Can naturalists and humanists be "spiritual," not religious? I've already enlisted Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins as yea-sayers, and Carl Sagan. Varieties of Scientific Experience, based on his 1985 Gifford Lectures ("The Search for Who We Are"), deliberately mirrors William James's famous Gifford-based Varieties.
Sagan admired James. Both were passionate about the human quest to be at home in the universe, on our pale blue dot, "the only home we've ever known."
He was a very good advocate for NASA, for science and rationality, and for the evolutionary worldview. We do speak for Earth, we have walked far.
"Two billion years ago our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening."
A quickening evolutionary pace is not flatly incompatible with NASA's 40-year detour of distraction, but isn't it really time to refocus on our next "final frontier"?
Charles Darwin (
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