by Carl Sagan
Now, there are several things that might be said about this. Is the statistical evidence as purported? In fact, is there any statistical evidence? Do we compare? Do the proponents of the Bermuda Triangle "mystery" compare the rate of loss of ships and airplanes off Bermuda to the rate of loss of ships and airplanes in some other region of the world with comparable weather and of equal area and traffic frequency? Nowhere do they attempt that. But others have, and found not a smidgen of evidence that the disappearance rate is larger there than elsewhere.
And also I would raise a related question. Why is it that there are no examples of mysterious disappearances of trains? Train sets out from one station, everything looks fine, and then it is supposed to appear at another station. It's not there. They go back to search along the tracks; it's totally disappeared! The thing about the ocean is you can sink in it. It has a natural explanation built in for mysterious disappearances, whereas railroad beds provide awkward opportunities for mysterious disappearances.
There is a famous case that I'll tell and then end. An enormous electrical rotor for a power-generating plant was completed-I've forgotten exactly where this was; let us say in Michigan-to be transported a thousand miles or so on a railway flatbed with the rotor tied down but in a vertical position. It left the factory perfectly all right. The train did arrive at its destination, but with no rotor. Rotor gone. And so, it being a very expensive piece of machinery, the railway detectives (you can imagine this as a change from the usual sorts of cases they have to deal with) go in a small railroad car along every inch of the thousand miles, and there isn't any rotor sitting by the side of the railway bed. So it has disappeared. Supernatural. And insurance companies are involved because it's expensive, so there's a second search. They can't find it. Nobody on the train saw anything amiss.
Twenty years pass, and then about three miles from the railway track a swamp is drained for a housing project, and there, at the bottom of the swamp, is this rotor, which must have broken its moorings and rolled three miles to the swamp. Can you imagine being out for a midnight walk and seeing this apparition rolling by? If anyone had seen it, it surely would have been an impetus to found a new religion.
CHAPTER SIX
Questioner: Well, I'd just like to ask you about your closing remarks. You were talking about possible proofs that God could have left us of His own existence. You don't think that you're making a rather arrogant assumption in that you are assuming that, for example, it could be possible that He has… that God has left in these religious writings the types of statements that you are suggesting, but it was simply that we ourselves have not got to that stage of development. For example, if He'd made statements about special relativity, a hundred years ago those would have been still meaningless. Could there not now be statements that in a hundred years would make sense to us that would not make sense to us now? Secondly, a more specific example, some people at the Hebrew University at Tel Aviv claim that there are in the Torah in Hebrew various words or messages in which were concealed the names of some thirty trees in Hebrew, with the letters of each tree equally spaced within the passages. And their suggestion is that it would have been impossible for anyone, without the use of computers, to have devised such complicated messages.
CS: This is from the Kabbalistic tradition?
Questioner: Uh-huh.
CS: I have looked at it a little bit, and I believe it is an example of the statistical error of the enumeration of favorable circumstances; that is-what's the best way to put it?-there is a stunning correlation between earthquakes in the Andes and oppositions of the planet Uranus. Is this a causal connection or not? First thing you ask is, how many connections had to be looked for before this particular one was derived? Volcanoes in Sicily with oppositions of the planet Mars-think of how many volcanoes there are in the world, how many earthquakes there are, how many planets there are, how many stars. If you start making a specific number of cross-correlations you will, of course, on occasion, come upon a coincidence. And what you have to do in a posteriori knowledge is to add up all those other cases of possible coincidences that you looked at or could have looked at.
Now, the cases that you are mentioning seem to me highly ambiguous. And I would ask, among other things, why these results have not been submitted to the leading scientific journals, Nature, for example, in Britain, Science in America. What kind of peer review have they got? Also, why something so obscure as the kinds of trees? Why not the detailed structure of a thousand amino acid proteins?
On the first part of your question about might there not be such clues waiting for us but we are not smart enough to recognize them: Well, maybe. You could never exclude that. But that is a slim reed upon which to base a religious faith. When they are discovered, then let's talk about them, but not until then.
Maybe there is a complete description of everything we want to know lying about on the surface of Pluto. And we won't be there until the middle twenty-first century, so we'll just have to hang on till then. Perfectly okay. Let's talk about it in the middle of the twenty-first century. For now there is no such evidence.
Questioner: In reality He is there. God is love.
CS: Well, if we say that the definition of God is reality, or the definition of God is love, I have no quarrel with the existence of reality or the existence of love. In fact, I'm in favor of both of them. However, it does not follow that God defined in that way has anything to do with the creation of the world or of any events in human history. It does not follow that there's anything that is omnipotent or omniscient and so on about God defined in such a manner. So all I'm saying is, we must look at the logical consistency of the various definitions. If you say God is love, clearly love exists in the world. But love is not the only thing that exists in the world. The idea that love dominates everything else, I deeply hope is true, but there are arguments that can very well be proposed, from a mere glance at the daily newspapers, to suggest that love is not in the ascendant in contemporary political affairs. And I don't see that it helps to say, forgive me, that God is love, because there are all those other definitions of God, that mean quite different things. If we muddle up all the definitions of God, then it's very confusing what's being talked about. There is a great opportunity for error in that case. So my proposal is that we call reality "reality," that we call love "love," and not call either of them God, which has, while an enormous number of other meanings, not exactly those meanings.
Questioner: Dr. Sagan, when you spoke to us yesterday, you mentioned something about Russia's approach to the recording of their history, and you said that Trotsky had virtually been written out of it. And how would you view the case for a corollary to that: Perhaps people can be written into history. For example, Jesus Christ?
CS: It's certainly possible. The only evidence for the existence of Jesus is the four Gospels and the subsequent books. And apart from that, there is merely the account of Josephus in the History of the Jews, which internal evidence suggests was put in by Christian apologists at a later time. On the other hand, for me personally, I find the accounts in the Gospels reasonably internally consistent, and I don't see any particular problem about Jesus as a historical figure in the same sense of Mohammed and Moses and Buddha. For all of them, I would think the least unsatisfactory hypothesis is that they were real people, genuine historical figures, great men, the details of whose lives and missions have been, of course, distorted by subsequent advocates and enemies both. It's inevitable. It's the way humans go about things.
Questioner: I'd like to ask you about why you think any omnipotent being would want to leave evidence for us.
CS: I think I entirely agree with what you say. There is no reason I should expect an omnipotent being to leave evidence of His existence, except that the Gifford Lectures are supposed to be about that evidence. And I hope it is clear that the fact that I do not see evidence of such a God's existence does not mean that I then derive from that fact that I know that God does not exist.
&n
bsp; That's quite a different remark. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Neither is it evidence of presence. And this is again a situation where our tolerance for ambiguity is required.
The only thrust of these remarks is for those-and it's by far the greatest majority of contemporary theologians-who believe that there are natural pieces of evidence for the existence of God or gods. And so I have no problems with any of that. And, as you say, if a god existed who gave us free will or merely noted that we had free will, and wished to let our free will operate, then he or she or it might very well give us no evidence of his, her, or its existence for just that reason.
And this is connected with one of the many little tangents in the extraterrestrial-intelligence problem. In fact, there is a perfect parallel between the two cases. Let me spend a moment on it. Two sorts of arguments have been generated. One says that if extraterrestrial intelligence exists, then it would have capabilities vastly in excess of our own. Look at what we've done in just a few thousand years of civilization. Imagine some other beings who are millions or thousands of millions of years more advanced than we. Imagine what they could do. Why aren't they here? Why haven't they so rearranged the cosmos so that their existence is apparent just by looking up at the night sky? "Drink Coca-Cola" spelled out in stars. Something of that sort. A more religious message than that. But why isn't the universe so clearly artificial that there would be no doubt of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence? This is in no way a different argument; it's just recast in modern language in slightly different terms. And one of the explanations-there are large numbers of them; on an issue with no data it is possible to have very involved debates-one of the explanations is the so-called zoo hypothesis, which says that there is an ethic of noninterference with emerging civilizations, because the extraterrestrials wish to see what humans will do. Let them develop on their own without outside interference, and therefore there is a stringently adhered-to requirement that none of the advanced civilizations make planetfall on Earth. And it seems to me that's very similar, not identical, to what you were saying about omnipotence and free will.
Questioner: Concerning the point about God leaving some amazing piece of evidence in the scriptures of His existence: I think that God's purpose is to leave evidence through all time for all men, even children, to understand that He exists, not to leave one piece of evidence for somebody to discover in a thousand years that will benefit one generation.
CS: No, all generations subsequently.
Questioner: Or all generations subsequently, but- CS: A thousand years is as an instant in Thy sight.
Questioner: As one day. Right. I don't believe as a physicist that physics deals with the truth. I believe that it deals with successive approximations to the truth.
CS: So do I.
Questioner: I think if it ever dealt with the truth, that we'd be out of a job. So I am aware in the history of physics that you can't say that you've got the definitive equation for gravity or the definitive equation for quantum mechanics or anything like this. And that reminds me, actually, of a quote from Einstein that says God doesn't play with dice. And I find that difficult to reconcile with the views that you put out for Einstein's assumption that God was equivalent to the universe and the laws of quantum mechanics.
CS: Surely that is consistent. All he was saying is that he believed there were hidden variables behind which the statistical regularities of quantum mechanics could be derived in the same sense that ordinary Newtonian mechanics could. That's all he said.
Questioner: Yes, but he was not accepting present-day quantum mechanics as being the end of the story.
CS: Right. He was saying that the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics conflicted with his sense of a universe ruled by physical laws.
Questioner: And he put that down to God. CS: Which he called God. That's right.
Questioner: Thank you.
CS: But which is very different from the traditional kind of God.
Questioner: Well, it may or may not be.
CS: Einstein was explicit that it was different. For example, in his first visit to the United States, he was sent an anguished telegram by the archbishop of Boston wanting to know what exactly were his religious views. And he spelled them out very explicitly and very courageously, and there was no question that it was not the traditional religious view of God. I mean, it doesn't matter, because Einstein is just one man. But since we all admire him, it's good to know what he actually said.
Questioner: Yes.
CS: And it was not the traditional view at all.
Questioner: Yes, well, yes. I accept that. Talking about proofs for the existence of God, I'd like to put it in perspective that there's no completely satisfactory proof that everyone in this room exists. I don't know if you know of one. I think it comes down in the end to belief of one sort or another that people in this room exist, and putting the proofs about God's existence in that context, we're demanding a lot more in proving God's existence than we are in proving our own existence.
CS: But the burden… the burden of proof is on those who claim that God exists. Or do you think not?
Questioner: I think you say that. I don't think that, in fact. CS: You think the burden of proof is on those who say that God does not exist?
Questioner: An equal burden of proof, I would say. I don't see why it should be put to those who say that He exists.
CS: But would you say that, no matter what contention is made, that the burden of proving or disproving it falls equally on those who agree and those who disagree?
Questioner: I would say that.
CS: Have you thought of the political applications of this?
Questioner: Well, it's not a political issue, I don't think. CS: No, but I thought it was a general proposition you were proposing.
Questioner: If you take a physical proposition, would you say you know that in every case the burden of proof rests to prove one type of case or the other type of case?
CS: The burden of proof always falls on those who make the contention.
Questioner: Well, all right. Yes. But only in the sense that it's disproving the other contention.
CS: No, no. It can be in an area where no one has any other contentions.
Questioner: Yes, well…
CS: It is-and it seems to me quite proper. Because otherwise opinions would be launched very casually if those who proposed them did not have the burden of demonstrating their truth. Here is a set of thirty-one proposals that I make, and good-bye. I mean, you would be left with a chaotic circumstance.
Questioner: Yes, all right. Yes, I see. I see your point. Yes.
CS: The audience is laughing. May I say I think these are… some of these are very good points, and this sense of dialogue I welcome and find delightful.
Questioner: I didn't agree with the way you presented some of the proofs for the existence of God. There was one other proof that I would like to give. I wouldn't call it a proof. I'd call it an argument, because I don't believe that you can prove in absolute logical terms the existence of God.
CS: So we are in agreement.
Questioner: There was an eminent scientist called Sir James Jeans, a Fellow of our Boyal Society in the 1930s, who published a book called The Mysterious Universe, in which he went into great detail discussing the new discoveries of physics. And he presented a rather elegant argument concerning the existence of God, which was based on a very simple, almost unspoken law, the law being that if any two things interact, they must be in some way like. He then went on to say that it's quite possible for somebody who looks at the Sun at sunrise on a nice morning to have a beautiful, poetic thought about it. He looked at the chain of events, which went to producing that poetic thought. It started off in the Sun, with light being emitted, traveling across space, coming through the upper atmosphere, being refracted, and then eventually reaching the lens of the eye, being focused on the retina, and traveling as a nerve impulse to the brain, and then producing a tho
ught.
Now, he said that there are two ways of looking at this. Either you can say that thought is a form of energy in some way, for its ability to interact with energy, or energy is a form of thought in some way.
CS: Those are two of a larger number of possible ways of looking at it.
Questioner: Two of a larger number. Yes. Now, scientists who restrict themselves to the purely rational view of man would say that, well, it's obvious, then, that thoughts are a form of energy.
CS: No, this is not a good argument. This is a 1950s premodern-neurology argument. "Thoughts are a form of energy."
Questioner: Well, it's equally valid to say that, you know, maybe the energy that's in the universe is in some way related to thought.
CS: They may be, perhaps, in some way related.
Questioner: If it is, for there to be one universe that everyone observes as being the same, there must be one being producing the thought.
CS: Why? Why? Why can't natural selection accommodate large numbers of unrelated organisms to the same laws of nature?
CHAPTER SEVEN
CS: I have a letter that I was sent that concluded by saying, "I have at times found your views somewhat naive and immature but hope for better things this week." I hope I have not disappointed. Let me read one remark of this deeply concerned person, who requested anonymity. He says, "On several occasions it has seemed to me that you try to quantify what is a qualitative experience. There is a spiritual and psychical world superimposed, as it were, on the physical. Worlds within worlds. Man is not just a physical being but a spiritual and a psychic entity, too."