Carl Sagan on The problem of hell

Carl Sagan's engagement with hell appears in The Demon-Haunted World (1995) and in scattered interviews and lectures. He did not devote a book to the doctrine, but his general framework — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and ideas should be evaluated by the standards of reason and kindness — leaves little room for eternal conscious torment to survive scrutiny.

Sagan noted the cross-cultural ubiquity of hell-like ideas and treated this not as evidence for an underlying reality but as evidence of a recurring human strategy for social control. Societies that could not enforce their norms through earthly power extended the enforcement beyond death. He regarded this as understandable but not credible: the wide spread of the idea tracks human psychology rather than cosmic fact.

On the moral question, Sagan was characteristically gentle but firm. He frequently spoke of the vastness of the cosmos and the smallness of human life within it, and argued that the idea of a God who would subject conscious beings to unending torment did not scale to such a universe. A morality worthy of the cosmos, he suggested, would be marked by compassion and humility, not by threat.