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

by Carl Sagan

  Now, these two views-we might call one with a powerful social hierarchy and the other with an almost nonexistent social hierarchy-cut through the anthropological literature. And there's an extremely interesting statistical study by the American social scientist James Prescott, in which he has looked at the compilation by Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor of hundreds of different societies, not all of them still extant. In some cases, for example, from Herodotus, you can get the key characteristics of some society now long dead. And Textor just puts the various categories down as a compilation. What Prescott has done is to do a multivariant analysis, statistical correlation- what goes with what. And the things that apparently go with each other are essentially the two sets of characteristics I just described. It is Prescott's view that there are causal relations. That, in fact, in his view the key distinction has to do with whether cultures hug their children and whether they permit premarital sexual activity among adolescents. In his view those are the keys. And he concludes that all cultures in which the children are hugged and the teenagers can have sex wind up without powerful social hierarchies and everybody's happy. And those cultures in which the children are not permitted to be hugged because of some social ban and a premarital adolescent sexual taboo is strictly enforced wind up killing, hating, and having powerful dominance hierarchies.

  Now, you cannot prove a causal sequence from a statistical correlation. And you could just as well argue that what the religious forms are determines everything or what the sacrament is has a powerful connection, between societies with alcohol and the societies that torture their enemies and abuse women and so on. But these correlations at least show that there are two and probably a multiplicity of ways of being human. That these cultures, which as far as we can tell have not been powerfully influenced by Western technical civilization, are yet strikingly different, and the reason for that difference-whatever other reasons there are-must be within us.

  And, in fact, if you look at nonhuman primates, you find that some of them have this pecking-order dominance hierarchy and others don't. And it is very likely that built in to humans are both ways of behaving; that is, a hardwired circuit in our brains that permits us to fit effortlessly-or with little effort-into some dominance hierarchy. After all, the military establishments of all nations work, and part of the reason they work is that we must have some predisposition to fit into a dominance hierarchy. And at the same time, we must also have some predisposition for the antithesis, which for short I will call democracy. They lead a kind of uneasy coexistence you can find in any democracy that has a military or a caste system or a class system. Now, if you grant me that much, let us then go on to the issue of the early function and origins of religion. Clearly there are no observers in our time who were present hundreds of thousands of years ago, and there can be no confident assertions on this subject. All we can have is differing degrees of plausibility. But I think this is, whether you agree with each point I'm making or not, a very useful way to look at the origins of religion. And I'm certainly not the first person to do so. Democritus is quoted as having said in the fifth century B.C.,

  The ancients seeing what happens in the sky, for example, thunder and lightning and thunderbolts and conjunctions of the stars and eclipses of the Sun and Moon were afraid, believing gods to be the cause of these.

  This is what is sometimes called "animism," the idea that there are intelligent forces of nature that exist in everything. The Greeks put a minor god in every tree and stream. All of this has been brilliantly discussed by a former Gifford lecturer, Sir James Frazer, in his book The Golden Bough. One thing we do if we believe that there is a god of the thunderbolt and do not wish to be hit by a thunderbolt is to propitiate the god of the thunderbolt, to do something to calm him down, to explain that while there may be other targets of thunderbolts deserving of his attention, we are not among them. And we then have to do something to show our respect for him, that we are not talking back to him, that we humble ourselves before him, that we are reverent before him. And many cultures have such institutionalized propitiation, which sometimes goes as far as human sacrifice; that is, to really show you how reverent I am, I will kill what is most dear to me, because you sure couldn't think that I was only playacting if I do that.

  The story of God's commandment to Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, is an example of the transition from human to animal sacrifice. After a while people decided it really wasn't worthwhile killing their own children in this way; they would symbolically kill their own children by just getting a goat and killing it. In fact, the general decline in the practice of human and animal sacrifice in the evolution of religion is worth some attention. The Judaic and therefore also the Christian-Islamic religions began when human and animal sacrifice was all the rage.

  What does that kind of propitiation mean? It is a wish for the course of nature to be different from what it otherwise would be. It provides the illusion that by some sequence of ritual actions we are able to influence forces of nature that are otherwise inaccessible to us. And therefore it involves a change from the usual course of nature, which was described very nicely by Ivan Turgenev as follows: "Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.'" And from a different tradition, let me quote a Yiddish proverb, which goes, "If praying did any good, they would be hiring men to pray."

  Now, does prayer do any good or not? It certainly is still with us. It certainly is connected with those activities of our ancestors, and, as I will argue in a moment, it's certainly connected with the behavior of all of us when we are children. Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, said, "Here we've been praying for all these years and nobody seems to know if it does any good or not. Is there a statistical test of the efficacy of prayer?" And he concluded that of course there is. Especially in Britain, because not only do people pray in Britain but people pray differentially. Some people are more in the prayer business than others. Do those who pray more get favors from heaven more? This is in late Victorian times, when these particular views were still more outrageous than they are today. So here is just a little hint of Galton's approach, his sense of scientific protocol:

  There are many common maladies whose course is so thoroughly well understood as to admit of accurate tables of probability being constructed for their duration and result. Such are fractures and amputations. Now, it would be perfectly practicable to select out of the patients at different hospitals under treatment for fractures and amputations two considerable groups. The one consisting of markedly religious and piously befriended individuals, the other of those who were remarkably cold-hearted and neglected. An honest comparison of their respective periods of treatment and the results would manifest a distinct proof of the efficacy of prayer, if it existed to even a minute fraction of the amount that religious teachers exhort us to believe.

  And then he goes on to say,

  An enquiry of a somewhat similar nature may be made into the longevity of persons whose lives are prayed for. Also, that of the praying classes generally.

  And so he then goes on to compare the mean longevity of sovereigns with that of other classes of persons of equal affluence and gives a table of the results. And the conclusion he states as follows:

  The sovereigns are literally the shortest-lived of all who have the advantage of affluence,

  from which he deduces that the efficacy of prayer is not yet demonstrated.

  Now, this has not led to a school of people who do statistical tests of the efficacy of prayer. Hard to know why not. Except that people who don't believe in prayer perhaps are not very interested in this, and those who do are convinced of its efficacy and therefore do not need to go to statistical tests. There is no question that there is something about prayer that seems to work. Surely it provides solace and comfort. It's a way of working through problems. It's a way of reviewing events that have happened, of connecting the past with the future. It does something goo
d. But that doesn't mean that it is as alleged. It doesn't say anything about the existence of a god. It doesn't say anything about the external world. It is a procedure, which on some level makes us feel better.

  I maintain that everyone starts out with that sort of attitude. We all grow up in the land of the giants when we are very small and the adults are very large. And then, through a set of slow stages, we grow up, and we become one of the adults. But still within us, surely, is some part of our childhood that hasn't disappeared and hasn't grown up. It's just there. In your formative years, you then learn from direct experience, absolutely incontrovertible, that there are much larger, much older, much wiser, and much more powerful creatures in the universe than you. And your strongest emotional bonds are to them. And, among other things, they are sometimes angry with you, and then you have to work through the anger. And they ask you to do things that you may not want to do, and you must propitiate them, you must apologize, you must do a set of things. Now, how likely is it that after we are all grown up we've fully detached ourselves from this formative experience? Isn't it much more likely that there remains a part of us that is still in the practice of this kind of childhood dealing with parents and other adults? Could that have something to do with prayer specifically and with religious beliefs in general?

  Well, this is in fact the scandalous view of Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion, and other famous books of the first few decades of the twentieth century. And Freud's view was that "at bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father." Of course Freud was living in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, in a very patriarchal kind of Judeo-Christian tradition, and therefore it was a very patriarchal kind of god. So it may be that his conclusions do not apply to all religions and all societies, but it's very easy to understand that those religions and those societies lent themselves very much to the Freudian hypothesis.

  To say it still more explicitly, the view here is that we start out with the sense that our parents are omnipotent and omniscient, we develop certain relations with them-different degrees of mental health in those relationships, depending on the nature of the relationship between the parents and the child- and then we grow up, and as we do so, we discover that our parents are not perfect. No one is, of course. There is a part of us that is deeply disappointed. There's a part of us that has been inducted into a dominance hierarchy and doesn't like the uncertainty of having to deal with things for ourselves. You know, one of the many reasons that are given for the advantages of military life and other powerfully hierarchical societies is that it's not required to think for oneself very much. There's something calming about that. And so, according to Freud, we then foist upon the cosmos our own emotional predispositions. You may or may not think that this explains a great deal about religion, but it is something I believe worth considering. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov,

  So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

  I would like now to turn to a related subject, and that has to do with the influence of molecules on the emotions and perceptions. By molecules I just mean chemicals-natural chemicals in the environment or synthetic chemicals made in laboratories. We, of course, all understand that behavior is modified by molecules. Humans all over the world have had experience with substances like ethanol that certainly produced changes in behavior and attitudes and perceptions of the world. We know about tranquilizers that likewise do that. But let us consider a very specific case, and that is manic-depressive syndrome. It's a terrible disease. The manic-depressive swings between two extremes, and it's hard for me to see which is more ghastly: one in the utter pit of despair and the other a kind of high-flying exaltation in which everything seems possible-to the extent that many sufferers of this disease when they are at the manic end of the pendulum believe that they are God. And this is, of course, disabling. Both ends of the swing are disabling, and you don't spend much time in the middle, just like a pendulum, in which you move more slowly at the ends than you do through the middle. It's a disease found in every human culture, and until the last two or three decades there was no effective treatment. Well, there is now a material that powerfully ameliorates manic-depressive syndrome in many patients, provided the dose of this material is administered very carefully. People who have taken this substance in regularly controlled doses, many of them, find that they are able to function again. Their lives are normalized, and they consider it a great blessing. What is this material? It is lithium, a salt. Lithium is a chemical element, the third simplest after hydrogen and helium. It's astonishing that such a simple material could have so profound an effect on a subset of the human population and change not just behavior; if you talk to ex-manic-depressives-that is, manic-depressives whose disease is controlled by regular administration of lithium-their account from the inside of how transforming this treatment is, is really stunning.

  Now, bearing this in mind, who will say that there are human emotions that will not, at least one day, be understood in some fundamental manner in the language of molecular biology and neuronal architecture? If you run through our own society and other societies, you find a vast range of substances, many of them chemically very distinct, that powerfully affect mood and emotion and behavior. Not just ethanol but caffeine, mushrooms, amphetamines, tetrahydrocannabinol and the other cannabinoids, lysergic acid diethylamide-known as LSD- barbiturates, Thorazine. It's a very long list.

  This prompts certain questions: Are all human emotions to some extent mediated by molecules? If a molecule ingested from the outside can change behavior, is there generally some comparable molecule on the inside that can change behavior? This is now a field that has made remarkable progress. I'm talking about the enkephalins and the endorphins, which are small brain proteins.

  In labor, women are amazingly strong in bearing pain, and of course there is a great deal of pain in childbirth. But in that case and in many other traumatic situations, the human body produces a particular molecule that reduces our susceptibility to pain. And it does it for very good survival reasons, which are not hard to understand. There are specific receptors in the brain for these small brain proteins, and it turns out that the opiates ingested from the outside are extremely similar chemically to a particular enkephalin having to do with resistance to pain that is produced on the inside; that is, it is looking as if every time a molecule on the outside does something about human emotions, there is a related molecule on the inside that is naturally produced, which is how it is that we have a brain receptor for this particular kind of molecular functional group.

  Let me be a little less abstract and speak from personal experience. I go to the dentist, and he gives me an injection of Adrenalin. It is a molecule. It's a molecule produced in your body, but it's also produced outside. And every time I've had this injection, I'm almost overcome with two contradictory emotions, one of which is to attack the dentist and the other is to leave the dentist's office, both of which I suppose could be understood just on purely rational grounds, considering the circumstances. But this is what adrenaline, the hormone epinephrine, does under any circumstances, under the most benign circumstances. It's called the fight-or-flight syndrome. This molecule makes you either aggressive or, if you want to think about running away, cowardly, one or the other. Very remarkable that two such apparently contradictory emotions can be brought about by the same molecule. But more important than that, it's extremely interesting. They just put this molecule in your bloodstream, and suddenly you feel things. It's just a function of the molecule being there. It's nothing, necessarily, in the external world. And we can understand the reasons for that. Consider our remote ancestors faced with, let us say, a pack of hyenas, not having yet deduced that hyenas with fangs bared are dangerous. It would be too inefficient to have our ancestor consciously stop and think, "Oh, I see those beasts have sharp teeth; they probably can eat somebody. They're coming at me. Maybe I should run awa
y." By then it's too late.

  What you need is one quick look at the hyena, and instantly the molecule is produced, and you run away, and later you can figure out what happened. And you can see two populations, one of whom has to slowly think the matter out, the other of whom can rapidly respond to the adrenaline. After a while these guys leave lots of offspring, those guys don't. Everybody winds up generating adrenaline. Natural selection. Not hard to understand how that comes about. And there are, of course, many other molecules like that.

  Another one is testosterone, which is produced in males at adolescence and instigates all sorts of bizarre behavior that we all know. I don't want to suggest that at the same age I was immune from it. I personally know the consequences of testosterone poisoning. You might imagine that our distant ancestors could figure out that it was useful to propagate the species and leave offspring and had an intellectual understanding of how it comes about. But this is very iffy. It's requiring a great deal of intellectual activity and cerebration, and it's much better to simply have the whole thing hardwired in the brain and triggered by this molecule after the biological clock has ticked away for a certain period of time. And so the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex immediately leads to this sequence of events, and the species continues.

  There are many other such molecules. Of course, females have estrogen and other hormones. The number of sex hormones is more than one each. Statistics on the subjects that adults of all ages dream about most have sex very high up, and everything else is far below. It's clear the more interested in sex people are, generally speaking, the more offspring they tend to leave, at least before the invention of birth-control devices, and so there is a selective advantage for each species to have this kind of internal machinery.