Carl Sagan - The Varieties of Scientific Experience - A Personal View of the Search for God

Edited by ANN DRUYAN

Illustrations Editor and Scientific Consultant Steven Soter

First published in 2006

Carl Sagan was a scientist, but he had some qualities that I associate with the Old Testament. "When he came up against a wall-the wall of jargon that mystifies science and withholds its treasures from the rest of us, for example, or the wall around our souls that keeps us from taking the revelations of science to heart-when he came up against one of those topless old walls, he would, like some latter-day Joshua, use all of his many strengths to bring it down.

As a child in Brooklyn, he had recited the Hebrew V'Ahavta prayer from Deuteronomy at temple services: "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might." He knew it by heart, and it may have been the inspiration for him to first ask, What is love without understanding? And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?

The more Carl learned about nature, about the vastness of the universe and the awesome timescales of cosmic evolution, the more he was uplifted.

Another way in which he was Old Testament: He couldn't live a compartmentalized life, operating on one set of assumptions in the laboratory and keeping another, conflicting set for the Sabbath. He took the idea of God so seriously that it had to pass the most rigorous standards of scrutiny.

How was it, he wondered, that the eternal and omniscient Creator described in the Bible could confidently assert so many fundamental misconceptions about Creation? Why would the God of the Scriptures be far less knowledgeable about nature than are we, newcomers, who have only just begun to study the universe? He could not bring himself to overlook the Bible's formulation of a flat, six-thousand-year-old earth, and he found especially tragic the notion that we had been created separately from all other living things. The discovery of our relatedness to all life was borne out by countless distinct and compelling lines of evidence. For Carl, Darwin's insight that life evolved over the eons through natural selection was not just better science than Genesis, it also afforded a deeper, more satisfying spiritual experience.

He believed that the little we do know about nature suggests that we know even less about God. We had only just managed to get an inkling of the grandeur of the cosmos and its exquisite laws that guide the evolution of trillions if not infinite numbers of worlds. This newly acquired vision made the God who created the World seem hopelessly local and dated, bound to transparently human misperceptions and conceits of the past.

This was no glib assertion on his part. He avidly studied the world's religions, both living and defunct, with the same hunger for learning that he brought to scientific subjects. He was enchanted by their poetry and history. When he debated religious leaders, he frequently surprised them with his ability to out-quote the sacred texts. Some of these debates led to longstanding friendships and alliances for the protection of life.

However, he never understood why anyone would want to separate science, which is just a way of searching for what is true, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe.

His argument was not with God but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed. Science's permanently revolutionary conviction that the search for truth never ends seemed to him the only approach with sufficient humility to be worthy of the universe that it revealed. The methodology of science, with its error-correcting mechanism for keeping us honest in spite of our chronic tendencies to project, to misunderstand, to deceive ourselves and others, seemed to him the height of spiritual discipline. If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.

The idea that the scientific method should be applied to the deepest of questions is frequently decried as "scientism." This charge is made by those who hold that religious beliefs should be off-limits to scientific scrutiny-that beliefs (convictions without evidence that can be tested) are a sufficient way of knowing. Carl understood this feeling, but he insisted with Bertrand Russell that "what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite." And in all things, even when it came to facing his own cruel fate-he succumbed to pneumonia on December 20, 1996, after enduring three bone-marrow transplants-Carl didn't want just to believe: He wanted to know.

Until about five hundred years ago, there had been no such wall separating science and religion. Back then they were one and the same. It was only when a group of religious men who wished "to read God's mind" realized that science would be the most powerful means to do so that a wall was needed. These men-among them Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and, much later, Darwin-began to articulate and internalize the scientific method. Science took off for the stars, and institutional religion, choosing to deny the new revelations, could do little more than build a protective wall around itself.

Science has carried us to the gateway to the universe. And yet our conception of our surroundings remains the disproportionate view of the still-small child. We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed, unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find our actual place in the fabric of nature. We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go. That we even do science is a hopeful glimmer of mental health. However, it's not enough merely to accept these insights intellectually while we cling to a spiritual ideology that is not only rootless in nature but also, in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. Carl believed that our best hope of preserving the exquisite fabric of life on our world would be to take the revelations of science to heart.

And that he did. "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious," he wrote in his book Cosmos. "If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies you will not find another." He lobbied NASA for years to instruct Voyager 2 to look back to Earth and take a picture of it from out by Neptune. Then he asked us to meditate on that image and see our home for what it is-just a tiny "pale blue dot" afloat in the immensity of the universe. He dreamed that we might attain a spiritual understanding of our true circumstances. Like a prophet of old, he wanted to arouse us from our stupor so that we would take action to protect our home.

Carl wanted us to see ourselves not as the failed clay of a disappointed Creator but as starstuff, made of atoms forged in the fiery hearts of distant stars. To him we were "starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of 10 billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose." For him science was, in part, a kind of "informed worship." No single step in the pursuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was.

This imperative was one of the reasons he was willing to get into so much trouble with his colleagues for tearing down the walls that have excluded most of us from the insights and values of science. Another was his fear that we would be unable to keep even the limited degree of democracy we have achieved. Our society is based on science and high technology, but only a small minority among us has even a superficial understanding of how they work. How can we hope to be responsible citizens of a democratic society, informed decision makers regarding the inevitable challenges posed by these newly acquired powers?