Let’s have a closer look at each of them.

1. What does it mean to be created in the Creator’s own image? Surely not that the Creator is a discrete entity as we think that we are. First, it is false that we are discrete entities. We are interconnected and interdependent, not just in a figurative sense but in a literal sense as well at least because our energy fields interact with the energy fields of everything else on the planet and, by extension, everything else in the universes. Second, we only think that we are separate entities because our true nature is filtered through and obscured by the action of our five senses. Plus the more we come to rely exclusively on the five senses, the more we allow our intuitive faculties to atrophy.

It is these intuitive faculties that bring us to an awareness of our true divine image and that is that within each of us is the capacity to know God directly. Hatha Yoga and other Eastern disciplines are aware of a subtle energy system that is much if not more a part of us than our physical system. Such disciplines have as their purpose the optimization of those energy systems for the express purpose of manipulating the subtle energy circulating therein so that ever increasing spiritual knowledge becomes available to us and we come to know our own divine nature as well as the nature of God. The entire purpose of the New Testament is also bring us to an awareness of our inner divinity. The Sermon on the Mount lays out the methodology of developing that awareness.It is that sense of inner divinity that enables us to say that we are created in God’s image.

2. When one knows themselves directly to be divine cosmic consciousness and lives as that consciousness, then they are able to suspend the so-called laws of nature as they will. This ability to rise above the supposed limits of the laws of nature is an offshoot of the spiritual development process referred to above. Scriptures, especially Vedantic scriptures, caution the spiritual aspirant to ignore such abilities, because to linger and play with them is likely to lead to a resurgence in ego and a detour from the spiritual path. Such abilities are seen as part of the process but a part that should be ignored until well along the spiritual path. History is littered with fallen spiritual leaders who succumbed to their special abilities because they are were not firmly grounded in their spiritual nature. History also provides with thousands of examples of saints and sages who did use these powers to suspend natural ‘laws’ but who did so for the benefit of others.

3. The third supposed demotion is difficult. Are humans radically different from animals because ‘we have “reasoning, self-consciousness, tool making, ethics, altruism, religion, language, nobility of character”.’? The evidence is still out on whether we alone possess those qualities. It may that animals have them as well but in ways that we have not yet understood. Or, it may be that animals posssess those qualities but because of a density of consciousness are not able to know this. We all know people who are not aware of their nobility of character or who seem to lack a sense of ethics and altruism and are without a sense of religion or spirituality. In fact, we seem to be in a period of increasingly acknowledging the higher functions of animals just as we are in a period of exploring our own higher functioning, just witness the rise in popularity of Yoga, Buddhism, and meditation practices of all kinds as direct rebuff of the claims of dominance of science and scientists.

4. As for Sagan’s other ‘demotions’, they are merely a letting go of mistaken notions. They signify not a demotion, but, in fact, a rise in the subtlety of our consciousness that leads to an increased willingness to let go of outdated pretensions of knowledge and enter the unknown without fear or ego. For Sagan to characterize the release of error and rise of consciousness as demotion is curious to say the least. One could even say that Sagan is dead wrong and a victim of his own ego, his over-reliance on science, and his hubris in his ability to think and reason. But reveling in one’s ability to think and reason is childish and akin to a young child being fascinated with their excretory processes.

I haven’t read the book, but without knowing the context, my take on this sentence is quite different from yours. Meaning, like value, is a quality of experience/awareness, and not of the universe itself. A thing has value because self-aware beings value it. A thing has meaning because self-aware beings perceive that meaning–arguably even create its meaning in the act of perception.

The point is not how important we are, but that value and meaning are not intrinsic to the universe. To one who takes the universe as being intrinsically meaningful, the statement that “We are the custodians of life’s meaning” might seem unhumble. To me it is one more demotion: a humble confession that our mage of a meaningful universe is simply a projection of our experience onto everything that exists.

But perhaps I’m reading my own views into Sagan. I should pick the book up sometime.

james

B. F. Skinner wrote, “We are not justified in assigning to anyone or anything the role of prime mover. Although it is necessary that science confine itself to selected segments in a continuous series of events, it is to the whole series that any interpretation must eventually apply.” Alan Watts, referring to these words, wrote “This passage is the purest mysticism, which might have come straight from…the Dharmadhatu doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism, that the universe is a harmonious system which has no governor,…nobody is in charge of it.” (References: “Science and Human Behavior” 1953 pp. 448-9; “The Individual as Man/World” in “The Psychedelic Review” 1963 1(1) 55.)

Causal chains don\’t originate in humans, despite the nearly universal tendency of humans to speak that way. The source of human meaning-constructing activity is usefully described as the environments of which the activity is a function, rather than as some activity or characteristic of humans. There is no entity to which things happen - we are the happening. There is no autonomous agent, no intelligent design, no miracles - just the universe rolling downhill, commenting on itself along the way.

It is not clear to me whether this describes Carl Sagan\’s views, but he did reject the assertions that humans have special immunity from the laws of nature, and that we are different in kind from other animals.