Broca's Brain (47 page)
Authors: Carl Sagan
I think it is wise, when coming face to face with such profound mysteries, to feel a little humility. The idea that scientists or theologians, with our present still puny understanding of this vast and awesome cosmos, can comprehend the origins of the universe is only a little less silly than the idea that Mesopotamian astronomers of 3,000 years ago—from whom the ancient Hebrews borrowed, during the Babylonian captivity, the cosmological accounts in the first chapter of Genesis—could have understood the origins of the universe. We simply do not know. The Hindu holy book, the Rig Veda (X:129), has a much more realistic view of the matter:
Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it?
Whence was it born, whence came creation?
The gods are later than this world’s formation;
Who then can know the origins of the world?
None knows whence creation arose;
And whether he has or has not made it;
He who surveys it from the lofty skies,
Only he knows—or pernaps he knows not.
But the times we live in are very interesting ones. Questions of origins, including some questions relating to the origin of the universe, may in the next few decades be amenable to experimental inquiry. There is no conceivable answer to the grand cosmological questions which will not resonate with the religious sensibilities
of human beings. But there is a chance that the answers will discomfit a great many bureaucratic and doctrinal religions. The idea of religion as a body of belief, immune to criticism, fixed forever by some founder is, I think, a prescription for the long-term decay of the religion, especially lately. In questions of origins and ends, the religious and the scientific sensibilities have much the same objectives. Human beings are built in such a way that we passionately wish to answer these questions—perhaps because of the mystery of our own individual origins. But our contemporary scientific insights, while limited, are much deeper than those of our Babylonian predecessors of 1,000
B.C.
Religions unwilling to accommodate to change, both scientific and social, are, I believe, doomed. A body of belief cannot be alive and relevant, vibrant and growing, unless it is responsive to the most serious criticism that can be mustered against it.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution encourages a diversity of religions but does not prohibit criticism of religion. In fact it protects and encourages criticism of religion. Religions ought to be subject to at least the same degree of skepticism as, for example, contentions about UFO visitations or Velikovskian catastrophism. I think it is healthy for the religions themselves to foster skepticism about the fundamental underpinnings of their evidential bases. There is no question that religion provides a solace and support, a bulwark in time of emotional need, and can serve extremely useful social roles. But it by no means follows that religion should be immune from testing, from critical scrutiny, from skepticism. It is striking how little skeptical discussion of religion there is in the nation that Tom Paine, the author of
The Age of Reason
, helped to found. I hold that belief systems that cannot survive scrutiny are probably not worth having. Those that do survive scrutiny probably have at least important kernels of truth within them.
Religion used to provide a generally accepted understanding of our place in the universe. That surely has been one of the major objectives of myth and legend,
philosophy and religion, as long as there have been human beings. But the mutual confrontation of differing religions and of religion with science has eroded those traditional views, at least in the minds of many.
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The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves—without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. We cannot begin with an entirely clean slate, since we arrive at this problem with predispositions of hereditary and environmental origin; but, after understanding such built-in biases, is it not possible to pry insights from nature?
Proponents of doctrinal religions—ones in which a particular body of belief is prized and infidels scorned—will be threatened by the courageous pursuit of knowledge. We hear from such people that it may be dangerous to probe too deeply. Many people have inherited their religion like their eye color: they consider it not a thing to think very deeply about, and in any case beyond our control. But those with a set of beliefs they profess to feel deeply about, which they have selected without an unbiased sifting through the facts and the alternatives, will feel uncomfortably challenged by searching questions. Anger at queries about our beliefs
is the body’s warning signal: here lies unexamined and probably dangerous doctrinal baggage.
Christianus Huygens wrote a remarkable book around 1670 in which bold and prescient speculations were made about the nature of the other planets in the solar system. Huygens was well aware that there were those who held such speculations and his astronomical observations objectionable: “But perhaps they’ll say,” Huygens mused, “it does not become us to be so curious and inquisitive in these Things which the Supreme Creator seems to have kept for his own Knowledge: For since he has not been pleased to make any farther Discovery or Revelation of them, it seems little better than presumption to make any inquiry into that which he has thought fit to hide. But these Gentlemen must be told,” Huygens then thundered, “that they take too much upon themselves when they pretend to appoint how far and no farther Men shall go in their Searches, and to set bounds to other Mens Industry; as if they knew the Marks that God has placed to Knowledge: or as if Men were able to pass those Marks. If our Forefathers had been at this rate scrupulous, we might have been ignorant still of the Magnitude and Figure of the Earth, or that there was such a place as America.”
If we look at the universe in the large, we find something astonishing. First of all, we find a universe that is exceptionally beautiful, intricately and subtly constructed. Whether our appreciation of the universe is because we are a part of that universe—whether, no matter how the universe were put together, we would have found it beautiful—is a proposition to which I do not pretend to have an answer. But there is no question that the elegance of the universe is one of its most remarkable properties. At the same time, there is no question that there are cataclysms and catastrophes occurring regularly in the universe and on the most awesome scale. There are, for example, quasar explosions which probably decimate the nuclei of galaxies. It seems likely that every time a quasar explodes, more than a million worlds are obliterated and countless forms of life, some of them intelligent, are utterly destroyed. This is not the
traditional benign universe of conventional religiosity in the West, constructed for the benefit of living and especially of human beings. Indeed, the very scale of the universe—more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars—speaks to us of the inconsequentiality of human events in the cosmic context. We see a universe simultaneously very beautiful and very violent. We see a universe that does not exclude a traditional Western or Eastern god, but that does not require one either.
My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts (as well as unable to take such a course of action) if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival. In either case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent with both science and religion, and is essential for the welfare of the human species.
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White seems also to have been responsible for the exemplary custom of not awarding honorary doctoral degrees at Cornell University: he was concerned about a potential abuse, that honorary degrees would be traded for financial gifts and bequests. White was a man of strong and courageous ethical standards.
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Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods. It is a curious concept this, of an omnipotent God with a long list of things he is forbidden to do by the fiat of the theologians.
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It is a charming notion that Napoleon actually spent his days aboard ship perusing the highly mathematical
Mécanique céleste.
But he was seriously interested in science and made an earnest attempt to survey the latest findings (see
The Society of Arcueil: A View of French Science at the Time of Napoleon I
by Maurice Crosland, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967). Napoleon did not pretend to read all of the
Mécanique céleste
and wryly wrote to Laplace on another occasion, “The first six months which I can spare will be employed in reading it.” But he also remarked, on another of Laplace’s books, “Your works contribute to the glory of the nation. The progress and perfection of mathematics are linked closely with the prosperity of the state.”
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However, from astronomical arguments Aristotle concluded that there were several dozen unmoved prime movers in the universe. Aristotelian arguments for a prime mover would seem to have polytheistic consequences that might be considered dangerous by contemporary Western theologians.
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This subject is rich in irony. Augustine was born in Africa in 354
A.D.
and in his early years was a Manichean, an adherent of a dualistic view of the universe in which good and evil are in conflict on roughly equal terms, and which was later condemned as a “heresy” by Christian orthodoxy. The possibility that all was not right with Manicheanism occurred to Augustine when he was studying its astronomy. He discovered that even the leading figures in the faith could not justify its murky astronomical notions. This contradiction between theology and science on matters astronomical was the initial impetus moving him toward Catholicism, the religion of his mother, which in later centuries persecuted scientists such as Galileo for trying to improve our understanding of astronomy. Augustine later became Saint Augustine, one of the major intellectual figures in the history of the Roman Catholic church, and his mother became Saint Monica, after whom a suburb of Los Angeles is named. Bertrand Russell wondered what Augustine’s view of the conflict between astronomy and theology would have been had he lived in the time of Galileo.
AND THE TURTLES
Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
,
Henry V
, Act IV, Prologue
IN THE EARLIEST
myths and legends of our species, there is a common and understandable view of the cosmos: it is anthropocentric. There were gods, to be sure. But the gods had feelings and weaknesses and were very human. Their behavior was seen as capricious. They could be propitiated by sacrifice and prayer. They intervened regularly in human affairs. Various factions of gods supported opposing sides in human warfare. The
Odyssey
expresses a generally held view that it is wise to be kind to strangers: they may be gods in disguise. Gods mate with humans, and the offspring are generally indistinguishable, at least in appearance, from people. The gods live on mountains or in the sky, or in some subterranean or submarine realm—at any rate, far off. It was difficult unambiguously to come upon a god, and
so it was hard to check a story told about the gods. Sometimes
their
actions were controlled by more powerful beings yet, as the Fates controlled the Olympian gods. The nature of the universe as a whole, its origin and fate, were not considered well understood. In the Vedic myths, doubt is raised not only about whether the gods created the world but even about whether the gods know who
did
create it. Hesiod in his “Cosmogony” says that the universe was created from (or maybe by) Chaos—perhaps only a metaphor for the difficulty of the problem.
Some ancient Asian cosmological views are close to the idea of an infinite regression of causes, as exemplified in the following apocryphal story: A Western traveler encountering an Oriental philosopher asks him to describe the nature of the world: