On the 10th anniversary of his death, brilliant astrophysicist and Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sagan offers a prescient exploration of the relationship between religion and science and his personal search for God.

Carl Sagan, considered one of the greatest scientific minds of our time, had a remarkable ability to explain science in terms easily understandable to the layman. In bestselling books such as Cosmos, The Dragons of Eden, and The Demon-Haunted World, he won a Pulitzer Prize and placed himself firmly next to Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, and Oliver Sachs as one of the most important communicators of science.

In December 2006, Ann Druyan, his widow and longtime collaborator, marked the occasion by releasing Sagan's famous "Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology," The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. The opportunity to give the Gifford Lectures is an honor reserved for the most distinguished scientists and philosophers of our civilization. In 1985, on the grand occasion of the centennial of the lectureship, Carl Sagan was invited to give them. He took the opportunity to set down in detail his thoughts on the relationship between religion and science and to describe his own personal search to understand the nature of the sacred in the vastness of the cosmos.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience, edited, updated, and with an introduction by Ann Druyan, is like eavesdropping on a delightfully intimate conversation with the late great astronomer and astrophysicist. In his charmingly down-to-earth voice, Sagan discusses his views on topics ranging from manic depression and the possibly chemical nature of transcendence to creationism and so-called intelligent design to the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets to the likelihood of nuclear annihilation of our own, and a new concept of science as "informed worship."

Exhibiting a breadth of intellect nothing short of astounding, he illuminates his explanations with examples from cosmology, physics, philosophy, literature, psychology, cultural anthropology, mythology, theology, and more. Sagan's humorous, wise, and at times stunningly prophetic observations on some of the greatest mysteries of the cosmos have the invigorating effect of stimulating the intellect, exciting the imagination, and reawakening us to the grandeur of life in the cosmos.