Re-watched the movie, Contact, and was pleasantly surprised

[brandon1984]

I re-watched the movie, Contact, last night and was taken aback by how much it made of the science and religion debate. I did not remember it being this way! The movie was based on a novel by Carl Sagan. I enjoyed the way the debate is depicted especially all of the confounding tensions between the inner experience and the external reality. At the end (no spoilers) the main character as an atheist scientist (Jody Foster) who was intellectually honest and a God-believing writer (Matthew McConaughey) were each other's greatest advocates. Sagan was an atheist and could have made it more of an "us vs them" tribalism but to make it complex by exposing tensions on both sides and drawing them together by human experience. . . it was beautiful.

[ArcticFox]

You should read the book. In the book, the aliens reveal that they have discovered a pattern in pi (after a few million digits) that conclusively prove the universe is a product of intelligent design. Sagan may have been an atheist, but in his novel, God created the universe.

[brandon1984]

Wow, fascinating. Maybe he wasn't an atheist and was agnostic. That seems more likely now that I read his quotes. Even as an agnostic, if the content of the movie is a good representation of the book, I give him credit for doing a good amount of justice to the topic.