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

by Carl Sagan

  It is clearly good for the survival of microorganisms to know where the light is, especially the ones that photosynthesize. It is certainly good for earthworms to know where the food is. Those earthworms that can't figure out where the food is leave few offspring. After a while the ones that survive know where the food is. Those phototropic or phototactic offspring have encoded into their genetic material how to find the light. It is not apparent that God has entered into the process. Maybe, but it's not a compelling argument. And the general view of many, not all, neuro-biologists is that consciousness is a function of the number and complexity of neuronal linkages of the architecture of the brain. Human consciousness is what happens when you get to something like 1011 neurons and 1014 synapses. This raises all sorts of other questions: What is consciousness like when you have 1020 synapses or 1030? What would such a being have to say to us any more than we would have to say to the ants? So at least it does not seem to me that the argument from consciousness, a continuum of consciousness running through the animal and plant kingdoms, proves the existence of God. We have an alternative explanation that seems to 'work pretty well. We don't know the details, although work on artificial intelligence may help to clarify that. But we don't know the details of the alternative hypothesis either. So it could hardly be said that this is compelling.

  Then there's the argument from experience. People have religious experiences. No question about it. They have them worldwide, and there are some interesting similarities in the religious experiences that are had worldwide. They are powerful, emotionally extremely convincing, and they often lead to people reforming their lives and doing good works, although the opposite also happens. Now, what about this? Well, I do not mean in any way to object to or deride religious experiences. But the question is, can any such experience provide other than anecdotal evidence of the existence of God or gods? One million UFO cases since 1947. And yet, as far as we can tell, they do not correspond-any of them-to visitations to the Earth by spacecraft from elsewhere. Large numbers of people can have experiences that can be profound and moving and still not correspond to anything like an exact sense of external reality. And the same can be said not just about UFOs but about extrasensory perception and ghosts and leprechauns and so on. Every culture has things of this sort. That doesn't mean that they all exist; it doesn't mean that any of them exist.

  I also note that religious experiences can be brought on by specific molecules. There are many cultures that consciously imbibe or ingest those molecules in order to bring on a religious experience. The peyote cult of some Native Americans is exactly that, as is the use of wine as a sacrament in many Western religions. It's a very long list of materials that are taken by humans in order to produce a religious experience. This suggests that there is some molecular basis for the religious experience and that it need not correspond to some external reality I think it's a fairly central point-that religious experiences, personal religious experiences, not the natural theological evidence for God, if any, can be brought on by molecules of finite complexity.

  So if I then run through these arguments-the cosmological argument, the argument from design, the moral argument, the ontological argument, the argument from consciousness, and the argument from experience-I must say that the net result is not very impressive. It is very much as if we are seeking a rational justification for something that we otherwise hope will be true.

  And then there are certain classical problems with the existence of God. Let me mention a few of them. One is the famous problem of evil. This basically goes as follows: Grant for a moment that evil exists in the world and that unjust actions sometimes go unpunished. And grant also that there is a God that is benevolent toward human beings, omniscient, and omnipotent. This God loves justice, this God observes all human actions, and this God is capable of intervening decisively in human affairs. Well, it was understood by the pre-Socratic philosophers that all four of these propositions cannot simultaneously be true. At least one has to be false. Let me say again what they are. That evil exists, that God is benevolent, that God is omniscient, that God is omnipotent. Let's just see about each of them.

  First of all, you might say, ''Well, evil doesn't exist in the world. We can't see the big picture, that a little pool of evil here is awash in a great sea of good that it makes possible." Or, as medieval theologians used to say, "God uses the Devil for his own purposes." This is clearly the three-monkey argument about "hear no evil…" and has been described by a leading contemporary theologian as a gratuitous insult to mankind, a symptom of in-sensitivity and indifference to human suffering. To be assured that all the miseries and agonies men and women experience are only illusory. Pretty strong.

  This is clearly hoping that the disquieting facts go away if you merely call them something else. It is argued that some pain is necessary for a greater good. But why, exactly? If God is omnipotent, why can't He arrange it so there is no pain? It seems to me a very telling point.

  The other alternatives are that God is not benevolent or compassionate. Epicurus held that God was okay but that humans were the least of His worries. There are a number of Eastern religions that have something like that same flavor. Or God isn't omniscient; He doesn't know everything; He has business elsewhere and so doesn't know that humans are in trouble. One way to think about it is there are several times 1011 worlds in every galaxy and several times 1011 galaxies, and God's busy.

  The other possibility is that God isn't omnipotent. He can't do everything. He could maybe start the Earth off or create life, intervene occasionally in human history, but can't be bothered day in and day out to set things right here on Earth. Now, I don't claim to know which of these four possibilities is right, but it's clear that there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Western theological view produced by the problem of evil. And I've read an account of a recent theological conference devoted to this problem, and it clearly was an embarrassment to the assembled theologians.

  This raises an additional question-a related question-and that has to do with microintervention. Why in any case is it necessary for God to intervene in human history in human affairs, as almost every religion assumes happens? That God or the gods come down and tell humans, "No, don't do that, do this, don't forget this, don't pray in this way, don't worship anybody else, mutilate your children as follows." Why is there such a long list of things that God tells people to do? Why didn't God do it right in the first place? You start out the universe, you can do anything. You can see all future consequences of your present action. You want a certain desired end. Why don't you arrange it in the beginning? The intervention of God in human affairs speaks of incompetence. I don't say incompetence on a human scale. Clearly all of the views of God are much more competent than the most competent human. But it does not speak of omni-competence. It says there are limitations.

  I therefore conclude that the alleged natural theological arguments for the existence of God, the sort we're talking about, simply are not very compelling. They are trotting after the emotions, hoping to keep up. But they do not provide any satisfactory argument on their own. And yet it is perfectly possible to imagine that God, not an omnipotent or an omniscient god, just a reasonably competent god, could have made absolutely clear-cut evidence of His existence. Let me give a few examples.

  Imagine that there is a set of holy books in all cultures in which there are a few enigmatic phrases that God or the gods tell our ancestors are to be passed on to the future with no change. Very important to get it exactly right. Now, so far that's not very different from the actual circumstances of alleged holy books. But suppose that the phrases in question were phrases that we would recognize today that could not have been recognized then. Simple example: The Sun is a star. Now, nobody knew that, let's say, in the sixth century B.C., when the Jews were in the Babylonian exile and picked up the Babylonian cosmology from the principal astronomers of the time. Ancient Babylonian science is the cosmology that is still enshrined in the book of Ge
nesis. Suppose instead the story was "Don't forget, the Sun is a star." Or "Don't forget, Mars is a rusty place with volcanoes. Mars, you know, that red star? That's a world. It has volcanoes, it's rusty, there are clouds, there used to be rivers. There aren't anymore. You'll understand this later. Trust me. Right now, don't forget."

  Or, "A body in motion tends to remain in motion. Don't think that bodies have to be moved to keep going. It's just the opposite, really. So later on you'll understand that if you didn't have friction, a moving object would just keep moving." Now, we can imagine the patriarchs scratching their heads in bewilderment, but after all it's God telling them. So they would copy it down dutifully, and this would be one of the many mysteries in holy books that would then go on to the future until we could recognize the truth, realize that no one back then could possibly have figured it out, and therefore deduce the existence of God.

  There are many cases that you can imagine like this. How about "Thou shalt not travel faster than light"? Okay, you might argue that nobody was at imminent risk of breaking that commandment. It would have been a curiosity: "We don't understand what that one's about, but all the others we abide by." Or "There are no privileged frames of reference." Or how about some equations? Maxwell's laws in Egyptian hieroglyphics or ancient Chinese characters or ancient Hebrew. And all the terms are defined: "This is the electric field, this is the magnetic field." We don't know what those are, but we'll just copy them down, and then later, sure enough, it's Maxwell's laws or the Schrodinger equation. Anything like that would have been possible had God existed and had God wanted us to have evidence of His existence. Or in biology. How about, "Two strands entwined is the secret of life"? You may say that the Greeks were onto that because of the caduceus. You know, in the American army all the physicians wore the caduceus on their lapels, and various medical insurance schemes also use it. And it is connected with, if not the existence of life, at least saving it. But there are very few people who use this to say that the correct religion is the religion of the ancient Greeks, because they had the one symbol that survives critical scrutiny later on.

  This business of proofs of God, had God wished to give us some, need not be restricted to this somewhat questionable method of making enigmatic statements to ancient sages and hoping they would survive. God could have engraved the Ten Commandments on the Moon. Large. Ten kilometers across per commandment. And nobody could see it from the Earth but then one day large telescopes would be invented or spacecraft would approach the Moon, and there it would be, engraved on the lunar surface. People would say, "How could that have gotten there?" And then there would be various hypotheses, most of which would be extremely interesting.

  Or why not a hundred-kilometer crucifix in Earth orbit? God could certainly do that. Right? Certainly, create the universe? A simple thing like putting a crucifix in Earth orbit? Perfectly possible. Why didn't God do things of that sort? Or, put another way, why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?

  I think this is a serious issue. If we believe, as most of the great theologians hold, that religious truth occurs only when there is a convergence between our knowledge of the natural world and revelation, why is it that this convergence is so feeble when it could easily have been so robust?

  So, to conclude, I would like to quote from Protagoras in the fifth century B.C., the opening lines of his Essay on the Gods:

  About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are to look at. Many things prevent my knowing. Among others, the fact that they are never seen.

  Seven

  THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

  Cast your mind back some hundreds of thousands of years. Those who can do that readily will have demonstrated some of the issues that I considered dubious earlier, but apart from reincarnation let's try to think about what were the circumstances of the greater part of the tenure of the human species on Earth. That surely is relevant to any attempt to understand our present circumstances.

  The human family is some millions of years old, the human species perhaps one million, with some uncertainty. For the greater part of that period by far, we did not have anything like present technology, present social organization, or present religions. And yet our emotional predispositions were powerfully set in those times. Whatever our feelings and thoughts and approaches to the world were then, they must have been selectively advantageous, because we have done rather well. On this planet we are certainly the dominant organism of some fair size. An argument could be made for beetles or bacteria at smaller scales as being the dominant organism on the planet, but at least on our scale we have done quite well.

  Now, what were those characteristics, and how 'would we know what they are? Well, one way we can know is by examining the groups of hunter-gatherers that are still tenuously alive on the planet today. These are small groups of people whose way of life predates the invention of agriculture. The fact that we know them means they must have made some contact with our present global civilization-and that immediately implies that their way of life is in its last days. They are the essence of humans. They have been studied by dedicated anthropologists who have lived with them, learned their languages, been adopted into the group in those cases that permit outsiders to have such an experience, and we can learn something about them. They are by no means all the same. This is a large topic, called cultural anthropology. I do not pretend to be expert in it, but I have had the benefit of spending a fair amount of time with some of the anthropologists who have been at the forefront of studying some of these groups. And I think it's relevant to the task before us.

  There are, as I say, different kinds of groups, including some that we might consider absolutely horrendous and some that we might consider astonishingly benign, and I'll try to give a sense of each.

  For the latter let me say just a few words about the!Kung people in the Kalahari Desert in the Republic of Botswana. These are a people who now have been drafted into the army of apartheid South Africa, and their culture has been irrevocably abused. But up until some twenty years ago, they had been well studied. We know something about them.

  They are hunter-gatherers, which mainly means that the men hunt and the women gather. There is a kind of sexual division of labor, but there is very little in the way of social hierarchy. There is not a significant male dominance of women. In fact, there's very little in the way of social hierarchy at all.There is specialization of labor. That's different from social hierarchy. Children are treated with tenderness and understanding. And there is very little in the way of warfare, although occasionally they run into difficulties because of misunderstandings.

  For example, there was a famous case, sometime ago, in which a hunting party came back and said that there was the most astonishing good fortune-a completely new creature had been discovered, and you could actually creep up to it with your bow and arrow and get within a meter of it, and it would not run away. And then you could shoot it dead. And here it is. And it was a cow. The neighboring Herero people protested, and this conflict between two groups, one that had not yet left the hunter-gatherer stage and the other that had domesticated animals, then had to be settled.

  Another interesting question has to do with the hunt. Who owns the prey that is killed? It turns out it is not the hunter who killed the animal, it is the artisan who made the arrow. It is his kill. But this is merely a matter of bookkeeping, because everyone gets part of the kill, except that the arrowsmith has a right to a favored part. In fact, there is very little in the way of property. They are a nomadic people and can own only what they can carry with them-except for pots and some pieces of clothing and hunting apparatus and things of that sort. And even some of that (there is no personal property) is community property. There is no head man or head woman per se. And there is a cosmology, there is a kind of religion, there is the active encouragement of the religious experience which is obtained, as in many cultures-in fact, all cultures as far as I know-
partly by the use of chemical hallucinogens and partly through the use of particular kinds of behavior: dance, trances, and so on. They recognize other levels of consciousness, of conscious experience. They consider these religious experiences or hallucinations as highly valuable, as not something to be laughed at or put into a category of beliefs of the weak-minded. This is a culture in which there has traditionally always been enough to eat. Mainly mongongo nuts, the staple provided by the women, with the men providing the occasional appetizers of meat.

  Now, it's interesting to compare such cultures with other cultures that, in a certain sense, because of the biases of our own culture, we know much better. And these are cultures like the Ji-varo of the Amazon Valley, in which there are in this world and the next, very striking dominance hierarchies in which there is always someone above someone else, except of course for the Supreme Creator God, above whom there is no one else. These are people who torture their enemies, who do not hug their children-in fact, brutalize their children-who are dedicated to warfare, whose sacrament is not some exotic hallucinogen but instead is ethanol, ordinary ethyl alcohol (I mean, ordinary in our society). And in virtually all the aspects that I just mentioned, there is a completely different way of looking at the world.