The late atheist astronomer Carl Sagan was famous for his declaration in the opening line of his 1980 book Cosmos (on which the television series was based) that "The Cosmos is all there is, all there ever was and all there ever will be."
That Sagan was presenting a creed for a substitute religion is apparent from his capitalization of Cosmos. The cosmos is Sagan's ersatz God. It's the ultimate reality in his ontology, the source of all else that exists. He regarded the universe as the only self-existing, eternal being, one which required no transcendent Creator to account for its existence.
This is a remarkable thing for an astronomer to say since he was writing some fifteen years after the discovery of the cosmic background radiation that pretty much proved, to the extent that scientific theories can be proven, the reality of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang was the event in which the universe came into being so it had a beginning and is not eternal. Nor is it uncaused since whatever begins to exist must have a cause that pre-exists the effect and which therefore transcends the effect.
The universe, then, did not cause itself and therefore must have been caused by something that transcends space, time and matter which means that the cause itself must be spaceless, timeless and immaterial. Moreover, it must be enormously powerful and intelligent to have created the exquisitely fine-tuned universe in which we find ourselves.
This sounds a lot like the theistic concept of God, but Sagan had little time for the Judeo-Christian God whom he mockingly described as "an outsized, light-skinned male, with a long white beard." Perhaps he gleaned this childish concept from viewing Michelangelo's depiction of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but, in any case, it's astonishingly naive.
Sagan believed, furthermore, that we have a moral duty to the cosmos from which we sprang. He believed, oddly, that we have an obligation to the universe to survive.
This is silly, and it calls to mind Chesterton's aphorism that when men cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
It's nonsense to speak of an obligation to an impersonal entity. One may as well speak of a duty one has to gravity or to friction. If we have obligations of any sort they can only be to other personal beings. Impersonal objects like trees or universes have no duties to personal beings and personal beings can have no duties to impersonal objects.
Sagan's Cosmos was enormously influential to at least two generations of young people. The series was shown in middle school and high school science classrooms by science teachers all across the country for three decades, and may still be.
Yet the metaphysical message Sagan tried to inculcate in the minds of young students, the message that belief in the traditional God can no longer be sustained in a scientific age and that instead our worship should be directed to the "Sun and stars" is philosophically absurd.
