Great info on the dissonance within Sagan. As I have written elsewhere, this kind of dissonance is very common among scientists and most of the rest of us. As usual, Charles Taylor has diagnosed this condition with precision in A Secular Age. One comment from page 555: "A very common experience of living here (in the modern age) is that of being cross-pressured between the open and closed perspectives." (Open refers to the allowance for transcendence or even God, closed means strict physicalism.)