It’s been a long 10 years since we’ve heard Carl Sagan beckoning us to consider the possibilities inherent in the “billions” of stars peppering the sky and in the “billions” of neuronal connections spiderwebbing our brains....
In his absence, the public discourse on his favorite issues — the fate of the planet, the beauty and mystery of the cosmos — has not fared well. The teaching of evolution in public schools has become a bitter bone of contention; NASA tried to abandon the Hubble Space Telescope and censor talk of climate change; and of course, religious fanatics crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center, leading to a war in the Middle East that has awakened memories in some corners of the Crusades.
Now, however, Dr. Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave. The occasion is the publication in November of “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God” (Penguin). The book is based on a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985, and it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator....
“I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship,” he writes at the beginning of a discussion that includes the history of cosmology, a travel guide to the solar system, the reason there are hallucinogen receptors in the brain, and the meaning of the potential discovery — or lack thereof — of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Never afraid to venture into global politics, Dr. Sagan warns at one point of the danger that a leader under the sway of religious fundamentalism might not try too hard to avoid nuclear Armageddon, reasoning that it was God’s plan.
“He might be interested to see what that would be like,” Dr. Sagan wrote. “Why slow it down?”
Almost in the same breath, Dr. Sagan acknowledges that religion can engender hope and speak truth to power, as in the civil rights movement in the United States, but that it rarely does.
It’s curious, he says, that no allegedly Christian nation has adopted the Golden Rule as a basis for foreign policy. Rather, in the nuclear age, mutually assured destruction was the policy of choice. “Christianity says that you should love your enemy. It certainly doesn’t say that you should vaporize his children.”
In many respects Dr. Sagan's criticisms of fundamentalism don't seem to be too far off the mark. However, could it be that he failed to understand the true intent and purposes of Christ's transforming love? Did he fail to understand the meaning of true religion? Or, did he simply find it rarely practiced in our times?
Interestingly, I find myself in agreement with the assertion that Christians frequently fail to follow the intentions of Christ. Too often we do the exact opposite with no intention of seeking to right the situation.
In Sagan's assessment of fundamentalism I am reminded of Jesus' criticism of the Pharisees and the kind of religion that they sought to promote. In many respects we might say that the Pharisees achieved some measure of success--this is something that I have mused over since my early experiences with evangelicalism. Religion devoid of love is not the faith that is born of our Lord's passion, rather it is something truly alien to the heart of Christ.
If Sagan would have only searched for Christ with the same rigor that he applied to science, his findings might have yielded surprising evidence.
Ah, there you go. When anyone searches for Christ with the same rigor that we apply to other things, our findings yield surprising evidence. Evidence. Indeed. Whole households of martyrs did not die simply because they were stubborn! If there were not evidence of Christ's power on earth, there would not be enough love in this exile to keep even a puppy alive.
Posted by: C | February 15, 2007 at 09:29 AM