When I was in high school, I idolized Carl Sagan.  After watching Cosmos on PBS, my imagination would be fired up with visions of black holes and humid primeval forests.  He filled me with wonder at the vastness of the universe and the natural miracle that is life and intelligence.  I hesitate to make comparisons between science and religion  because they tend to muddle things more than they clarify, but if science in the last half of the 20th century had a prophet or evangelizer, it was Carl Sagan.   He shed light on the mysteries of life and made the heavens accessible to the layperson.

I remember wanting to follow in his footsteps as a popularizer of science.  In my senior year of high school, I participated in the Academic Decathlon.  My speech was on the life cycle of stars, and I remember the smiles on the judges’ faces as I made references to silly putty and phoenixes.  If I remember right, that 10-minute science lecture won the highest score in the speech category for our district.

Then, at the height of my teen angst and insecurity, I converted to Mormonism, and my rationality was clouded by self-censorship of anything that challenged LDS doctrine.  Believing that death did not enter the world until after Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, I became a young-earth creationist.  Two years devoted to spreading the word of God left me little time to question these assumptions.

Fortunately, I returned to UC Irvine and began taking the science for non-majors sequence.  This was a great series because it taught the history of science in addition to the current understanding of physics, geology and other sciences.  I took cosmology from physicist and SF author Gregory Benford.  Episodes of Cosmos began flooding back into my mind as we traced the human understanding of the universe moved from the Ptolemaic, Copernican, Newtonian, to the Einsteinian models and beyond.

In my geophysics class taught by Virginia Trimble, I learned how difficult it was to break through the notion of a young, static earth to the ancient, dynamic one we have today.  It was only after overwhelming evidence from multiple disciplines deep into the 20th century did geologists accept the theory of plate tectonics.    (What’s more, I got to write a piece of science-focused fiction as an assignment.)
I credit these professors, atheist friends, websites like Talk Origins and the seeds planted in my early years by teachers like Carl Sagan for dismantling my Medieval view of the universe and for restoring my faith in the scientific method and the scientific community.  They restored my sense of wonder at nature that had been long obscured and diverted by my religious fundamentalism.

I should note that I’m not referring to my beliefs in God and Christ and Mormonism in this short narrative.  Their disintegration is another story.  I know from personal experience that you can be a liberal theist, full of questions about your religion and full of awe at the mystery of the universe.  And I can empathize with those who struggle with the seemingly impossible task of overcoming dissonance between religious dogma and prevailing scientific theories.

I hope I can be a skeptic in the mode of Carl Sagan.  He shared the astonishment and awe of the natural world in a way that most believers did not find threatening, and in so doing helped raise a generation of supporters of science.  At the same time, he had no patience for superstition and pseudo-science.  I hope that I can reach open-minded theists as much as freethinkers, and that together we can beat back the forces that would extinguish or at least diminish our yearning and awe of a strange and coldly beautiful universe.