Contact - Carl Sagan [72]
"I'm a Christian and you don't speak for me. You've tapped yourself in some sort of fifth-century religious mania. Since then the Renaissance has happened, the Enlightenment has happened. Where've you been?"
Both Joss and der Heer were half out of their chairs. "Please," Ken implored, looking directly at Ellie. "If we don't keep more to the agenda, I don't see how we can accomplish what the President asked us to do."
"Well, you wanted `a frank exchange of views.'"
"It's nearly noon," Joss observed. "Why don't we take a little break for lunch?"
Outside the library conference room, leaning on the railing surrounding the Foucault pendulum, Ellie began a brief whispered exchange with der Heer.
"I'd like to punch out that cocksure, know-it-all, holier-than-thou…"
"Why, exactly, Ellie? Aren't ignorance and error painful enough?"
"Yes, if he'd shut up. But he's corrupting millions."
"Sweetheart, he thinks the same about you."
When she and der Heer came back from lunch, Ellie noticed immediately that Rankin appeared subdued, while Joss, who was first to speak, seemed cheerful, certainly beyond the requirements of mere cordiality.
"Dr. Arroway," he began, "I can understand that you're impatient to show us your findings, and that you didn't come here for theological disputation. But please bear with us just a bit longer. You have a sharp tongue. I can't recall the last time Brother Rankin here got so stirred up on matters of the faith. It must be years."
He glanced momentarily at his colleague, who was doodling, apparently idly, on a yellow legal pad, his collar unbuttoned and his necktie loosened.
"I was struck by one or two things you said this morning. You called yourself a Christian. May I ask? In what sense are you a Christian?"
"You know, this wasn't the job description when I accepted the directorship of the Argus Project." She said this lightly. "I'm a Christian in the sense that I find Jesus Christ to be an admirable historical figure. I think the Sermon on the Mount is one of the greatest ethical statements and one of the best speeches in history. I think that `Love your enemy' might even be the long-shot solution to the problem of nuclear war. I wish he was alive today. It would benefit everybody on the planet. But I think Jesus was only a man. A great man, a brave man, a man with insight into unpopular truths. But I don't think he was God or the son of God or the grandnephew of God."
"You don't want to believe in God." Joss said it as a simple statement. "You figure you can be a Christian and not believe in God. Let me ask you straight out: Do you believe in God?"
"The question has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I'm convinced God doesn't exist, or do I mean I'm not convinced he does exist? Those are two very different statements."
"Let's see if they are so different, Dr. Arroway. May I call you `Doctor'? You believe in Occam's Razor, isn't that right? If you have two different, equally good explanations of the same experience, you pick the simplest. The whole history of science supports it, you say. Now, if you have serious doubts about whether there is a God-enough doubts so you're unwilling to commit yourself to the Faith-then you must be able to imagine a world without God: a world that comes into being without God, a world where people die without God. No punishment. No reward. All the saints and prophets, all the faithful who have ever lived-why, you'd have to believe they were foolish. Deceived themselves, you'd probably say. That would be a world in which we weren't here on Earth for any good reason-I mean for any purpose. It would all be just complicated collisions of atoms-is that right? Including the atoms that are inside human beings.
"To me, that would be a hateful and inhuman world. I wouldn't want to live in it. But if you