The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

the country to this mad scheme. A system that has to work perfectly to protect the country and which can never be tested. Trust us. It'll be fine. Don't worry about it.

Questioner: Can religious beliefs adapt to the future?

CS: Well, it's certainly an important question. My feeling is, it depends on what religion is about. If religion is about saying how the natural world is, then to be successful it must adopt the methods, procedures, techniques of science and then become indistinguishable from science. By no means does it follow that that's all that religion is about. And I tried to indicate at the end of my last lecture some of the many areas in which religion could provide a useful role in contemporary society and where religions, by and large, are not. But that's very different from saying how the world is or came to be. And there the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions have simply adopted the best science of the time. But it was a long time ago, the time of sixth-century B.C., during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. That's where the science of the Old Testament comes from. And it seems to me important that the religions accommodate to what has been learned in the twenty-six centuries since. Some have, of course, to varying degrees; many have not.

Questioner: [inaudible]

CS: The god that Einstein was talking about is completely different, as I've tried to say several times in these lectures, from the standard Judeo-Christian-Islamic god. It is not a god who intervenes in everyday life, no microintervention, no prayer. It's not even clear that this god made the universe in the first place. So that's a very different use of the word 'god' than what is, I gather, your attempt to justify the existing religion. That we have to use our sense organs and our intellectual abilities to comprehend these issues, I think, is apparent. Perhaps they are limited, but it's all we have. So do the best with what we have. Don't foist, I say, our predispositions on the universe. Look openly at the universe and see how it is. And how is it? It is that there's order in there. It's an amazing amount of order, not that we have introduced but that is there already. Now, you may choose to conclude from that fact that there is an ordering principle and that God exists, and then we come back to all the other arguments: Where did the ordering principle come from? Where did God come from? If you say that I must not ask the question of where God came from, then why must I ask the question of where the universe came from? And so on.

Questioner: Professor Sagan, I'd like advice, please. Is there anything you think an individual could do to change in some way the world situation, or should we just sit back and accept it?

CS: Nope, you don't have to sit back. I think if we let the governments do it, we will continue in the very desultory direction we have already been going for forty years or more. I think the first thing, in a democracy, where there is at least some pretense about the people controlling government policy, is that every democratic process ought to be used. You can make sure that those whom you vote for have rational views on these matters. You can work hard to make sure that there is a real difference of opinion in the alternative candidates. You can write letters to newspapers and so on. But more important than any of that, I believe, is that each of us must equip him- or herself with a 'baloney-detection kit.'

That is, the governments like to tell us that everything is fine, they have everything under control, and leave them alone. And many of us, especially on issues that involve technology, such as nuclear war, have the sense that it's too complicated. We can't figure it out. The governments have the experts. Surely they know what they're doing. They must be in favor of the support of our country, whichever our country happens to be. And anyway, this is such a painful issue that I want to put it out of my mind, which psychiatrists call denial. And it seems to me that that is a prescription for suicide, that we must, all of us, understand these issues, because our lives depend on them, and the lives of our children and our grandchildren. That's not an issue you want to take on faith. If ever there was a circumstance in which the democratic process ought to take hold, this is it. Something that determines our future and all that we hold dear. And therefore I would say that the first thing to do is to realize that governments, all governments, at least on occasion, lie. And some of them do it all the time-some of them do it only every second statement-but, by and large, governments distort the facts in order to remain in office.

And if we are ignorant of what the issues are and can't even ask the critical questions, then we're not going to make much of a difference. If we can understand the issues, if we can pose the right questions, if we can point out the contradictions, then we can make some progress. There are many other things that can be done, but it seems to me that those two, the baloney-detection kit and use of the democratic process where available, are at least the first two things to consider.

Questioner: [inaudible]

CS: Right. You say everyone in this room has felt aggression. Surely that's right. I'm sure it's right. There may be a few saints in the room… and I very much hope that there are. But at least almost everyone in the room must have felt it. But I also maintain that everyone in the room has felt compassion. Everyone in the room has felt love. Everyone in the room has felt kindness. And so we have two warring principles in the human heart, both of which must have evolved by natural selection, and it's not hard to understand the selective advantage of both of them. And so the issue has to do with which is in the preponderance. And here it is the use of our intellect that is central. Because we're talking about adjudicating between conflicting emotions. And you can't have an adjudication between emotions by an emotion. It must be done by our perceptive intellectual ability. And this is the place where Einstein said something very perceptive. In response-this is post-nuclear war, post-1945-in response to precisely the question you have just formulated, in which Einstein was saying that we must give the dominance to our compassionate side, he said, 'What is the alternative?' That is, if we do not, if we cannot manage it, it is clear that we are gone. We're doomed. And therefore we have no alternative. Certainly untrammeled, continuing aggression in an age of nuclear weapons is a prescription for disaster. So either get rid of the nuclear weapons or change what passes for social relations among humans.

But even getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether will not solve this problem. There will be new technical advances. And already there are chemical and biological weapons that could perhaps rival some of the effects of nuclear war. So this is a very key aspect of what I was thinking when I said we are at a branch point in our history, in the sense of who we are. I maintain it's not a question of sudden change, that we have been compassionate for a million years, and it's a question of which part of the human psyche the governments-and the media, and the churches, and the schools-give precedence to. Which one do they teach?

Which one do they encourage? And all I'm saying is that it is within our capability to survive. I don't guarantee it. Prophecy is a lost art. And I don't know what the probabilities are that we will go one way or another. And no one says it's easy. But it is clear, as Einstein said, that if we do not make a change in our way of thinking, all is lost.

Acknowledgments

Editing these lectures afforded me, for precious moments at a time, the happy delusion that I was working with Carl once again. The words he spoke in these lectures would sound in my head and it felt wonderfully as if we had somehow been transported back to the two heavenly decades when we thought and wrote together.

We had the pleasure of writing several of our projects, the Cosmos television series among them, with the astronomer Steven Soter, our dear friend. Since Carl's death Steve and I wrote the first two planetarium shows for the magnificent Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Once I had turned Carl's Gifford Lectures into a book, I invited Steve to join me in editing the final drafts. We felt sure that Carl would not have wanted us to use the 1985 slides from the lectures. Astronomers have seen farther and more clearly since then. Steve found the gorgeous images that replace them. He also wrote the scientific updates that appear in the footnotes. I am grateful to him for his many editorial contributions to this book.

Ann Godoff has been our editor ever since Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl's favorite among all the books he and we ever wrote. She also edited Carl's Pale Blue Dot, The Demon- Haunted World, and Billions & Billions. It was her recognition that the Gifford Lectures should become a book that made The Varieties of Scientific Experience possible. Her imagination and wit made the process of that transformation a pleasure. I thank her colleagues at the Penguin Press, art director Claire Vaccaro, and Ann's assistant Liza Darnton for all they did for the book and for me. I am grateful to Maureen Sugden for her meticulous and thoughtful copyediting.