Carl Sagan’s scientific search for God, revisited

THE VARIETIES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE: A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE SEARCH FOR GOD

By Carl Sagan

Penguin Press, $27.95, 284 pages.

REVIEWED BY ERNEST W. LEFEVER

Carl Sagan, the well known and articulate astronomer, has few peers in popularizing the rapidly unfolding developments in the heavens. “The Varieties of Scientific Experience,” a highly readable volume edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and longtime collaborator, marks the 10th anniversary of Mr. Sagan’s death.

The book includes his Gifford Lectures, delivered at Glasgow University in 1985, and his brisk answers to questions from the audience. In response to the question, “I thought science was a servant of mankind and not mankind a servant of science,” Mr. Sagan replied: “[If I had] left my science outside the door as I walked in, I would have appeared before you naked.”

The book’s title is a knockoff on William James’ influential “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902). Mr. Sagan admired James’ definition of religion as a “feeling of being at home in the Universe.” His widow said his scientific experience was characterized by “oneness, humility, community, wonder, love, courage, remembrance, openness, and compassion.” Quite a bouquet.

Actually there were three different Mr. Sagans — the disciplined scientist in search of verifiable facts, the confused pilgrim in search of God and the apocalyptic crusader.

As a popularizer of knowledge about the universe he had few peers. His language is vivid, convincing and, pardon the phrase, down to Earth. I can understand him. When students at Glasgow asked about the mysterious Bermuda Triangle or about those who believe the Shroud of Turin dates to the time of Jesus, he gave common sense, i.e. scientific, answers.

As a very young child, like Mr. Sagan and millions of others, I pondered the mysteries of the heavens. Was the universe always here? If not, where did it come from? Who or what created it? And is Earth the only place with intelligent life? All great questions that Mr. Sagan discusses, but which neither he nor science can answer.

Acknowledging the limits of the scientific method, Mr. Sagan says that astrophysicists convincingly assert that the universe is expanding, but admit they don’t know why. That question lies beyond the ken of verifiable science.

When Mr. Sagan ventures into these age-old and essentially religious questions he runs into trouble. The subtitle of his book, “A Personal View of the Search for God,” suggests far more than he is able to deliver. His approach is that of a confused pilgrim. He might even be called a “reverent agnostic,” a term Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once applied to himself after hearing a summer sermon by his friend, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. And certainly a reverent agnostic is easier to live with than an arrogant, self-righteous, know-it-all “believer.”

Mr. Sagan never claims to have found God. But he toys with the idea. He rather likes Einstein’s view of God “as the sum total of the laws of physics,” over the those who see God “as an outsize male with a long white beard, sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow.” Repeatedly, he says the burden of proof rests on those who claim that God exists.

Brought up in a Jewish family, Mr. Sagan affirms the justice and compassion embraced in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but he does not believe this ethic needs to be rooted in a belief in God. He has no problem with “Jesus as a historical figure in the same sense as Mohammed and Moses and Buddha.”

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