Sunday Sermon/Carl Sagan

From the book "Broca's Mind", Maariv Library 1978, on the tenth anniversary of his death

On the cradle of every science of the sciences lay theologians like the strangled snakes laid next to (the cradle of) Hercules.
T.H. Huxley (1860),

We have seen the highest circle of the Ascending Powers. We called this circle in the name of God. We could call it any other name, as we wished: abyss, mystery, total darkness, total light, matter, spirit, final hope, final despair, silence.
Nicenes Kazantzakis (1948)

These days I often have the opportunity to present scientific topics to the general public. Sometimes I am asked to discuss the study of the planets and the nature of other planets; Sometimes, at the origin of life or reason on earth; Sometimes, in search of life in other places; And sometimes, in the cosmological perspective in all its glory. Since I had already heard, more or less, these things before, the most interesting part of the matter for me is in the questions. From it I learn how the listeners relate to the whole subject and what worries them. The most frequent questions presented to me concern UFOs and ancient astronauts - what seem to me to be thinly veiled religious questions. An almost equally common question itself - especially after a lecture devoted to the evolution of life or intelligence - is: "Do you believe in God?" Many people have their own interpretations of the word "God", and therefore I often answer with the question, what did the questioner mean by the word "God". To my surprise, there are many who accept this response as something strange or unexpected: "Oh, Oza knows, God and the sea. Everyone knows what God is." Or "Well, some kind of force that is stronger than us and exists everywhere in the universe." There are several such powers. One of them is called gravity, but I think it is not often identified with God. And not everyone knows what is meant by the term "God". This concept encompasses a wide range of ideas.

Some believe that God is a white-skinned and tall man, with a long beard coming down according to his size, and he sits on a throne, somewhere in the heavens, and himself follows every little bird. Others - for example, Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein - saw God fundamentally as the sum total of all the physical forces that describe the universe. I know of no compelling evidence for the existence of anthropomorphic patriarchs overseeing human destiny from some hidden vantage point, but only a madman would deny the existence of the laws of physics. The question of whether we believe in God or not depends very much on our personal interpretation of the concept of God.

In the history of mankind there were, apparently, thousands of different religions. There are some well-meaning people who hold the pious belief that all these religions are essentially the same. If we examine the psychological resonance that lies at their foundation, we can certainly find important similarities in many religions, but there is an impressive difference between the organized religions when it comes to the details of the rituals and doctrines, and the apologetics that are the basis of credibility. The differences concern fundamental issues such as one god versus many gods; the source of evil; Reincarnation ; Idolatry: magic and sorcery; the role of the woman; Allowed and prescribed foods; reception ceremonies; ceremonial sacrifices; direct access to the gods or access through intermediaries; slavery; intolerance towards other religions; and the nature of the community of creatures worthy of special moral considerations.

We will not help religion in general, or any religious doctrine in particular, if we gloss over these differences. Instead, I believe that we must understand the worldviews that these different religions were derived from and wonder about the nature of the human needs that came to be satisfied thanks to the differences between religions.

Bertrand Russell once told how he was banned for peacefully rejoicing at Britain's entry into the First World War. The warden asked Russell about his religion - at that time a common question for new prisoners. Russell replied "agnostic" and was asked to spell the word. The jailer smiled kindly, shook his head and said "There are many different religions, but I believe that we all worship the same God." Russell says that this comment lifted his spirits for many weeks. Perhaps there were no other things that lifted his spirits in prison, although at that time he had time to write the entire introduction to mathematical philosophy and start reading the material for his essay on the analysis of the mind.

Many of those who ask if I believe in God are seeking confirmation that their particular belief system, whatever it may be, is compatible with modern scientific knowledge. Religion is frightened by the confrontation with science, and many people - but by no means all - object to a system of religious belief that conflicts so clearly with everything else we know. The Apollo 8 spacecraft completed the first manned orbit of the moon. In a spontaneous gesture, less is more, the astronauts of Apollo 8 began by reading the first verses of the book of Genesis. This was, among other things, I believe, an attempt to convey to the taxpayers in the United States that there is no real contradiction between accepted religious views and a manned flight to the moon. In contrast, orthodox Muslims were badly hurt when the Apollo 11 astronauts completed the first manned landing on the moon, as Islam attaches a special and sacred meaning to the lyre.

And in a different religious context, after Yuri Gagarin circumnavigated the globe* for the first time in a spacecraft, Nikita Khrushchev, ruler of the Soviet Union at the time, pointed out that Gagarin did not encounter any gods or angels - I mean, Khrushchev assured his listeners that circumnavigating the globe in a spacecraft Mawishet did not contradict his own beliefs. In the XNUMXs, a Soviet technical journal, called Voprossi Philosophie (in obedience to philosophy), published an article that said - in a very unconvincing way, in my humble opinion - that dialectical materialism requires the existence of life on every planet. Some time later, a painful official denial appeared which again and disconnected dialectical materialism from exobiology. A clear prediction in a field that is in the midst of vigorous research creates a doctrine destined to be refuted. And the last situation a bureaucratic religion wants to find itself in is exposure to a workable experiment that will prove whether it stands on two firm legs or on chicken's knees. The fact that no life was discovered on the moon did not undermine the foundations of dialectical materialism. Doctrines that do not produce convincing predictions are less than those that produce correct predictions; But more successful than doctrines whose predictions have been falsified.

not always. One important American religion confidently predicted that the world would come to an end in 1914. And here, 1914 came and went - and even brought with it some events that were not without importance - and the end, as far as I can determine, did not come to the world. In the face of such a thorough and false prophecy, there are at least three responses that organized religion can choose from. Priests can say, "Oh, we said: 1914? Very sorry, we meant '2014'. Slight miscalculation. We hope you have not been inconvenienced." They did not choose this path. They could say, "Well, the end of the world had to come, but we prayed and begged God so much that He passed the evil decree." They didn't do it rudely. They chose a smarter way. They announced that the end of the world did come in 1914, and if most of us didn't notice, that's our business. To our surprise, the religion was not left without believers. But religions are inherently harsh in their creation. They do not establish any laws that can be refuted and alternatively they rush to introduce changes in the doctrine immediately after its falsehood is clearly exposed. The fact that religions can show such dishonesty with a determined forehead, so disregard the intelligence of their followers and thrive in spite of all these things, does not speak much in praise of the common sense of the believers. But it also serves to show, if proof is indeed needed, that very close to the essence of the religious experience there is something that stands up well to rational investigation.
Andrew Dickinson White was the intellectual luminary, founder and first president of Cornell University. He also wrote an unusual book called The War Between Science and Theology in Christianity, a book that was considered so scandalous at the time of its publication that his co-author asked that his name be omitted. White was a man of deep religious feelings. Nevertheless, he described the long and tormented history of erroneous arguments about the naturalness of the world, as they came out of the religious seminaries, and how it happened that people who investigated the world directly and discovered that it differed from the doctrinal beliefs, were persecuted and oppressed. . The Catholic establishment threatened old Galileo with torture just because he claimed that the earth moved, the Jewish establishment boycotted Spinoza, and it's hard to find an organized religion with a solid set of doctrines that didn't persecute people, at one time or another, for violating free inquiry. Cornell's adherence to broad-minded free inquiry met with such fierce opposition in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that some pastors advised high school graduates to forego college altogether and not to enroll in an institution espousing such heretical ideas. Furthermore, the Sage Chapel ** was also built to appease the God-fearing believers. But it is possible, in any case, to note with joy that from time to time serious efforts towards broad-minded ecumenism have been revealed in it.

Many of the controversies described in White's book concern questions of origin. It was common to believe that every event in the world - for example, the opening of a chrysanthemum - is the result of divine intervention in Ze'ar-Anfin. The flower is unable to open on its own. God needs to learn "Be, flower, open." The application of this idea to human affairs has often had consistent social results. First, it seems that there is something to establish that we are not responsible for our actions. If the presentation of the world is produced and managed by an all-powerful and all-knowing God, doesn't this mean that every act of injustice is also the work of God? I know that this idea causes embarrassment in the West, and among the attempts to circumvent it one can also find the belief that what appears to be injustice is actually part of the divine plan, which is too complex for us to get to the bottom of; Or that God, when he set out to establish his world, chooses to obscure everything that concerns the tangle of causes and circumstances. There is no reason to completely cancel these philosophical rescue attempts, but I believe that they serve first and foremost as supports for the strengthening of a shaky ontological structure.*** Moreover, the idea of ​​meddling in the affairs of the world was used to strengthen explanatory, political and economic conventions. Thus, for example, philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes were found who sided with the whole seriousness of the idea of ​​the "divine right of kings". If you had revolutionary ideas that revolved around, say, George III, you would have been charged anyway with religious crimes like heresy and blasphemy, alongside more routine political crimes like treason.

The first and second questions raise many legitimate scientific problems: What is the origin of the human race and where did the nodes and the animals come from? How was life created? How were the earth, the planets, the sun, the stars created? Does the universe have a beginning, and if so, what is it? And at the end of this column stands an even more fundamental and exotic question, a question that many scientists would say is not subject to examination by its very nature and therefore has no meaning: Why are the rocks of nature the way they are? The idea that a god or gods are needed to bring about one or more of these health problems has been repeated over and over for the past thousands of years. Today we know something about phototropism and plant hormones, and therefore we can understand the opening of the chrysanthemum without requiring divine micro-intervention, the same can be said of the entire tangle of causes and agents up to the creation of the universe. As we learn more and more about the universe, there seems to be less and less work left for God.

Aristotle saw God as an irreplaceable prime mover, an idle king who established the universe in the first place and then sat back comfortably to observe the interwoven and convoluted chains of causes and spinners through the ages. But this image seems abstract and disconnected from everyday experience. It is also somewhat embarrassing, what else is there to hurt human arrogance. It seems that human beings inherently loathe an infinite regression of causes, and this loathing indeed lies at the foundation of the most famous and effective proofs of the existence of God, the fruit of the musings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. But these thinkers lived before infinite columns were a mathematical routine. If they had invented the differential and integral calculus in Greece, in the fifth century BC, and if they had not suppressed all of these afterwards, the history of religion in the West might have been very different - in any case, there might not have been so many pretensions, such as those found in Aquinas's book, To prove the theological doctrine, through rational argument, to all those who reject the claims of divine revelation.

When Newton came along and explained the motion of the planets through the universal theory of gravitation, angels were no longer needed to push and guide the planets in their tracks. When the Marquis Pierre Simon came to Place and offered to explain the creation of the solar system - though not the creation of matter - using physical laws, he seemed to challenge even the essentiality of divine intervention in the entire act of creation.
Flam is said to have given a copy of his first mathematical treatise, (Celestial Mechanics) to Napoleon, on the assumption that the two met on a ship in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1799-1798). A few days later, so the story continues, Napoleon complained to Flam that he could not find any mention of God in the text. Flame's answer was as follows: "Sir, I do not need this hypothesis." The perception of God as a hypothesis, not precisely as a clear truth." (It is heartening to think of Napoleon spending his days on the ship poring over a mathematical treatise on celestial mechanics. It is known, in any case, that he showed a serious interest in science and tried to follow the latest discoveries seriously (see Arcoy's Society: The Appearance of French Science in the Time of Napoleon I, by Maurice Cushland, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967). Napoleon did not pretend to read Laplace's entire essay and wrote to the latter on another occasion, "When I can spare I will devote the first six months to reading your essay." But he also comments, in connection with one of Laplace's other books Laplace, "Your essays contribute to the glory of the nation. There is a close connection between the advancement and perfection of mathematics and the state's prosperity."

Obviously, it is essentially a new idea in the West - although there is no doubt that the Greek philosophers discussed it seriously and distortedly already 2,400 years ago. It is often claimed following Aristotle. that God was needed at least for the creation of the universe. After all, this is a point that deserves to be examined in more detail. First and foremost, it is absolutely possible that the universe is infinitely ancient and therefore did not need any creator. This assumption is consistent with existing knowledge of cosmology, which leaves room for a cyclically oscillating universe in which all the events that have taken place since the big bang are nothing more than the last incarnation in an endless series of health and ruins of the universe. Second, let's discuss the idea of ​​the universe that God somehow created out of nothing. The question now arises from the way of nature - and many ten-year-olds think about it spontaneously before the adults stop them - where does God come from? If we answer that God is eternally primordial or that he is present simultaneously in all ages, we have not yet achieved any non-literal solution. We just postponed dealing with the real problem at one stage. An infinitely primordial universe and an infinitely primordial God are, in my humble opinion, equally profound mysteries. It is not entirely clear why we should believe that one of the two has a more reliable foundation than the other. Spinoza would perhaps say that the two possibilities are in fact the same idea itself.

When we come face to face with such profound mysteries, I think we would be wise to be a little humble. The very idea that scientists or theologians, equipped with the little knowledge we have at the moment about this universe, as vast and terrible as we are, would gossip about the creation of the universe with their intelligence, is only a little less stupid than the idea that the astronomers at Aram Nahrim, 3,000 years ago - those of The ancient Hebrews, during the Babylonian exile, asked the cosmological picture of chapter 129 in Genesis - they could indeed achieve the creation of the universe. Simply put, we will not disappoint. The view of the holy scriptures of the Hindus, the Rigveda (XNUMX:XNUMX) on the whole matter is much more realistic.

Who knew Al right? Who will come and declare?
When was he created, when was creation?
The gods were born after this world was created;
Who then knew Tzur from his quarry?

In any case, astronomical considerations led Aristotle to the general conclusion that there are several dozen prime movers in the universe that should not be copied from their places. It seems that Aristotle's arguments about a prime mover had polytheistic implications that Western theologians of the time could see as dangerous.

No one knows when his creation was
And whether he created or whether he did not create;
He surveys it from heaven,
Only he alone knows - or maybe he doesn't.

But the time we live in is a very interesting time. In the coming decades we may be able to present to experimental investigation some questions of the beginning, including some questions related to the creation of the universe. There is no possible answer to the great cosmological questions that cannot be traced back to the religious sensibilities of human beings. But the answers may embarrass bureaucratic and doctrinal religions. Harini believes that the very concept of religion as a body of beliefs, immune to criticism, established forever by some founder or other, is a proven prescription for the degeneration of religion in the long run, especially as things are supposed to be in the other era. In the first and second questions, the religious logic and the scientific logic have a great deal of common purpose. The mental structure of man is made so that we need with all our heart to answer these questions - exhausted. Because of the mystery of our private main. But our current scientific understandings, limited as they are, are much deeper than those of the Babylonian scientists of 1,000 BC. If there are religions that are not ready to adapt to changes, both scientific and social, I fear that their fate is sealed. A system of belief will not be able to exist and belong to reality, ferment and grow, unless it has the strength to respond to the harshest criticism that can be mobilized against it.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution encourages freedom of religious worship but does not prohibit criticism of religion. In fact, he protects the critics of the religion and strengthens their hands. Religion should be subject to at least the same degree of skepticism to which arguments about UFO visits or Velikovsky's catastrophism are subject, for example. I believe that if the religions themselves adopt a skeptical approach regarding the fundamental infrastructure of their evidential foundation, it will add health to them. There is no doubt that religion provides comfort and assistance, a support in times of emotional distress, and there is no doubt that it can play very useful social roles. But by no means does this imply that religion should be immune from scrutiny, from critical study, from skepticism. It's amazing to see how many belittle a skeptical discussion about religion in the nation of Tom Paine, the man who wrote the Age of Reason.

From time immemorial, religion provided an understanding of our place in the universe that was universally accepted. There is no doubt that the achievement of this understanding has been one of the main goals of myth and legend, philosophy and religion, since there were humans on earth. But the mutual confrontation of different religions, and of religion and science, undermined these traditional views, at least in the minds of many. The way to understand our place in Bikram is by examining the universe and ourselves - without bias, with an open and unbiased mind as far as we can. It is not in our power to start with a completely smooth slate - we have come to this problem and we are equipped with mindsets and thoughts, the result of our hereditary and environmental origins; But, when we understand the origin of such entrenched prejudices, can we not observe nature from his point of view?

Followers of doctrinal religions - those that uphold a certain belief system and despise non-believers - fear a bold search for knowledge. Such people tell us that probing too deeply can be dangerous. Many people inherited their religion, just like they inherited their eye color: they believe that it is not a subject worthy of deep thought, and that it is surely something beyond their control. Those people who hold their faith based on a biased sifting of facts and alternatives, and claim that it evokes deep feelings in them, will feel uneasy if their confidence is undermined by probing questions. Anger towards questions about our beliefs is a sign of the body: here lies an untested, and probably also dangerous, doctrinal charge. In 1670, Christian Huygenm wrote an impressive book with bold and far-reaching speculations about the other planets in the solar system. Huygenham knew very well that there were opponents of this kind of speculation and his astronomical observations.

This topic is steeped in irony. Augustine was born in Africa in 354 AD and in his youth was one of the Manichaeans, followers of a dualistic view of the universe, in which there is a conflict between good and evil, the data being more or less in a state of equality. This image was later rejected by Christian orthodoxy. The possibility that Meshor was corrupted by Manichaeism occurred to Augustine during his studies of astronomy. He found that even the elders of the faith could not justify the vague astronomical concepts involved in it. This contradiction between theology and science in astronomical matters was the first motive that pushed him towards Catholicism, his mother's religion, which for hundreds of years persecuted scientists like Galileo for their attempts to better understand astronomy. Augustine later became Saint Augustine, one of the main intellectual heroes of the Catholic Church. His mother was St. Monica, and she even had the right to have a suburb of Los Angeles named after her. Bertrand Russell wondered how Augustine would have seen the conflict between astronomy and theology if he had lived in Galileo's day.
"But perhaps they will say," Huygens mused to himself, "it is not honorable for us to show so great a degree of curiosity in these things that the Supreme Creator apparently decided to keep them for his own knowledge: since he preferred not to reveal anything more about them to us, it seems There is something presumptuous in wanting to investigate what he saw fit to hide. But these gentlemen must be told," Huygens continues and thunders in a clear voice, "that they take too much upon themselves when they pretend to determine how far human beings may go in their searches, and in this way put limits on the diligence of other people; As if they knew what limits God had set for knowledge; Or as if man has the power to cross these limits. If our ancestors had been as careful, we might not have known anything and a half about the size and shape of the Earth, or we wouldn't have known that there was such a place as America."
If we look at the universe as a whole, something amazing like no other will be revealed to us. First, we will discover a universe full of beauty and its intricate and delicate structure. If the universe looks like this to us because we are a part of it - that is, no matter how complex the universe is, it will always look beautiful to us - then that is a question I do not pretend to answer. But there is no doubt that the splendor of the universe is among its most impressive features. At this time there is no doubt that in this universe holocausts and catastrophes occur on a regular basis and on a most horrifying scale. There are, for example, quasar explosions, which apparently shrink the nuclei of galaxies. There is good reason to assume that with every quasar explosion, more than a million worlds are wiped from the sky, and countless forms of life, some of them intelligent, are completely destroyed. This is not the traditional benevolent universe of conventional religious thinking in the West, a universe built for the welfare of living beings, and humans in particular, rather, the very dimensions of the universe - more than a hundred billion galaxies, each of which holds more than a hundred billion stars - teach us about the insignificance of events the human in the cosmic context. The universe revealed to us is very beautiful and very violent at the same time. The universe revealed to us does not eliminate the possibility of a traditional god in the western or eastern sense, but neither does it require the existence of such a god.
I believe with all my heart, that if there is indeed a god or something similar to the traditional type, then he is the one who gave us our curiosity and intelligence. We would not have been able to cherish these virtues (just as it was not in our power to choose such a course of action) if we suppressed our desire to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if there is no such traditional god, it is only because our curiosity and reason are the main tools for our continued existence. One way or another, the pursuit of knowledge is compatible with both science and religion, and is essential to the well-being of the human race.

*. White is supposedly also responsible for correcting the exemplary practice of not awarding honorary doctorate degrees at Cornell University: he was concerned about the possibility of these degrees being misused, of selling the honorary degree in exchange for benefits and financial grants. White was a man of strong and bold moral principles

** A magnificent building at Yale University that includes, among other things, a church

*** Many theologians confidently made statements about God based on reasons that sound, at least today, erroneous. Thomas Aquinas claimed that he was able to prove that God cannot create another God, or commit suicide, or create a person without a soul, or even create a triangle whose interior angles are not equal to 180 degrees. But Boulay and Lobachevski managed to accomplish the last feat (over a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, without coming anywhere near the feat of gods. Isn't this a strange idea: an almighty god who, by order of the theologians, is forbidden to perform a long list of exploits.

* With the approval of Maariv Publishing, December 2006