I d the future a podcast about evolution and intelligent design was a famous 20th century atheist Darwinist actually a sleeper ID agent?

We will find out.

I'm Robert Crowther and for this provocative episode of I.D. the future we're going to look at

famed atheist noted scientist one of the great popularizers of science in the 20th century, Carl Sagan. Recently, there was an article published at evolution news titled Carl Sagan, an intelligence that

antidates the universe.

And to unpack what that means, what this is all about,

we've invited today's guest, professor, writer, philosopher,

and ID proponent, all-round good guy, and ID proponent.

All-round good guy, Dr. Paul Nelson.

Welcome, Paul.

Thanks so much for inviting me on, Rob.

You know, I was struck recently by the tremendous growth of interest over the past couple of years in what are now called UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.

And in musing about this I thought back on a figure who was really

influential in my college years roughly in 1980 to 1984 and subsequently namely the

astronomer Carl Sagan who died in 1996 tragically young younger when he died in fact, than I am now.

So I'm getting along in years.

I went over to my book shelf and got my paper back copy of his novel contact off the shelf and even before I opened the book I noticed looking at it sort of side on that I had dog-eared, you know, folded over the corners of about 50 pages from when I first read the novel many many years ago and I you know I flipped to those pages and sure enough

Contact as a novel makes an argument for the detectability of intelligent cause.

In fact, you really wouldn't have a story without that premise, namely that humans can detect intelligence if it exists elsewhere in the universe.

So that set me to thinking and I wrote the piece that I did for Evolution News and now I've decided I'm going to do a follow-up piece which this

podcast is sort of a prelude to talking about some work of Saganans that was published posthumously that I think is really significant.

But anyway, I think that contact and SAGans on scientific work really does give us some insight into the methods of intelligent design detection in a way that's quite striking because Sagan himself was of course a lifelong skeptic of religion and what he saw his superstition and he would have included, I think, intelligent design in that category.

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