooperative effort and sustained by the coordination of scientific and unscientific concerns. While science had its earliest inception on the mainland of Europe through Galileo and Descartes, it was in Protestant England that science seems to have taken a permanent hold, not because of some special quality of mind possessed by the British, but because of a visionary rhetoric linking scientific enterprise to the Christian mission. From the pulpits of several upper class London churches of the seventeenth century, science was preached as a weapon against the growing threat of atheism and deism, as means of positive proof of God's existence, and as the means to carry out the millennial programs of Christendom. In England, a firm foundation was constructed for modern science. Instead of being the esoteric concern of a handful of academics, science became the champion of a larger body of socially and politically powerful individuals.

At our end of the spectrum of modern scientific history stands Cosmos, a contemporary attempt to fill a vacuum left by the gradual erosion of the previous religious understandings of science's place in the unfolding human destiny. Like the formerly predominant theistic justifications for science, Cosmos is an attempt to ground science in a higher order, to place science within the realm of the sacred, and consequently to remove it from the banalities of profane existence. By speaking the words of science in a sacral mode, Sagan is responding to an enduring human need that spans not only the history of science but also human history: the need to make what is human more than human, to make the deeds of humans the deeds of the gods, to make the order of human society the order of the universe, and the hopes of the species the purposes of nature. Sagan's rhetoric is representative of what Stephen Toulmin has identified as the new cosmology, which, modifying the tradition of intellectual detachment science inherited from Cartesian dualism, reunites natural science with natural religion, giving science a voice in how humans define themselves in the greater order of things.

Unlike the previous theistic rationale for science, Cosmos is grounded in a naturalistic understanding of reality, making Sagan's religious thinking more akin to the Eastern tradition and the pre-Christian roots of Western culture than to that of the Protestant forbearers of modern science. And, in fact, when Sagan chooses to make explicit connections between his vision of science and religion, it is with Eastern religious thought that Sagan identifies. But while Cosmos is rhetoric stemming primarily from a naturalistic model, the values that dominated the older theistic vision of science still persist, albeit in different form. Cosmos might be best seen as lying in the intersection of two worldviews, one the theistic perspective that shaped early modern science but that has since gradually declined, and the other a kind of naturalism which was previously implicit in the scientific perspective, but now repeatedly comes to the surface. From the millennialism of the old theistic vision Cosmos inherits its preoccupation with progress as a value, and inherits the underlying sense of purpose it projects into the cosmos. From the naturalistic vision Cosmos brings to the viewer a sense of the relatedness between the human species and the universe, a relatedness which manifests itself in ecological values of self-preservation and respect for nature. These two fundamental visions of purpose and interrelatedness are the interpretations of a sacred text composed chiefly of evolutionary materials from within science rather than from an external text, as was the case with previous attempts to align science with popular beliefs. In the light of Cosmos, Richard Weaver's claim of pre-eminence for the god-term of "progress" is somewhat antiquated. If Cosmos is reflective of the current scientism of our society, we must recognize the equal status of a set of terms encircling a god-term of "adaptiveness."

After a lapse of about eighty years or more in which popular justifications for science were political and practical rather than religious, Cosmos represents a return to a religious rhetoric of science. This singular, but widely popular rhetoric, may represent a fundamental difficulty the scientific community faces in its interface with the nonscientific public. The increasing sophistication of scientific research places greater pressure on scientists to justify their demands for the funding of work that, while enormously expensive, is also increasingly difficult for the nonscientific public to understand and therefore appreciate. Simultaneous with the increasing financial demands that science makes on the American public is a growing moral distrust of science. A recent study by the National Science Foundation shows a rising uneasiness with science since 1957 when public support of science was boosted by the political ramifications of Sputnik. Among individuals attentive to science in the period between 1957 and 1979, the belief that the benefits of scientific research outweigh the harmful results declined from 96 to 90 percent. Among the nonattentive public the decline was from 87 to 66 percent. More significant perhaps is the rising belief that scientific discoveries tend to break down people's ideas of right and wrong. Among those who are attentive to science this belief increased during that twenty-two year period from 11 percent to 27 percent. Among the general public the increase is more alarming, from 24 percent in 1957 to 42 percent in 1979.

The popular distrust of science reflected in these figures is not a new development. Every generation has its own versions of the Faustian legend, but the contemporary versions are fueled by a new sense of mortality increasingly making its way into the human consciousness in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The scientist of popular drama is more often than not a tragic figure, a sorcerer's apprentice who freely invents, but who cannot control, the magic of his inventions. It is not scientists and science so much that people fear, but that scientists and everyone along with them will become the victims of scientific inventions. Science in the midst of a world it has technologized faces a great moral quandary. As the edifice of scientific achievements rises to the heavens, so also does the length of its shadow stretch across the earth. Science not only taught us how to systematize production, but also how to systematize the extermination of a whole people. Science not only gave the world medicine to prolong life, but also the possibility for greater numbers to starve. Science not only brought the mysteries of the atom to light, but also the atomic technology that darkens our future. Science not only empowers all that is good in the human character, but also brutality, self-indulgence, and arrogance.

The moral neutrality that scientists wish to claim for their work does not obtain in the public world where the artificial distinction between scientific work and its consequences becomes invisible. But as these consequences become more apparent, a rhetoric of science that is successfully to maintain a working relationship with the larger public that supports science must respond to the moral meanings of science in the world. Such a response moves scientific discourse from its traditional realm of the epistemic into the realm of the ethical, which means in effect into the narrative arena of public dialogue. Carl Sagan's Cosmos is one instance of this transformation. As an attempt to portray science as a righteous force, as a holy movement culminating in the cosmic drama, Sagan projects a moralistic vision of science, a theodicy vindicating the ethical integrity of the scientific way. As such, as communication not just about what is and is not but also about what is good and bad, Cosmos has its rhetorical roots in the traditions of religious discourse as much as in the scientific.