UNBELIEVING
TO THE END

Topics: Apologetics; Atheism; Belief; Death; Despair; Faith; Knowledge; Naturalism; Science; Skepticism

Reference: John 20:29

Carl Sagan was fascinated that educated adults, with the wonders of science manifest all around them, could cling to beliefs based on the unverifiable testimony of observers dead for two thousand years.

“You’re so smart, why do you believe in God?” he once asked cleric Joan Brown Campbell. She found this a surprising question from someone who had no trouble accepting the existence of black holes, which no one has ever observed.

“You’re so smart, why don’t you believe in God?” she answered.

Sagan never wavered in his agnosticism, even when he was dying. “There was no deathbed conversion,” his wife, Ann Druyan, says. “No appeals to God, no hope for an afterlife, no pretending that he and I, who had been inseparable for twenty years, were not saying good-bye forever.”

“Didn’t he want to believe?” someone asked.

“Carl never wanted to believe,” she said fiercely. “He wanted to know.”

—Jerry Adler, “Unbeliever’s Quest,” Newsweek (March 31, 1997)