This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Casper.com.

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Also, I did a rather long-winded rant in this one, and if you want to skip over that,

and skip over the commercials, jump over to around the 33-minute mark and you'll get right into the interview.

Alright, here we go.

Hello, friends. It is I, Duncan Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, and oh, what a magical episode we have today.

And to kick this episode off, I'm going to play a clip from an interview with Carl Sagan that was done six months before he died.

What is faith? It is belief in the absence of evidence.

Now, I don't propose to tell anybody what to believe, but for me, believing when there's no compelling evidence is a mistake.

The idea is to hold belief until there is compelling evidence, and if the universe does not comply with our previous positions,

okay, then we have the wrenching obligation to accommodate to the way the universe is.

The wrenching obligation to accommodate to the way the universe really is.

And that's coming from a man who's got about six months left to live.

He is not succumbed to the attractive and comforting idea offered to the world through so many varying religions

that when material life ceases, when organic life ceases, when the last breath leaves the body, the human does not stop existing,

but rather depending on which particular philosophy you're subscribing to, goes on to some higher plane of consciousness or has some kind of contact with the creator.

And that's a very attractive thing to start believing in when you're at the gateway of death.

But Carl Sagan was not letting himself get sucked into that paradigm, but rather was holding firm.

And for Carl Sagan, this wrenching obligation that he was talking about was obviously the wrenching obligation to accept the fact

that upon the dissolution of his body, he would cease to exist for infinity and would never have contact with those that he loved again.

This is the great terror.

This is the great ghost story of the atheist.

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