The Sagan Paradox

It is coincidental that as I now re-read Carl Sagan's Cosmos, I run across this month-old piece from Doublethink about the implicit religiosity of the vocally non-religious Carl Sagan. In a lifetime of writing and lecturing, Sagan's skepticism was never in question; and while he was never as derisive toward religion as the now in vogue antitheists are, even a small sample of his writing yields a potshot here and there.

Sagan's paradox, however, was his unflinching belief in the unproven:

“Those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed,” Sagan said. “The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations. A grinding of heels can be heard screeching across the last five centuries as scientists have revealed the noncentrality of our position and as many others have fought to resist that insight to the bitter end.”

For Sagan, science had exposed the nullities behind most traditional human cosmologies. During an exchange with an audience member, Sagan raised the “concept of God as an outsize male with a long white beard, sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow.” “For that kind of god,” Sagan said, “I maintain there is no evidence. And while I’m open to suggestions of evidence for that kind of god, I personally am dubious that there will be powerful evidence for such a god not only in the near future but even in the distant future.”

Sagan’s Gifford Lectures are filled with such statements. Reading through them, however, you are struck by an odd juxtaposition. Sagan spent the lectures heaping criticism on orthodoxy -- but he also spent ample time discussing the search for extraterrestrial life. And here his tone seemed altogether unskeptical. Discussing extraterrestrial intelligence, Sagan said, “We have to be extremely careful.” We must “demand the most stringent and rigorous standards of evidence precisely because we have profound emotional investments in the answer.”

The phrase “profound emotional investments” is a clue to the paradox underlying Sagan’s Gifford Lectures in particular and his worldview in general. That is because, while he never stated so publicly, Sagan believed in the existence of extraterrestrial life. He didn’t believe there was the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the position he took in his writings and public appearances. No. He believed in the fact that there are extraterrestrials. And not Unidentified Flying Objects -- tales of which he worked actively to debunk -- but “superior beings in space, creatures so intelligent, so powerful as to resemble gods,” according to his biographer Keay Davidson. These beings in whom Sagan believed inhabited societies “millions of years old,” wrote Davidson. They had “developed technologies unimaginable to us.” They did not know war and were willing to share their knowledge of the cosmos freely. “In short,” Davidson continued, they were “all powerful, all knowing, all loving.”

This last bit on his belief in the nature of extraterrestrials is made explicit in Contact, in which Ellie has a vision, a revelation, an epiphany - a religious experience - after seeing with her own two eyes evidence of the "breathtaking diversity of beings and cultures..., a vision of a populated galaxy, of a universe spilling over with life and intelligence, [that] made her want to cry."

There are entire chapters in Cosmos, Sagan's most popular and well-known work, as well as in most of his other works, devoted to speculation on where and how extraterrestrial life will be found. Granted, the probability of its existence is favorable: (1 - (1/100 billion)) = 1. I also believe there is life elsewhere in the universe. But for a skeptic and dogmatic empiricist to express a belief in something so uncontroversially unproven, and damn near unprovable (if humanity exists for another 100 million years, I'd say the odds are still stacked against us ever getting our hands on any cold hard evidence) reveals a certain inner dualism.

I mention this not as a critique against Sagan; rather, I understand both his belief in something unproven and his genuine sense of awe - at the universe in general, and humanity in particular - as natural human responses to simple observation. After all, the most basic, primitive, and instinctual religious act one can make is submission to the forces of nature as forces beyond human control. The hyper-empiricism of the Sagan type simply crystallizes this instinct and holds onto as an end, rather than taking it as a starting point for theological discourse; it accepts a materialistic naturalism, but denies a natural law.

The argument that I always think carries most sway is that our very self-awareness and thus our existence is an ontological impossibility in a strictly material universe - the old "you can't get more out than you put in" - but that's a different story for a different day. Even now as I refresh myself on Sagan's writing, I can't help but be impressed by his longing for something - or, more precisely, someONE - out there in the universe that would give him that "Ellie moment" in Contact; the sad part is that a severely dogmatic, and thereby severely handicapping empiricism denied him that awareness during his lifetime.