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by Carl Sagan

“You scientists are so shy,” Rankin was saying. “You love to hide your light under a bushel basket. You’d never guess what’s in those articles from the titles. Einstein’s first work on the Theory of Relativity was called ‘The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.’ No E=mc2 up front. No sir. ‘The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.’ I suppose if God appeared to a whole gaggle of scientists, maybe at one of those big Association meetings, they’d write something all about it and call it, maybe, ‘On Spontaneous Dendritoform Combustion in Air.’ They’d have lots of equations; they’d talk about ‘economy of hypothesis’; but they’d never say a word about God. “Y’see, you scientists are too skeptical.” From the sidewise motion of his head, Ellie deduced that der Heer was also included in this assessment. “You question everything, or try to. You never heard about ‘Leave well enough alone,’ or ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ You always want to check out if a thing is what you call ‘true.’ And ‘true’ means only empirical, sense data, things you can see and touch. There’s no room for inspiration or revelation in your world. Right from the beginning you rule out of court almost everything religion is about. I mistrust the scientists because the scientists mistrust everything.”