Contact - Carl Sagan [70]
"And the Bible speaks to our own time. Israel and the Arabs, Gog and Magog, American and Russia, nuclear war-it's all there in the Bible. Anybody with an ounce of sense can see it. You don't have to be some fancy college professor."
"Your trouble," she replied, "is a failure of the imagination. These prophecies are-almost every one of them-vague, ambiguous, imprecise, open to fraud. They admit lots of possible interpretations. Even the straightforward prophecies direct from the top you try to weasel out of-like Jesus' promise that the Kingdom of God would come in the lifetime of some people in his audience. And don't tell me the Kingdom of God is within me. His audience understood him quite literally. You only quote the passages that seem to you fulfilled, and ignore the rest. And don't forget there was a hunger to see prophecy fulfilled.
"But imagine that your kind of god-omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate-really wanted to leave a record for future generations, to make his existence unmistakable to, say, the remote descendants of Moses. It's easy, trivial. Just a few enigmatic phrases, and some fierce commandment that they be passed on unchanged…"
"Joss leaned forward almost imperceptibly. "Such as…?"
"Such as `The Sun is a star.' Or `Mars is a rusty place with deserts and volcanoes, like Sinai.' Or `A body in motion tends to remain in motion.' Or-let's see now"-she quickly scribbled some numbers on a pad-"`The Earth weighs a million million million million times as much as a child.' Or-I recognize that both of you seem to have some trouble with special relativity, but it's confirmed every day routinely in particle accelerators and cosmic rays-how about `There are no privileged frames of reference'? Or even `Thou shalt not travel faster than light.' anything they couldn't possible have known three thousand years ago."
"Any others?" Joss asked.
"Well, there's an indefinite number of them-or at least one for every principal of physics. Let's see… `Heat and light hid in the smallest pebble.' Or even `The way of the Earth is as two, but the way of the lodestone is as three.' I'm trying to suggest that the gravitational force follows an inverse square law, while the magnetic dipole force follows an inverse cube law. Or in biology"-she nodded toward der Heer, who seemed to have taken a vow of silence-"how about `Two strands entwined is the secret of life'?"
"Now that's an interesting one," said Joss. "You're talking, of course, about DNA. But you know the physician's staff, the symbol of medicine? Army doctors wear it on their lapels. It's called the caduceus. Shows two serpents intertwined. It's a perfect double helix. From ancient times that's been the symbol of preserving life. Isn't this exactly the kind of connection you're suggesting?"
"Well, I thought it's a spiral, not a helix. But if there are enough symbols and enough prophecies and enough myth and folklore, eventually a few of them are going to fit some current scientific understanding purely by accident. But I can't be sure. Maybe you're right. Maybe the caduceus is a message from God. Of course, it's not a Christian symbol, or a symbol of any of the major religions today. I don't suppose you'd want to argue that the gods talked only to the ancient Greeks. What I'm saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job. And he hardly had to confine himself to writings. Why isn't there a monster crucifix orbiting the Earth? Why isn't the surface of the Moon covered with the Ten Commandments? Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?"
Joss had apparently been ready to reply a few sentences back, a look of genuine pleasure unexpectedly on his face, but Ellie's rush of words was gathering momentum, and perhaps he felt it impolite to interrupt.
"Also, why would you think that God has abandoned us? He used to chat with patriarchs and prophets every second Tuesday, you believe.