I suspect Sagan shared an affinity with Bruno due to his pantheistic leanings. Cosmos, at heart, presents an almost pantheistic worldview: nature as Creator and nature as an ever-present source of awe, wonder and reverence.
Consider these quotes:
“The cosmos is all there is, or ever was, or ever will be.”
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
“I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship.”
Sagan never denied the existence of a traditional God, but I don’t think he saw a need to even posit one, because the cosmos itself provided that same spiritual experience. The universe was his cathedral.
So Bruno is important thematically because he, too, found spirituality in a cosmic worldview… and he was martyred for it.
I’ve watched the second episode now, and it’s better than the first, but still stumbled twice. It’s clear that there’s an anti-theist axe to grind.
Early in, he says that it’s tempting to think that humans are special, but aren’t. It’s an unneeded shot. The science of Evolution stands just fine on its own.
The (deserved) shot at ID was overreaching. “Evolution is not just a theory, it’s a scientific fact” was terrible, and I can’t believe it spilled out of Tyson’s face. He both muddles the terminology and lowers the value of a “scientific theory” – a fact is an observed event (finding a fossil, observing the sky, etc.) whereas a theory is the idea that ties the fact together in a predictive and descriptive cohesive model. Very disappointing.
I was, however, happy to see much more science in this one. But they should really stop the paeans to Carl Sagan. Just show the science, guys.
It still sucks. Get the terminology right. Teach, don’t preach. And have a DVD extra for Sagan or something, but enough already (I loved the original series, and some of Sagan’s books, but fer cryin’ out loud…)
Sorry, Tyson is exactly correct- as was Sagan. If you define evolution as Darwin did -, descent with modifications - it has happened and we see it happen. If you define it as speciation, we’ve seen that happen too. They are facts. The mechanism of evolution is a theory - amply demonstrated and subject to experimental verification in its broad meaning, lots of uncertainty when you get down to some of the details.
It is fine to reiterate how theory means more than creationists think it does. But it is good to mention that evolution is a fact also - especially since it is.
I was more disappointed in the entire content of Ep. 2.
I am really more interested in the physics of the universe, cosmology etc. I never saw the original series, so should I expect that although the title of the show is Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, the intent of the series is not necessarily to stay on the topic as promised by its title?
I watched the first ep and it didn’t seem to hold much promise of improving on the original, so not bothering with the rest. I hope it finds an audience though.
Didn’t like the animation. I don’t care much for reenactment, but in this case I think it would have been better. Found a explanation of why they went that route, and though I can see why they would do it, the bit about audiences being so sophisticated and conditioned by big budget costume dramas as to prefer animation is a stretch. The reenactments in the original weren’t that bad.
They should have let Neil deGrasse Tyson be himself. I find him engaging on talk shows but here, he’s being constrained, and he looks uncomfortable and unnatural. Also, it jumps around too much, the music is annoying, the futuristic spaceship thingy they keep going to, even when the subject is evolution (WTF?), and the cheapo animations are way out of place in the middle of slick images. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…
I hope younger audiences are getting more out of it than this old coot is.
I don’t know as the animations are cheap–it’s a stylistic thing, and you like it or you don’t. Mostly I do, but it seems here mostly folks don’t. That said, tonight’s episode was more or less the Cosmos Cartoon Hour–far too much of it, to say nothing of Baby Halley’s “Hell’s bells!”. On the whole, I’m enjoying it–the evolution episode was excellent. Looking forward to more
Maybe I’m just being overly sensitive (it could be), but as a pro-science religious believer, I seem to feel that Cosmos is just taking unnecessary pot shots at religion. While they mentioned (once) that Issac Newton believed in God, they seemed to imply that Newton’s calculations allowed for folks to forget about God (which, of course, only leads to people being scared of comets). All the while ignoring that Newton was against the deistic notion of God (while the cosmos was governed by mathematical laws - it was God who was behind it) and he happens to be buried at Westminster Abbey (which is kind of Christian place).
(Yes, I realize that Newton would have been considered a heretic if his true non-trinitarian beliefs were widely known - but that doesn’t diminish his actual faith in a Creator)
