“Why Is God Telling Me to Stop Asking Questions?”

Meet the Woman Behind Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos”
Ann Druyan, "Cosmos" creator and widow of Carl Sagan, on science vs. religion--and men getting credit for her work.


As the host of the recently concluded series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” – now availableon home video, if you missed it – Neil deGrasse Tyson became, along with America’s most prominent astrophysicist, the public face of science in its effort to recapture the public imagination. But although Tyson is an important author in his own right, he didn’t conceive, write or produce “Cosmos.” He essentially served the role of an actor or a news anchor, a charismatic and credible figure reading someone else’s words off a Teleprompter. Those words, and damn near everything else about the show, were the work of Ann Druyan, the writer and executive producer who also co-created the original “Cosmos” series with her late husband, Carl Sagan,more than 30 years ago.

Druyan does not personally seek the limelight and is not a celebrity, but in her own way she’s a key cultural figure in the struggle against the popular antagonism to science and the spread of anti-scientific claptrap about climate change and evolution. Those on the creationist or anti-evolutionist fringe who understood the unstinting scientific arguments of “Cosmos” as a direct attack on their beliefs were entirely correct, but Druyan’s critique of religion goes well beyond the literal-minded idiocy of the Answers in Genesis crowd. She describes herself as an agnostic rather than an atheist – based on the premise that science must withhold judgment on questions it cannot answer – but she has also described religious faith as “antithetical to the values of science” and religion in general as “a statement of contempt for nature and reality.”

Druyan is well aware that many religious people would reject those characterizations, and those snippets may make her philosophical approach sound less generous and open-minded than it really is. While she is profoundly uncomfortable with the artificial wall between the domains of science and religion erected by Stephen Jay Gould’s famous pronouncement that they are “non-overlapping magisteria,” she welcomes discussion of seemingly indefinable and unscientific concepts like sacredness and spirituality. Those things are to be found at a capacious and more evolved level, she argues, by leaving behind “our infantile sense of centrality in the universe,” in which we are the precious offspring of a benevolent protector, and instead shifting our focus to the profound and immense mysteries presented by “13 billion years of cosmic evolution and four and a half billion years of the story of life on this planet.”

During my all-too-brief phone conversation with Druyan, we also discussed her brilliant rereading of the story of the Garden of Eden, which she sees as the story of humanity’s escape from “a maximum-security prison with 24-hour surveillance.” Adam and Eve’s 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. There are certainly currents within the major religious traditions that resist such a simple-minded negation of science – Buddhism, Judaism and the Catholic Church are now OK, generally speaking, with both evolution and cosmology – but Druyan’s provocative critique of religion as a distorting social force is well worth considering even if you think her argument is too sweeping.

http://www.alternet.org/culture/why-god-telling-me-stop-asking-questions-meet-woman-behind-neil-degrasse-tysons-cosmos