Sagan titled his lectures The Varieties of Scientific Experience to situate them in deliberate dialogue across space and time with the Gifford Lectures pioneering Harvard psychologist William James (January 11, 1842–August 26, 1910) had delivered eight decades earlier. Assumption is a species of belief, or rather the genome of all belief - which is why Sagan himself asserted in his superb meditation on science and religion, based on his 1985 Gifford Lectures in Scotland, that “if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.” “I live my life with the idea that the universe can be described by a set of physical laws that are quantifiable and knowable, and that they apply anywhere in the universe, and that’s an assumption,” NASA astrophysicist Natalie Batalha - a modern-day Carl Sagan - reflected in our On Being conversation.
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