Sunday marked the 80th birthday of Carl Sagan, the spiritual scientist. Author James Croft writes that Sagan, who died in 1996 at age 62, found science to be a profoundly spiritual pursuit.

For Sagan, science was not just a technical pursuit, nor was it simply about the discovery of new facts, Croft writes.

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship, Sagan wrote in The Varieties of Scientific Experience.

Croft writes, "This may be surprising to some, but one of the foremost icons of todays rationalist movement believed passionately that to preclude spirituality from a relationship with science was to demean science, as well as spirituality."

But here is Sagan's definition of Nature (with a capital N): reverence; awe; celebration; magnificence; intricacy; beauty; soaring; elation; humility; joining and merging with the Cosmos.

Sagans spiritual approach to science, Croft writes in a Religion News Service piece, is important for atheists, skeptics, and Humanists to rememberbecause it offers a different view of the relationship between science and religion than the battleground itis so often portrayed as today.

Read the rest of the story here: http://chrisstedman.religionnews.com/2014/11/09/atheists-carl-sagan-lead/

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Carl Sagan: the spiritual scientist