 |
 |
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
Projects: Space InformationBook Review: Finding Sagan's Godby Michael Shermer
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search
for God If you do not believe in God, where do you get your spirituality? Given today's religious climate, the question is reasonable, and I am asked it, in one form or another, at every public lecture that I give. My answer to the question: If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists? Through a natural process of evolution, and an artificial course of culture, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on Earth, the only home we have ever known. The realization that we exist together for a narrow slice of time and a limited parsec of space, potentially elevates us all to a higher plane of humility and humanity, a provisional proscenium in the drama of the cosmos. These are the final words of a booklet I wrote titled The Soul of Science, which was inspired by the writings of Carl Sagan, the most spiritual scientist of our generation. Thanks to the efforts of his widow and longtime collaborator Ann Druyan, we now have the definitive statement by Carl of his position on God, religion, and spirituality in the context of a scientific worldview. The Varieties of Scientific Experience is a lightly edited transcript from the original lectures written and presented by Sagan at the University of Glasgow for the 1985 Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology. This prestigious series has hosted some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, including Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Alfred North Whitehead, and Albert Schweitzer. Those who recall the inimitable voice of Sagan, with his punched syllables and dramatic pauses, will hear it again in these chapters. "There was plenty of laughter during these lectures," Druyan recalls, "but also the kind of pin drop silence that comes when the audience and the speaker are united in the thrall of an idea." There is, arguably, no more enthralling idea than that of God -- or what that concept represents in terms of the ultimate questions about nature and life -- which Sagan characteristically addressed in a rigorously logical and scientific manner. Consider how Carl begins Chapter 6, "The God Hypothesis," with a definitional challenge: "If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say 'God.' This turns out not to be easy." Think of all the possible worlds that open up when gods are allowed into our thinking: "Worlds without gods, gods without worlds, gods that are made by preexisting gods, gods that were always here, gods that never die, gods that do die, gods that die more than once, different degrees of divine intervention in human affairs, zero, one, or many prophets, zero, one, or many saviours, zero, one, or many resurrections, zero, one, or many gods." Sagan was an agnostic. Nevertheless, Druyan makes this interesting observation: "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." Like many of the Old Testament rabbis who extolled the virtues of searching for the truth as being even higher than finding it, Sagan closes this magnificent volume with these stirring words of wisdom: I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. I think this search does not lead to a complacent satisfaction that we know the answer, not an arrogant sense that the answer is before us and we need do only one more experiment to find it out. It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us. Amen! -- Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and the author of Why People Believe Weird Things, How We Believe and The Science of Good and Evil. His latest book is Why Darwin Matters. |
||||||
 |
 |
||||||
[ what is this? ]