The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. by Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience:

A Personal View of the Search for God.  by Carl Sagan

A MALA 6030 report by Mitch Pryor

July 23, 2019

The topic of my project selection for MALA 6030 “Identity and Truth” was the book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan and edited by his wife Ann Druyan from archive paper translations of Sagan’s series of lectures given at Gifford University in Glasgow, Scotland 1985. The book was published in 2005 nine years after Sagan’s death.

            Druyan makes note of some of the fundamental principles behinds Sagan’s research and writings in the Editor’s Introduction that begins the book. She writes that Sagan felt that 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. Sagan believed that the little we do know about nature suggest that we know even less about God. He could never understand why someone would want to separate science, which is just a way for searching for the truth, 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 is completed. Sagan admired Philosopher William James definition of religion as a “feeling of being home in the Universe”.

The book starts out with numerous exceptional photos of space as we know it. This sets the setting for the reader to recognize how small the earth is in the entirety of the Universe. Sagan writes that he enormous scale of the universe has not been take into account in any religion especially western religions. Comparably to the whole of the universe, Earth would seem to be of little significant consequence. Many world religions posed mankind in a position of smallness compared to the vastness of a deity. However, one only has to look to the universe to feel small. Worlds live and world die in a cycle of life similar to humans. Why would an immortal God create everything around him including the basic element of the universe to eventually die? Sagan believed that science is an informed worship of a creator.

As mankind grew to understand the universe, our theological sense of being privileged diminished as we discovered the Earth and all the planets revolve around the sun and do not revolve around the Earth, our Milky Way Galaxy is not the center of the universe and that we do not live under Aristotle’s’ view of the “unchanging heavens” as early astronomers begin to see supernovas and comets. The next theological item to come in to question was the age of the earth. Theologians, again look at the earth through the aspect of human privilege, thought it be 10,000 years old while scientist unanimously agreed it to be 4.5 billion years old.

.               As science advances there seems to be less for God to do. Something that cannot be explained is always thought to be in the realm of God until scientist figure it out and the theologians give up their hold on it. If you look at all life of all species on Earth, there are only about 30 building blocks of organic molecules that give organisms their biological make-up. At the molecular level we are all virtually identical. So what sparked these properties to life? Some believe that it was the abundance of them that existed in the early history of the earth. Another theory is these elements that are germane to life were brought about by other living systems. So what if these same building blocks of life are found elsewhere in our universe?

            This discussion carried into Sagan’s thoughts on extraterrestrial life and how science fiction became popularized in the early 1900’s and how these writings turned our attitudes to extraterrestrial into a xenophobic approach in popular culture. With so many planetary systems the likelihood of extraterrestrials is very high and with our planet being in its technological adolescence the chances of them being more advanced is highly likely.

Sagan then addresses the history of God in our though process as a civilization. He ascertains that mankind may be chemically and biologically fixated on the need for a dominant deity to control their life. Sigmund Freud stated that the belief in God was nothing more that the belief in an expanded father figure.

Sagan closes the book with his fear of nuclear war. That a species that has survived millions of years of natural selection could be on the brink of extinction due to their own technological advancements. This was his greatest fear for the future man..  
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Discussion Questions:

Carl Sagan believed in a deity that was interchangeable with the laws of physics and science. Explain what you think he meant by this assertion?

Do you believe that many people are predisposed biologically or chemically for a dominant or superior being or deity to have control of their life?

Quiz Questions: 
1. What do many Western religions discount when it comes to our Universe?
2.What was Aristotle's biggest mistake when it came to assessing our solar system?
3,What theological principal of man's role on earth and in the Universe to diminish as more was learned about the Cosmos?
4.How old is our planet Earth?
5.Now many building blocks of organic molecules are at the basis of every living thing on earth?

Links of interest

Sagan's last interview before his death with Charlie Rose

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t7Uvqrh8kU

God: A Reassuring Fable -Carl Sagan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd4jTUF3CLo