Atheism is Pantheism: A Reflection on Carl Sagan’s Ipsedixitisms

First things first: Let us define an ipsedixitism. According to Wikipedia, an ipsedixitism is “a term used to identify and describe a sort of arbitrary dogmatic statement, which the speaker expects the listener to accept as valid” (source). From what we are spoon fed by secular “authorities” such “arbitrary dogmatic statements” should only be found among the religious/religious fanatics and not the reflective, scientifically (read: TRUTH) oriented purveyors of pure gnosis.

Yet consider the following statements made by popular science writer Carl Sagan, a hero to self-identifying skeptics, agnostics, and atheists worldwide (although there is some question as to how Sagan identified his own position toward religion in general, see here).

1. “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

2. “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

3. “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”

4. “The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding.”

These words are more akin to what one would expect to find in a mystic’s notebook than what one would expect to find in the mouth of a so-called religious skeptic/agnostic/atheist. Let us consider the meaning and implication of these little gems.

1. Humans are unique and precious. Elsewhere, we are told by this high priest of scientism that humans are made in the image and likeness of the Cosmos. As it is written: “We are, each of us, a little universe.” (2nd Cosmos, Neil DeGrasse Tyson)

2. The cosmos is self-aware, i.e. conscious. In other words, the cosmos is a living, thinking, being which may be appropriately identified as actus purus (see here). In other words, again, the cosmos is the kind of God Sagan was deluded enough to think he had no faith in.

3. The cosmos is eternal, unchanging, omnipotent, and incomprehensible. These are theological terms, mind you, which Sagan is predicating of the cosmos. In other words, yet again, Sagan is openly deifying the cosmos, worshiping it as that being greater than which nothing can be conceived (see here for more information on who Christians have identified with such a being).

4. The cosmos is eternal and beyond human comprehension. The cosmos is, in the parlance of religious folk, God, endless in duration and incomprehensible (see here for more on God’s incomprehensibility).

There is a reason why the Scriptures say that no man is an atheist. Reading Sagan’s words of gnostical wisdom, are we not led to conclude that he has “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:23)?

Carl Sagan, and those who think his ipsedixitisms are true, was not an atheist. No man is an atheist. For if the cosmos, i.e. materiality, is all there is, then the cosmos is one’s God. Atheism, as it predicates divine attributes of materiality (i.e. the cosmos) is pantheism operating under a different vocabulary.

This is called self-delusion. And the Scriptures teach that there is only one way to be free from such delusional thinking: Repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins.

Christ alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Triune God who created the seemingly eternal, seemingly unfathomable, and seeming omnipotent cosmos is truly all powerful, endlessly living, actus purus. He alone is all wise. He alone guides, molds, and shapes the course of history and the destinies of all things.

Worship him, or worship an idol.

[For more on Carl Sagan’s foolish ipsedixitisms, see John W. Robbins’ paper “The Sagan of Science.”]

-h.