Carl Sagan on Natural Theology (I)

Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience

Carl Sagan, the late astronomer extraordinaire, has a new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. Ann Druyan, his widow, has edited into book form the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology Sagan delivered at Scotland's University of Glasgow, on the occasion of the lectureship's centennial in 1985. In these lectures, Sagan highlights Western religious orthodoxy's incompatibility with modern scientific understandings, suggesting that the former will give way to the latter, just as it has in the past.

But to me there seems to be a great big hole in his argument.

In his chapter on "The God Hypothesis," Sagan assails the various proofs of God's existence that have been offered in the history of religion in the East and in the West. One is the cosmological argument. All things are caused by something else, yet an infinite regress of causes of causes of causes is, presumably, impossible. There must be a first, or uncaused, cause: God.

Sagan doesn't accept that. "And who made God?" he asks.

Then he turns to the big bang, the explosion of our cosmos 15 billion years ago out of a tiny primordial dot of super-dense stuff. To the question of what preceded the big bang, he says there are two available answers:

One is "Don't ask that question," which is very close to saying that God did it. And the other is that we live in an oscillating universe in which there are an infinite number of expansions and contractions (pp. 155-156).

Sagan clearly favors the latter hypothesis, since it obviates the need to ascribe the universe's origin to anyone or anything. But his editor footnotes the passage with:

In 1998 two international teams of astronomers independently reported unexpected evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. These findings suggest the universe is not oscillating but will continue to expand forever.

Which implies that the big bang, the origin of the universe, was unique. It will not be repeated, much less repeated ad infinitum.

It appears that the entire gamut of laws of nature which science studies began with the big bang, such that we lack all scientific purchase on what may have happened prior to it. The big bang is, as best we can tell, a scientifically impenetrable "singularity" at the origin of time, space, matter, and energy. Assuming that it had a cause, there is no way for science to figure it out.

If the backward chain of natural causes simply terminates when we reach the big bang, why? If that first, uncaused cause is meaningless to the point of total incomprehensibility, why?

A nice alternative — if we are not in an infinite loop of eternal cosmic oscillations — is to assume the big bang itself was caused by a meaningful, intentional, comprehensible agent, itself primary and uncaused.

Why is that so hard to believe?

Isn't it now more likely than it seemed in 1985 that science and religion can come to sing from the same hymn book?

Isn't the uniqueness of the big bang very strong natural-theological evidence that there is, after all, a God?