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

by Carl Sagan

  In just the same ways as the enkephalins and the endorphins and sex hormones influence our sexual activity, what about hormones and religion? People certainly have spontaneous religious experiences. Sometimes they're brought about by deprivation, as with the fasting monks in the desert. There are a number of ways in which sensory deprivation can bring about these experiences. They also happen spontaneously to people in many different cultures, always using the language of the indigenous culture to describe the experience. But also they can be brought about in a molecular way. And certainly the uniform experience, especially in the 1950s and '60s-pioneered by Aldous Huxley and others-was that LSD and other such molecules produce religious experiences. And there were many religionists who objected to this, because they thought it was too easy; that is, you're not supposed to have a religious experience without doing some significant personal deprivation. Just taking, whatever it was, five hundred micrograms of a tablet, was considered too easy.

  Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience, whatever the religious experience is. How does that come about? Virtually every time someone takes that molecule, he or she has a religious experience. Does that not suggest that there is a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion? What could that molecule be like? Let's give it a name, since nobody's discovered it yet, and of course it may not exist-a good one would be "theophilline," but that has already been preempted for an antiasthma drug. And I think "theotoxin" would be biasing the issue too strongly. So let's call it "theophorin," a material that makes you feel religious.

  What could the selective advantage of a theophorin be? How would it come about? Why would it be there? Well, what is the nature of the experience? The nature of the experience has, as I say, many different aspects. But one uniform aspect of it is an intense feeling of awe and humility before a power vastly greater than ourselves. And that sounds to me very much like a dominance-hierarchy molecule or part of a suite of molecules whose function it is to fit us into the dominance hierarchies-to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey.

  Now, what's the good of that? Why would that have any selective advantage? If for no other reason, it would produce social conformity, or, put in more favorable terms, it would ensure social stability and morality. And this is, of course, one of the principal justifications of religion. Any cosmological aspect of the deities is an entirely separate attribute. Consider how we bow our heads in prayer, making a gesture of submission that can be found in many other animals as they defer to the alpha male. We're enjoined in the Bible not to look God in the face, or else we will die instantly. Submissive males of many species, including our own, avert their eyes before the alpha male. In the court of Louis XIV, as the king passed, he was preceded by courtiers crying "Avertez les yeux! Avert the eyes! Don't look up. He's passing." And to this day many animals with a taste for dominance can be made aggressive simply by looking them in the eye.

  Well, I don't claim that this is the same as all aspects of the religious experience. I think there is as much difference between the religious experience and the bureaucratic religions as there is, say, between sex with love and sex without love. And of course humans have added something profound and beautiful in both cases to the molecular reflex. Perhaps this account will sound tasteless or unpalatable to many, and if so I apologize. But if we treat the question of the origin of religion and the religious experience as a scientific question, then we must ask, "What essential aspects of the religious experience are left out by this hypothesis?" and note that it is at least in principle testable by finding the theophorin, and you could then of course see a large number of controlled experiments to test that out in great detail.

  Now, whether or not this explanation is right, there is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. And it is customary even today to argue that the actual truth or falsity of the religious doctrine does not matter so much as the degree of social stability it brings about. People who through no fault of their own have much less in the way of material goods or respect in a society are told in many religions, "It doesn't matter in this life. Yeah, it looks like you're getting a bad deal, but this is just the twinkling of an eye. What really matters is the next life, and there an implacable cosmic justice awaits you. All those who seem unjustly enriched by the rewards of this life will be punished greatly in the next, whereas you who are the hewers and carriers, the humble people who are content with your lot in this life, will be raised to glory in the next."

  Maybe it's true. But it's not hard to see that such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. It calms any revolutionary tendencies or even mild complaints and therefore has powerful utility. Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious promise of heaven affords.

  Many religions lay out a set of precepts-things people have to do-and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods. For example, the first code of law by Hammurabi of Babylon, in the second millennium B.C., was handed to him by the god Marduk, or at least so he said. Since there are very few Mar-dukians today, perhaps no one will be offended if I suggest that this is a bamboozle, that it's a pious hoax. That if Hammurabi had merely said, "Here's what I think everybody ought to do," he would have been much less successful, although he was king of Babylon, than if he said, "God says you should do this."

  I recognize that the next step, saying that other lawgivers who are better known today are in the same situation, might produce some degree of outrage at the impiety, but I ask you to nevertheless think it through. Is it not likely that in earlier times, in less sophisticated circumstances, those who wished to impose a certain set of behavioral tenets claimed that they had been handed them by a god or gods.

  Now, as soon as you say that religious belief and conventional morality are necessary to keep the society going, you raise the suspicion that these are tools by which those who control the country tend to keep everybody else in line.

  And I would like to jump headfirst into a contemporary issue just to make this a little less abstract. Everyone knows about what's going on in apartheid South Africa. I would merely like to draw your attention to something recently produced, called the Kairos Document, derived from a Greek word meaning "the moment of truth." It was written by committed Christians of many races who are opposed to the apartheid system in South Africa. And in the context of what we were just talking about, let me just paraphrase a couple of paragraphs to get a feel about this. It says that state theology in South Africa employs almost exclusively the apostle Paul's view of the state as a power "ordained by God" and commanding obedience. It comes from the remark, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," without there being any detailed explication as to how you go about doing that. The regime elevates the concept of law and order above every other sort of morality. It goes on to state that in the present crisis and especially during the State of Emergency, "State Theology" has tried to reestablish the status quo of orderly discrimination, exploitation, and oppression by appealing to the conscience of its citizens in the name of law and order.

  And then later on,

  This God is an idol. It is as mischievous, sinister and evil as the idols that the prophets of Israel had to contend with… Here we have a God who is historically on the side of the white settlers, who dispossesses black people of their land and gives the major part of the land to his "chosen people."… It is the God of teargas, rubber bullets, sjamboks, prison cells and death sentences. Here is a God who exalts the proud and humbles the poor, the very opposite of the God of the Bible……

  How rare it is that religions-especially established religions- take the lead in confrontation with the civil authorities when a monstrous injustice is being done. How often it is that the religious authori
ties take the safe way and temporize or talk about the afterlife or talk about moving slowly or talk about this not being the proper function of religion. And then, on the other side, how often is it that the established religions make authoritative pronouncements on matters of science, matters of fact, matters where they run the desperate risk of being disproved by the next discovery?

  This idea was very nicely summed up by Pierre-Simon, the marquis de Laplace, one of the great scientists in the post-Newtonian age, and also a partisan of the French Revolution. In his System of the World, in 1796, he said, "Far from us be the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to mislead, to deceive, and enslave mankind to ensure their happiness."

  Well, I have tried in this talk to give a further sense of how it is possible in various sorts of ways, ranging from brain chemistry to the wish of the political establishments to maintain power, to understand some of the key aspects of religious belief. By no means does it follow that religions thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without any mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do not provide.

  I would like to conclude with a quote from Bertrand Russell, from his Skeptical Essays, published in 1928. I should warn you, this is redolent with irony.

  I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system. Since both are at present faultless this must weigh against it.

  Eight

  CRIMES AGAINST CREATION

  Tradition is a precious thing, a kind of distillation of tens or hundreds of thousands of generations of humans. It is a gift from our ancestors. But it is essential to remember that tradition is invented by human beings and for perfectly pragmatic purposes. If instead you believe that the traditions are from an exhortatory god and hold that the traditional wisdom is handed down directly from a deity, then we are much scandalized at the idea of challenging the conventions. But when the world is changing very fast, I suggest survival may depend precisely on our ability to change rapidly in the face of changing conditions. We live in precisely such a time.

  Consider our past circumstances. Imagine our ancestors, a small, itinerant, nomadic group of hunter-gatherer people. Surely there was change in their lives. The last ice age must have been quite a challenge some ten to twenty thousand years ago. There must have been droughts and new animals suddenly migrating into their area. Of course there is change. But by and large the change is extraordinarily slow. The same traditions for chipping stone to make spears and arrowheads, for example, continues in the East African paleoanthropological sites for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

  In such a society, the external change was slow compared to the human generation time. Back then traditional wisdom, parental prescriptions, were perfectly valid and appropriate for generations. Children growing up of course paid the closest attention to these traditions, because they represented a kind of elixir of the wisdom of previous generations; it was constantly tested, and it constantly worked. It is not for nothing that ancestors were venerated. They were heroes to subsequent generations, because they passed on wisdom that could preserve lives and save them.

  Now compare that with another reality, one in which the external changes, social or biological or climatic or whatever we wish, are rapid compared to a human generation time. Then parental wisdom may not be relevant to present circumstances. Then what we ourselves were taught and learned as youngsters may have dubious relevance to the circumstances of the day. Then there is a kind of intergenerational conflict, and that conflict is not restricted to intergenerational but is also intragener-ational, internally, because the part of us that was trained twenty years ago, let's say, must be in some conflict with the part of us that is trying to deal with the difficulties of today. So I claim that there are very different ways of thinking for these two circumstances: when change is slow compared to a generation time and when change is fast compared to a generation time. There are different survival strategies. And I would also like to suggest that there has never been a moment in the history of the human species in which so much change has happened as in our time. In fact, it can be argued that in many respects there never will be a time when the change can be so rapid as it has been in our generation.

  For example, consider transportation and communication. Just a couple of centuries ago, the fastest practicable means of transportation was horseback. Well, now it is essentially the intercontinental ballistic missile. That is an improvement from tens of miles per hour to tens of miles per second in velocity. It's a very substantial increment. In communication a few centuries ago, except for rarely used semaphore and smoke-signaling systems, the speed of communication was again the speed of the horse. Today the speed of communication is the speed of light, faster than which nothing can go. And that represents a change from tens of miles per hour to 186,000 miles per second. And never will there be any improvement on that velocity.

  Now, it's a very different world if the fastest that a message can get to us goes from the speed of a horse or a caravel to the speed of light. The speed of light means that we can talk-in essentially real time-to anybody on the Earth or even on the Moon. Or consider medicine. A few centuries ago, most of the children born to the great houses of Europe died in childhood. And they had the exemplary medical care of the age. Today even quite poor people in some nations at least have infant mortality astonishingly less than the crowned heads of state in the seventeenth century Or consider the availability of safe and inexpensive means of birth control. It immediately implies a revolution in human relations and especially in the status of women. These are all things that have happened very recently, and you can think of many, many others, all of which involve not just a change in the technical details of our lives but changes in how we think about ourselves in the world. Very major changes, and therefore not a circumstance where the wisdom of, say, the sixth century B.C. is necessarily relevant. It might be, but it might not be. And therefore, for this reason as well-for this reason especially-wisdom may lie not in simply the blind adherence to ancient tenets but in the vigorous and skeptical and creative investigation of a wide variety of alternatives.

  For me personally, the kind of science that I do is utterly unthinkable in any other age. I find myself engaged in the spacecraft exploration of nearby worlds, something that would have been considered the most rank fantasy just two generations ago, when the Moon was the paradigm of the unobtainable. Some of you will remember those poems and popular songs-"Fly Me to the Moon," meaning asking for the impossible. And yet in our time a dozen human beings have walked on the surface of the Moon. And as I will stress in tomorrow's talk, that same technology that permits us to travel to other planets and stars also permits us to destroy ourselves-on a global scale, on a scale unprecedented in all of human history, and the mere knowledge that this is possible, even if we are lucky enough for it never to come about, must powerfully influence the lives of everybody who grows up in our time in a way that was not true for any other generation in human history.

  I've spent much of my time over the last twenty years in the exploration of the solar system. Our robot emissaries have left the Earth, have visited every planet known to the ancients, from Mercury to Saturn, and reconnoitered some forty attendant smaller worlds, the satellites of those planets. We have flown by all those worlds, we have orbited and landed on three of them: the Moon, Venus, and Mars. There are something approaching a million close-up pictures of other worlds in our libraries.
And it is a remarkable experience. Here's a world never before known by human beings, and then, for the first time, it is explored. This is a continuation of the spirit of adventure that I think has been a propelling force in human history. The worlds are lovely. They're exquisite. It is a kind of aesthetic experience to see them.

  In the case of Mars, because of the Viking missions, we have been on the surface of that planet for some years, at least in two locales, and have essentially every day examined our surroundings. I personally spent in a certain sense a year on Mars in the course of that mission. I spent at least a great deal of my waking moments thinking about Mars. Now, at the end of such an experience, I feel something I hadn't planned on. And it is that these worlds, as exquisite and instructive as they are, are, as far as we can tell at this point, lifeless. There is in that lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus, as far as we can tell-the only planets we've landed on-are utterly lifeless. Maybe there's life in some places we haven't looked on those worlds. Maybe there used to be life and it is no longer. Maybe there one day will be life. But as far as we can tell here and now, there is none.

  After that sort of experience, you then look back on your own world and you begin to have a kind of special feeling for it. You recognize that what we have here is in some sense rare. As I've argued previously, I suspect life and intelligence are a cosmic commonplace. But not so common that they're on every world. And in fact in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world.