alan wells

Last night I finished reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. I’m humbled by Carl Sagan’s capacity for insight and clarity of thought. As someone with a strong background in science but an interest in spirituality, I enjoyed hearing the thoughts of Carl Sagan as he tried to reconcile his thoughts on religion with his expertise in the sciences. A few choice words from Carl:

On questioning the value of ancient tenets passed down through the generations:

“So I claim that there are very different ways of thinking for these two circumstances: when change is slow compared to a generation time and when change is fast compared to a generation time. There are different survival strategies. And I would also like to suggest that there has never been a moment in the history of the human species in which so much change has happened as in our time. In fact, it can be argued that in many respects there never will be a time when the change can be so rapid as it has been in our generation… Very major changes, and therefore not a circumstance where the wisdom of, say, the sixth century B.C. is necessarily relevant. It might be, but it might not be. And therefore, for this reason as well – for this reason especially – wisdom may lie not in simply the blind adherence to ancient tenets but in the vigorous and skeptical and creative imagination of a wide variety of alternatives.”

On the Earth as a lifeboat:

“When you look at 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 Mount Sinai. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. It’s like living in a lifeboat. We breath the air that Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, the key question, the central question – in a certain sense the only question – is, will we?”

On why our planet is in conflict over ideologies:

“We kill each other, or threaten to kill each other, in part, I think, because we are afraid we might not ourselves know the truth, that someone else with a different doctrine might have a closer approximation to the truth. Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can’t convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. The thought that I may have dedicated my life to a lie, that I might have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to the external reality, that is a very painful realization. I will tend to resist it to the last. I will go to almost any lengths to prevent myself from seeing that the worldview I have dedicated my life to is inadequate. I’m putting this in personal terms so that I don’t say “you,” so that I’m not accusing anyone of an attitude, but you understand that this is not a mea culpa. I’m trying to describe a psychological dynamic that I think exists, and it’s important and worrisome.

“Instead of this, what we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another’s belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies an inadequacies of our own. And those deficiencies and inadequacies are very major. This is true whichever political or ideological or ethnic or cultural tradition we come from. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?”

On the impression we give to the universe through our transmissions:

“Very nearby civilizations can detect our presence, and that is because television gets out. Not just television but radar. Radar and television get out. Most of AM radio, for example, doesn’t. So let’s just look at the television for a moment. Large-scale commercial television broadcasting on Earth begins when? In the late 1940s, mainly in the United States.

“So forty years ago there’s a spherical wave of radio signals that spreads out at the speed of light, getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. Every year it’s an additional light year away from the Earth. Now, lets say that it’s forty years later, so that expanding spherical wave front is forty light-years from Earth, containing the harbingers of a civilization newly arrived in the galaxy. And I don’t know if you know about 1940s television in the United States, but it would contain Howdy Doody and Milton Bearle and the Army-McCarthy Hearings and other signs of high intelligence on the planet Earth. So I’m sometimes asked, if there are so many intelligent beings in space, why haven’t they come. (I’m just joking.) But it’s a sobering fact that our mainly mindless television transmissions are our principal emissaries to the stars. There is an aspect of self-knowledge that this implies that I think would be very good for us to come to grips with.”