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

by Carl Sagan

  Well, I would like now to tell you about one of the most extraordinary studies on this subject that I know of, which is one of the few cases where not just supposed miraculous events occurred but where they were studied in great detail by a team of observers, who infiltrated the religious group in order to do sociological research. They convinced the group that they were there because they were also believers. This is an extremely interesting case, because the prophecies, every one of them, failed utterly. And those are not the cases we tend to hear.

  The story comes from a book called When Prophecy Fails, by [Leon] Festinger et al. It was published in the middle 1960s and refers to events that occurred in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the early 1950s. A woman in Minneapolis believed that she was receiving a message by automatic writing. Do you know what automatic writing is? It happens to people all over the world. It's where the hand with the pen or pencil in it seemingly takes on a life of its own and writes things when, as far as anyone else can see, the person who belongs to the hand is asleep or doing something else. There seems little doubt that the person who is attached to the hand is responsible for what is happening on the paper. But it has an eerie sense of happening not just unconsciously but from some external source. In this case the automatic writing was from Jesus-or at least a modern incarnation of him-who was resident on an otherwise undiscovered planet called Clarion. The message was urgent. It said that a flood would inundate the Earth (despite the biblical promise made to Noah), on the twenty-first of December, would cover most of the United States and the Soviet Union, among other nations, and would raise the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu. Spacemen from the planet Clarion would arrive before the flood to rescue the faithful, take them up on the flying saucers, and bring them to Clarion.

  The group that formed around the woman who did the automatic writing were ordinary people, in no sense obviously deranged. One of the leaders of the group was a physician who was examined by psychiatrists, I guess on the grounds that for a physician to believe this was extraordinary but for anyone else it was expected. He was adjudged to be entirely sane although "holding unusual ideas." The group received numerous messages-six or eight-advising them to be present at a certain time in a certain place to be picked up by flying saucers before the event, and, as will be no surprise to you, the Clarionites never appeared. If they had appeared, you would have heard of it before now. The flood itself also never appeared, although earthquakes in several parts of the world occurred within a day of the predicted inundation, and that was taken by the enthusiasts in the group to be a partial confirmation of the flood.

  As you can imagine, the failure of the flood on December 21 produced some consternation in the group but by no means led to the group falling apart. They responded wholeheartedly to a subsequent automatic-writing message that they were to sing Christmas carols in the cold outside the house of one of their leaders, preparatory to still another UFO pickup, which they did, surrounded by a crowd of some two hundred taunting onlookers and police to separate them from the onlookers. They showed great dedication, great courage. But a skeptical approach to the world, they cannot be said to have exhibited.

  Now, as to their understanding of how it is that they were not picked up, there were several sets of explanations, and I'll just list them: They had misunderstood the message (although it said in plain English what they were to do and it was signed "Jesus" or "God Almighty"). Another explanation was that they had been insufficiently dedicated, that their faith had not been strong enough. Or that all this was merely a test by the extraterrestrials to see how committed they were and that the extraterrestrials never intended to flood the Earth, just to test their faith. Or that the predictions were entirely valid but they got the date wrong. It would happen ten thousand years later… a small mistake. Or that the inundation would have happened but the coterie of the faithful sufficiently impressed God with their faith that God intervened on behalf of mankind, and we're all alive because these people had believed strongly enough.

  All these explanations are not mutually consistent, but they show a remarkable inventiveness and a striking unwillingness to change a set of beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence. Eventually most of the adherents drifted away from the movement, but even those who left first had repeatedly shown heroic fidelity in the face of what they call "disconfirmation," to say nothing of external skepticism. It's clear that mutual support within the belief system was central to the success, however short-lived, of the faith.

  There was no charismatic leader here. No ambitious scoundrel. It was automatic writing and ordinary people. Indeed, the group cast about looking for guidance. They thought that spacemen from Clarion must be around them in the most unlikely contexts. For example, there were a bunch of leather-jacketed, motorcycle-riding young men who had come to scoff, whom they immediately took to be the angels from Clarion. And likewise the members of the social-science research team, who had infiltrated the movement trying to understand how religious movements get started, were also taken as angels from Clarion. This posed all sorts of challenges to the proper detachment of scientist from subject.

  Most of these people had previously been involved in other borderline religions or pseudoscientific groups, including UFO clubs, spiritualists, Dianetics, which has since transmogrified into something called Scientology, and so on. But it is the very ordinariness of this group that I believe gives some real insights into the origins of religion. Let me quote the concluding sentences by Festinger et al.:

  They were unskilled proselytizers. It is interesting to speculate, however, on what they might have made of their opportunities had they been more effective apostles. For about a week they were headline news throughout the nation. Their ideas were not without popular appeal and they received hundreds of visitors, telephone calls and letters from seriously interested citizens as well as offers of money which they invariably refused. Events conspired to offer them a truly magnificent opportunity to grow in numbers. Had they been more effective, disconfir-mation might have portended the beginning and not the end.

  Suppose they'd had a charismatic leader. Or suppose that by chance there had been a spectacular UFO sighting at the time of the predicted inundation, for example, an Air Force test of a new kind of aircraft. Or suppose that the message that came from Clarion was not just that there was going to be a flood but something powerful, something moving, something that spoke to an oppressed minority in the United States or elsewhere. Then I think we can see the possibility that the Clarion religion would have grown into something much larger. If we look at recent religions-and let me restrict myself to those that have more than a million adherents-we find, for example, one that confidently predicted that the world would end in 1914. Unambiguous. And when the world did not end in 1914 (as far as one can tell it has not), they did not argue that, oh, they made a small mistake in arithmetic, it was actually 2014, hope no one was inconvenienced. They did not say that, well, the world would have ended, but they were sufficiently faithful that God intervened. No. They said, and it is still the major tenet of their faith, that the world did end in 1914 and we simply haven't noticed yet. This is a religion with millions of adherents, currently in the United States.

  Or there is a religion that says that all diseases are psychogenic, that there is no such thing as a microorganism producing disease. There is no such thing as a cellular malfunction producing a disease, that the only thing that produces disease is not thinking right, not having adequate faith. And I need not remind you that there is a significant body of medical evidence to the contrary.

  There is a religion that believes that in the nineteenth century a set of golden tablets was prepared by an angel and dug up by a divinely inspired human being. And the tablets were written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and had on them a hitherto-unknown set of books like those in the Old Testament. And, unfortunately, the tablets are not available for any scrutiny these days, and in addition there is powerful evidence of conscious fraud at the ti
me that the religion was founded, which led, last week, to two people being killed in the state of Utah, having to do with some early letters from the founders of the religion that were inconsistent with doctrine.

  Or there is a religion that believes that if you only have enough faith, you can levitate. I mean, that you can bodily float off the ground and propel yourself. It has many practical applications, if only it were true. These are perfectly typical tenets or aspects of modern religions.

  And if that is true, what about ancient religions? After all, there is a much greater distance in time between us and those earlier religions. And that means that there are much larger opportunities for fraud and for changing the disquieting details. I remind you that rewriting history is done all the time. To give an example-there are so many-one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution was a man named Lev Davidovich Bronstein, also known as Leon Trotsky. He founded the Red Army, he established the modern Soviet railroad system, he was the founder and first editor of Pravda, he played a leading role in both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions, but he does not exist in the Soviet Union. He's not there. You cannot find anything about him. There is no picture of him. In a two-volume Soviet history of the world, he appears once, as having inappropriate agricultural views. Otherwise unmentioned. They have simply written him out of the history of their own revolution, in which he played an absolutely central role, second perhaps only to that of Lenin. So now imagine that a religion is founded not just a few decades ago but a few centuries or a few thousand years ago, in which the received wisdom passes through a small group-a small priesthood. Think of the opportunities for changing disquieting facts in the interim. David Hume says,

  The many instances of forged miracles and prophecies and supernatural events, which in all ages have either been detected by contrary evidence or which detect themselves by their absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvelous and ought reasonably to beget a suspicion against all relations of this kind. It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, that such prodigious events never happen in our day, but it is nothing strange that men should lie in all ages.

  And then on the point that I was just making, he says,

  In the infancy of new religions the wise and learned commonly esteem the matter too inconsiderable to deserve their attention or regard. And then when afterwards they would willingly detect the cheat in order to undeceive the deluded multitudes, the season is now past and the records and witnesses which might clear up the matter have perished beyond recovery.

  Well, it seems to me that there is only one conceivable approach to these matters. If we have such an emotional stake in the answers, if we want badly to believe, and if it is important to know the truth, then nothing other than a committed, skeptical scrutiny is required. It is not very different from buying a used car. When you buy a used car, it is insufficient to remember, that you badly need a car. After all, it has to work. It is insufficient to say that the used-car salesman is a friendly fellow. What you generally do is you kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the hood. If you do not feel yourself expert in automobile engines, you bring a friend who is. And you do this for something as unimportant as an automobile. But on issues of the transcendent, of ethics and morals, of the origin of the world, of the nature of human beings, on those issues should we not insist upon at least equally skeptical scrutiny?

  Six

  THE GOD HYPOTHESIS

  The Gifford Lectures are supposed to be on the topic of natural theology. Natural theology has long been understood to mean theological knowledge that can be established by reason and experience and experiment alone. Not by revelation, not by mystical experience, but by reason. And this is, in the long, historical sweep of the human species, a reasonably novel view. For example, we might look at the following sentence written by Leonardo da Vinci. In his notebooks he says, "Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory."

  This was an extremely heterodox remark for the early sixteenth century, when most knowledge was derived from authority. Leonardo himself had many clashes of this sort. During a trip to an Apennine mountaintop, he had discovered the fossilized remains of shellfish that ordinarily lived on the ocean floor. How did this come about? The conventional theological wisdom was that the Great Flood of Noah had inundated the mountain-tops and carried the clams and oysters with it. Leonardo, remembering that the Bible says that the flood lasted only forty days, attempted to calculate whether this would be sufficient time to carry the shellfish with them, even if the mountaintops were inundated. During what state in the life cycle of the shellfish had they been deposited?-and so on. He came to the conclusion this didn't work, and proposed a quite daring alternative; namely, that over immense vistas of geological time the mountaintops had pushed up through the oceans. And that posed all sorts of theological difficulties. But it is the correct answer, as I think it's fair to say it has been definitively established in our time.

  If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say "God." This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn't a real god. They didn't believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn't believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time.

  Now, there is a constellation of properties that we generally think of when we in the West, or more generally in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, think of God. The fundamental differences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are trivial compared to their similarities. We think of some being who is omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, who created the universe, is responsive to prayer, intervenes in human affairs, and so on.

  But suppose there were definitive proof of some being who had some but not all of these properties. Suppose somehow it were demonstrated that there was a being who originated the universe but is indifferent to prayer… Or, worse, a god who was oblivious to the existence of humans. That's very much like Aristotle's god. Would that be God or not? Suppose it were someone who was omnipotent but not omniscient, or vice versa. Suppose this god understood all the consequences of his actions but there were many things he was unable to do, so he was condemned to a universe in which his desired ends could not be accomplished. These alternative kinds of gods are hardly ever thought about or discussed. A priori there is no reason they should not be as likely as the more conventional sorts of gods.

  And the subject is further confused by the fact that prominent theologians such as Paul Tillich, for example, who gave the Gifford Lectures many years ago, explicitly denied God's existence, at least as a supernatural power. Well, if an esteemed theologian (and he's by no means the only one) denies that God is a supernatural being, the subject seems to me to be somewhat confused. The range of hypotheses that are seriously covered under the rubric "God" is immense. A naive Western view of God is an outsize, light-skinned male with a long white beard, who sits on a very large throne in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow.

  Contrast this with a quite different vision of God, one proposed by Baruch Spinoza and by Albert Einstein. And this second kind of god they called God in a very straightforward way. Einstein was constantly interpreting the world in terms of what God would or wouldn't do. But by God they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature, as I have said earlier, that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far bey
ond: Edinburgh, Moscow, Peking, Mars, Alpha Centauri, the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quasars known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us. It represents an unexpected regularity to the universe. It need not have been. It could have been that every province of the cosmos had its own laws of nature. It's not apparent from the start that the same laws have to apply everywhere.

  Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nature are inapplicable.

  I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God. The former definition of God is much more dubious. And there is a wide range of other sorts of gods. And in every case we have to ask, "What kind of god are you talking about, and what is the evidence that this god exists?"

  Certainly if we are restricted to natural theology, it is insufficient to say, "I believe in that sort of god, because that's what I was told when I was young," because other people are told different things about quite different religions that contradict those of my parents. So they can't all be right. And in fact they all may be wrong. It is certainly true that many different religions are mutually inconsistent. It's not that they just aren't perfect simulacrums of each other but rather that they grossly contradict each other.