Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [25]
This is the anguished cry of the infant when the Parent does not come. But most people eventually come to grips with reality, and with the painful absence of parents who will absolutely guarantee that no harm befalls the little ones so long as they do what they are told. Eventually most people find ways to accommodate to the Universe—especially when given the tools to think straight.
“All that we pass on to our children” in the scientific age, Appleyard complains, “is the conviction that nothing is true, final or enduring, including the culture from which they sprang.” How right he is about the inadequacy of our legacy. But would it be enriched by adding baseless certainties? He scorns “the pious hope that science and religion are independent realms which can easily be separated.” Instead, “science, as it is now, is absolutely not compatible with religion.”
But isn’t Appleyard really saying that some religions now find it difficult to make unchallenged pronouncements on the nature of the world that are straight-out false? We recognize that even revered religious leaders, the products of their time as we are of ours, may have made mistakes. Religions contradict one another—on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods.
Science has brought many of us to that state in which Nathaniel Hawthorne found Herman Melville: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.” Or Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “They had not persuaded me, but they had troubled me. Their arguments had shaken me without ever convincing me … It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires.” As the belief systems taught by the secular and religious authorities are undermined, respect for authority in general probably does erode. The lesson is clear: Even political leaders must be wary of embracing false doctrine. This is not a failing of science, but one of its graces.
Of course, worldview consensus is comforting, while clashes of opinion may be unsettling, and demand more of us. But unless we insist, against all evidence, that our ancestors were perfect, the advance of knowledge requires us to unravel and then restitch the consensus they established.
In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
IF YOU LIVED two or three millennia ago, there was no shame in holding that the Universe was made for us. It was an appealing thesis consistent with everything we knew; it was what the most learned among us taught without qualification. But we have found out much since then. Defending such a position today amounts to willful disregard of the evidence, and a flight from self-knowledge.
Still, for many of us, these deprovincializations rankle. Even if they do not fully carry the day, they erode confidence—unlike the happy anthropocentric certitudes, rippling with social utility, of an earlier age. We long to be here for a purpose, even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident. “The meaningless