“THE VARIETIES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday,
All
If I say the phrase, “billions and billions and billions. . .” I am guessing that the majority of us in this room this morning would immediately shift our minds to one person. Those of us who were of majority age in or around 1980 came to know through popular culture the name Carl Sagan, an astronomer and astro-chemist who hosted an enormously popular PBS series called “Cosmos,” which explained what science knows about the way the universe works, its origins and its laws. Sagan would become perhaps the world’s best known popularizer of science to the masses. He loved to astound his audiences by explaining the almost inconceivable vastness of the universe – thus his much imitated tag-line became “billions and billions and billions,” and it was frequently lampooned as a punch-line by Johnny Carson, the cast of Saturday Night Live, and any comedian who could say the phrase with their tongue in their cheek but maintain the deepest sound of sincerity. Sagan died in 1996.
But aside from his celebrity in popular culture, Carl Sagan inspired many people to explore science more earnestly. He raised the stature of science in public education, and in his work for NASA he was directly responsible for not just a few of the successes of the space program.
Last Fall, one of our church members shared with me a little treasure he discovered. What I am calling “treasure” is a book by the late popular scientist Carl Sagan published posthumously last year, entitled The Varieties of Scientific Experience. It’s subtitle is: A Personal View of the Search for God.
I didn’t know the book existed. I call it a treasure for several reasons aside from its contents. First of all Carl Sagan was skilled in explaining technical scientific materials to people like me, who think they understand things they don’t. The book is a surprisingly easy read for us amateurs.
Another reason
it was a treasure is that this book is the transcription of Sagan’s Gifford
Lectures. The annual Gifford Lecture
series is perhaps the most distinguished event in the academic study of
religion, dating back to the 1880s. The
lectures are delivered at universities in
Like many treasures, Sagan’s book remained hidden for quite some time. He delivered these lectures in 1985, and they were not published until last year – over twenty years later – transcribed and edited by his widow and colleague, Ann Druyan, under the title “Varieties of Scientific Experience,” as a nod of respect to William James. Sagan’s original title for these lectures was “The Search for Who We Are.”
The first few chapters are classic Sagan. They describe the shocking vastness of the universe we live in. Our solar system of sun and planets is located in an almost unnoticeable corner of the Milky Way galaxy. Sagan’s phrase is that our sun is located in the “galactic boondocks” of our galaxy. It wouldn’t even draw much of our attention if we didn’t happen to live there because our galaxy contains many billions of other stars with their solar systems of planets. Our huge galaxy is itself lost in a universe of similar galaxies numbering in the hundreds of billions. Thus: “billions and billions and billions.”
At first one might wonder what all this has to do with the search for religious identity. He begins with this, I suppose, because the size of the complexity of our universe is almost beyond comprehension. But once we look at it the way it really is, the most appropriate way of thinking about nature is with a sense of awe. He quotes with approval Einstein’s famous observation when he said, “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”
Sagan seemed to find in the universe something of a parallel to the human concept of the divine. We stand humbled and mystified by the grandeur and beauty of nature we study. At one point he says it this way:
“Many religions have attempted to make statues of their god very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up (at the night sky) if we wish to feel small. . . . Edward Young, in the eighteenth century, said, “An undevout astronomer is mad,’ from which I suppose it is essential that we all declare our devotion at risk of being adjudged mad.
He spends a good portion of the book critiquing the common human concepts of God. In doing so, he seems unimpressed with the traditional ideas of a personal God of omnipotent power and personal judge of human behavior. He shows how, in his idea, these views are far too limited and bounded by the restraints of human thought and imagination. In his words:
“A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.” p. 30
While being unimpressed with most traditional concepts of God, he was warm to the kind of God proposed by Einstein and the 17th century philosopher Spinoza. Their idea of God, Sagan thought, was entirely compatible with science. By “God,” Sagan wrote,
“By God they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God. . . Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us.”
If the most common definition of God is simply that – “a power greater than any of us” – then the scientific discovery of the astounding powers that nature reveals fits that definition better than almost anything.
Throughout his career, Sagan urged the scientific perspective to overcome not only anthropocentrism, which means to study nature primarily from the human experience of it, but also geo-centrism, which is to think of the universe itself as mirror of what we find here on earth. How easy it was, for example, to look through a telescope at Mars and, seeing long straight lines across the landscape, infer that they are canals – with the implication that canals are constructed by intelligent beings. That is geocentrism and anthropocentrism.
And just as he warns against science being fooled by these mistakes, how much more religions have carried the same errors – imagining God to be like us, with emotions like anger and jealously, with a wish to be worshipped, with a divine plan to be played out in human life. That is an anthropocentric God, and the universe gives us no reason to jump to such conclusions.
There is also a geocentrism in religion. It began by believing that the earth was the center of creation, and the stars rotated around this planet, for which God held a special interest. It can also be found in the religious impulse, especially in the Western religions, to treat the earth as our possession and that it was created for human needs.
These longstanding religious ideas, he says, are now archaic, and there remains no justification for following them. What we can assume about a god, if one exists he said, is that what would be most godlike in human behavior would be an appreciation of that creation, and a passionate interest to study and understand it.
“If a Creator God exists,” he wrote, “Would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.” P. 31
Sagan was, by any measure, a humanist in his philosophical approach to life. Any reliance on the supernatural was, for him, a mistake. But he would not, I think, fit neatly with the kind of hard-edged humanist ideas surprisingly published in a set of books made popular last year: Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” Sam Harris, “The End of Faith,” or Christopher Hitchens, “God Is Not Great.“
I spoke on the phenomenon of these books last year, the surprising fact that boldly atheistic books have become best-sellers. I came to a conclusion that was not entirely embraced by everyone here. Each author makes persuasive critiques religions, about their irrational creedal beliefs and their destructive histories against those who have opposed them. Those critiques are true and deserve to be repeated. Yet I also found their approach often to cross a fine line which separates critique from diatribe.
My conclusion, when I spoke of Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith,” for example, was that what we should fear is not religious faith at all, but rather “dogmatism” in all its forms: religious, political, and secular. And to the extent that these writers present their ideas dogmatically, they are different from their fundamentalist foes only in content rather than form.
There is nothing dogmatic or harsh about Sagan’s critique of religion. He had the same problems that the others have about the superstitions and the sorry history of oppression and violence in religions. He also shares with them the view that traditional ideas of God are often deeply mistaken and sometimes dangerous. Yet Sagan finds, as they do not, some positive contribution religion has made and can make to the progress of human society. He treats the subject with respect.
He notes that
people of religious conviction played a significant role in the abolition of
slavery. They were also important in the
independence movement in
“are able to provide role models, to demonstrate that acts of conscience are creditable, are respectable. . . . Religions can speak truth to power. It’s a very important function that is often not carried out by all the other sectors of society. . . Religion has a long history of brilliant creativity in myth and metaphor. Religions can combat fatalism. They can engender hope. They can remind us that we are all in this together.”
He was writing in the early 80s, before the end of the cold war, and much of his thought was directed against the possibility of the destruction of human civilization through nuclear weapons. His critique, though, extends also to what he sees as a religious responsibility to care for the planet we inhabit. His is a call for the ethical religious spirit to understand our fragile relationship to the nature which is that great power beyond us.
“Not all religions have this perspective on the stewardship of the Earth by men and women, but they could. The idea is that this world is not here for us only. It is for all human generations to come. And not just for humans. . . . I remind you of the elementary fact that we breathe the waste products of plants, and plants breathe the waste products of humans. A very intimate relationship, if you think about it. And that relationship is responsible for every breath you take. We in fact depend on plants, it turns out, a lot more than the plants depend on us. So that sense that this is a world that is worth taking care of is, it seems to me, something that could be at the heart of religions that wished to make a significant contribution to the human future.”
What comes through in these lectures is not only Carl Sagan’s familiar sense of enthusiasm, but also his deeply imbedded optimism. His review of the human stories is a tale of progress. His fear is that we may cut that progress short. Here is an example of that overview of humanity:
“We (human species) started hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago as itinerant tribespersons, in which the fundamental loyalty was to a very small group by contemporary standards. Typical hunter-gatherer groups are may a hundred people, so the typical person on the planet had an allegiance to a group of no more that a hundred or a few hundred people.
“The names that many of these tribes give to themselves are touching in their narrowness. All over the world, people call themselves ‘the people,’ ‘the men,’ ‘the humans.’ And all other tribes, they are people, they aren’t men, they aren’t human. They are something else. . . .
“As time passed, groups have merged, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, and the unit to which personal identification and loyalties are due has grown. The sequence is known to all of those who take courses in the history of civilization, in which we pass through allegiances to larger groups, to city-states, to settled nations, to empires. Today the typical person on the Earth is obviously a patchwork quilt of political, economic, ethnic, and religious identifications, owing allegiance to a group or groups consisting of a hundred million people or more. It is clear there is a steady trend, and if the trend continues, there will be a time, probably not so far in the future, when the average person’s identification is with the human species, with everyone on Earth. Pp. 214-215.
The first part of his lectures contained his familiar and popular discussions of the nature of the universe in which we live. Those lectures were preparation for the follow-up discussion of how important it is for human religion to get away from creed and nurture a sense of stewardship toward nature. That imperative means to honor science and learning above all, for that is how we will know our place in history and the universe.
“There is a worldwide closed-mindedness that imperils the species,” he wrote. “. . . We have the Ten Commandments in the West. Why is there no commandment exhorting us to learn? ‘Thou shalt understand the world. Figure things out.’ There is nothing like that and very few religions urge us to enhance our understanding of the natural world.”
As I mentioned earlier, the original title of this lecture series was “The Search for Who We Are.” The key word here is “search,” and to read Sagan is to feel that there is something sacred about that search. He quotes with approval Tolstoy’s comment that “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.” Sagan then observes that:
“This two-pronged investigation into the nature of the world and the nature of our selves is, to a very major degree, I believe, what human enterprise is about.” P.213.
But given the limitations of the human mind, Sagan approaches that sacred search from a position of humility. In a way, it is that sense of humility that he urges to be incorporated not only in the religious quest, but also within the varieties of scientific experience. He closes his lectures with these words:
“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. (The search) 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.” P. 221
“Varieties of Scientific Experience”
By Carl Sagan
I think that the perspective of the Earth in space and time is something with enormous, not just educational but moral and ethical, force. I believe it is lucky for us that this is the time when pictures of the Earth from space are fairly routinely available. We look at them on the evening weather reports and hardly pause to think what an extraordinary item that is. Our planet, the Earth, home, where we come from, seen from space. And when you look at it from space, I think it is immediately clear that it is a fragile, tiny world exquisitely sensitive to the depredations of its inhabitants. It’s impossible, I think, not to look at that planet and think that what we are doing is foolish.
We are spending a million million dollars every year, worldwide, on armaments. A million million dollars. Think of what you could do with a million million dollars. A visitor from somewhere else – the legendary intelligent extraterrestrial – dipping down to the earth and inquiring what we are all about and finding such prodigies of human inventiveness and such enormous fractions of our wealth devoted not just to the means of war but to the means of massive global destruction – such a being would surely deduce that our prospects are not very good and perhaps go on to some other, more promising world.
When you look at
the Earth from space, it is striking.
There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator
and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political
separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human
manufacture. They have not been handed
down from