Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [24]
George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to his play St. Joan, described a sense of science preying on our credulity, forcing on us an alien worldview, intimidating belief:
In the Middle Ages, people believed that the Earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent of us could give the physical reason for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.
A more recent and very instructive example is Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man, by Bryan Appleyard, a British journalist. This book makes explicit what many people feel, all over the world, but are too embarrassed to say. Appleyard’s candor is refreshing. He is a true believer and will not let us slough over the contradictions between modern science and traditional religion:
“Science has taken away our religion,” he laments. And what sort of religion is it that he longs for? One in which “the human race was the point, the heart, the final cause of the whole system. It placed our selves definitively upon the universal map.” … “We were the end, the purpose, the rational axle around which the great aetherian shells rotated.” He longs for “the universe of Catholic orthodoxy” in which “the cosmos is shown to be a machine constructed around the drama of salvation”—by which Appleyard means that, despite explicit orders to the contrary, a woman and a man once ate of an apple, and that this act of insubordination transformed the Universe into a contrivance for operant-conditioning their remote descendants.
By contrast, modern science “presents us as accidents. We are caused by the cosmos, but we are not the cause of it. Modern man is not finally anything, he has no role in creation.” Science is “spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions. It cannot really co-exist with anything.” … “Science, quietly and inexplicitly, is talking us into abandoning our selves, our true selves.” It reveals “the mute, alien spectacle of nature.” … “Human beings cannot live with such a revelation. The only morality left is that of the consoling lie.” Anything is better than grappling with the unbearable burden of being tiny.
In a passage reminiscent of Pius IX, Appleyard even decries the fact that “a modern democracy can be expected to include a number of contradictory religious faiths which are obliged to agree on a certain limited number of general injunctions, but no more. They must not burn each other’s places of worship, but they may deny, even abuse each other’s God. This is the effective, scientific way of proceeding.”
But what is the alternative? Obdurately to pretend to certainty in an uncertain world? To adopt a comforting belief system, no matter how out of kilter with the facts it is? If we don’t know what’s real, how can we deal with reality? For practical reasons, we cannot live too much in fantasyland. Shall we censor one another’s religions and burn down one another’s places of worship? How can we be sure which of the thousands of human belief systems should become unchallenged, ubiquitous, mandatory?
These quotations betray a failure of nerve before the Universe—its grandeur and magnificence, but especially its indifference. Science has taught us that, because we have a talent for deceiving ourselves, subjectivity may not freely reign. This is one reason Appleyard so mistrusts science: It seems too reasoned, measured, and impersonal. Its conclusions derive from the interrogation of Nature, and are not in all cases predesigned to satisfy our wants.