Varieties of Scientific Experience: Carl Sagan on Science and God | Brain Pickings

Varieties of Scientific Experience: Carl Sagan on Science and God | Brain Pickings:

Reminding us that ignorance is the root of progress, Sagan writes:

I don’t propose that it is a virtue to revel in our limitations. But it’s important to understand how much we do not know.

He plays devil’s advocate to a common religious resistance to scientific inquiry:

Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, 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.

In the second lecture, titled “The Retreat from Copernicus: A Modern Loss of Nerve,” Sagan reminds us just how solipsistic our model of the universe and “God” is in the grand scheme of existence and cosmic time:

If the Earth is, as we certainly know it to be, 4,500 million years old and the human species at most a few million years old, probably less than that, then we have been here for only an instant of geological time, for less than one one-thousandth of the history of the Earth, and therefore in time, as in space, we have been demoted from the central to an incidental aspect.

[…]

If the very strong version of the anthropic principle is true, that is, that God—we might as well call a spade a spade—created the universe so that humans would eventually come about, then we have to ask the question, what happens if humans destroy themselves? That would make the whole exercise sort of pointless. So if only we could believe the strong version, we would have to conclude either (a) that an omnipotent and omniscient God did not create the universe, that is, that He was an inexpert cosmic engineer, or(b) that human beings will not self-destruct. Either alternative, it seems to me, is a matter of some interest, would be worth knowing. But there is a dangerous fatalism lurking here in the second branch of that fork in this road.

Science, to Sagan, is the antidote rather than the source of this fatalism. He ends the third lecture, titled “Organic Universe,” with “a beautiful little piece of poetry” by a woman in rural Arkansas named Lillie Emery who, while not a professional poet, does write poetry and had sent some to Sagan:






"My kind didn’t really slither out of a tidal pool, did we?

God, I need to believe you created me: we are so small down here."




To Sagan, Emery’s verse captures the quintessential human fear that fuels underpins both the consolation of religion and the promise — the essence — of science. He reflects:






"I think there is a very general truth that Lillie Emery expresses in this poem. I believe everyone on some level recognizes that feeling. And yet, and yet, if we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there’s nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?"