Carl Sagan on Natural Theology (II)

Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience

Now, more on the late astronomer extraordinaire Carl Sagan's posthumous The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God: the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology Sagan delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1985, now in book form. In these lectures, Sagan took on natural theology, religion's claim that scientific studies of nature bolster belief in God.

Sagan, who died far too young in 1996, is remembered for his pioneering work in exploring (robotically) other worlds in our solar system. He created the popular TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and was instrumental in establishing the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, SETI. He championed nuclear disarmament and warned of possible nuclear winter. And he opposed religious fundamentalists who resist Darwinism and other fruits of modern scientific inquiry.

In a number of previous posts to this blog I extolled Sagan as possessing as fine a spirituality as anyone could hope for. But he was clearly allergic to religion, as distinct from spirituality. The Varieties of Scientific Experience is in large part a compendium of reasons why he spurned religion.

I touched on one of them in Sagan on Natural Theology (I). There are a number of traditional "proofs" of God's existence that philosophers and theologians have proposed down through the centuries. Sagan says none of them satisfy a true skeptic. In fact, skepticism was precisely what Caarl Sagan believed most "religiously" in: the suspended judgment, systematic doubt, and the unbridled criticism characteristic of modern science.

In this book, Sagan questions (among other "proofs") the cosmological one: the assertion that an infinite backward regress of causes is absurd, so there has to be an uncaused cause, God. Why not, he says, then ask "What caused God?"

As I said in the earlier post, it now appears that scientifically investigatable causes cannot be tracked back any further than the big bang. But why stop there, intellectually? Why not ask "What caused the big bang?" and answer "God"? In other words, why terminate the causal regress at a point of utter incomprehensibility, rather than with an intentional agent?


One of Sagan's reasons for preferring incomprehensibility to intentionality is that he habitually tried to disentangle answers to important questions, such as does God exist, from our natural human tendency to project our fondest wishes onto the universe. We hope there's a God, Sagan said, so we should resist the conclusion that God exists. "We should ... pay attention to how badly we want to believe a given contention. The more badly we want to believe it, the more skeptical we have to be" (p. 230).

In offering such guidance, materialists like Sagan assume that "There is a God" is the type of assertion that evidence can establish or refute. Then they show how weak the physical evidence is, taken all by itself.

But religious faith is the hope of things unseen. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," Hebrews 11:1 reads. Faith starts by assuming that certain propositions cannot be proven by evidence alone. That's why we look to revelation. God is told of, so believers hold, first and foremost in scripture. Only after we accept scripture can we resort to natural theology to see what extra evidence of God's providence we can find, what greater clarity scientific inquiry can offer us.


The science Carl Sagan loved proves the Bible cannot always be read literally. The creation stories in Genesis and the counting up of generations which seems to show the earth is but a few thousand years old mean something other than what a literalist would assume. Our human forefathers alone go back over 2 million years. The planet we live on is 4.5 billion years old. The universe began 14 billion years ago.

Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

One of the greatest arguments within modern Christianity is about the "literal inerrancy" of the Bible. The literary critic Northrop Frye, a non-fundamentalist Christian who was ordained as a minister of the United Church of Canada, wrote two books towards the end of his life which claimed that the "literal" meaning of much of the Bible is much closer to the poet's than to the fact-based historian's or to the descriptive journalist's. In The Great Code Frye wrote, "In the Bible the literal meaning is the poetic meaning ... in a quite specific sense of confronting us with explicitly metaphorical and other forms of distinctively poetic utterance" (p. 62).

Northrop Frye's Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature

In Words with Power Frye said the Bible's "literal meaning is its mythical and metaphorical meaning" (p. 102). The earliest authors of the Old Testament were, during the Jews' Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century B.C., writing down and weaving together stories from a longstanding oral tradition that was in danger of dying. Words at that time had always been used in powerful ways to evoke an unseeable God. It would have been unthinkable to insist on what we today call "literal" inerrancy. That type of language expectation wouldn't come to the fore until modern times, in the last four centuries or so.

As the Wikipedia article on Frye puts it:

... it was in reflecting on the similarity between [the poets William] Blake and [John] Milton that Frye first stumbled upon the “principle of the mythological framework,” the recognition that “the Bible was a mythological framework, cosmos or body of stories, and that societies live within a mythology” [quote from Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye and the Theoretical Imagination]. Blake thus led Frye to the conviction that the Bible provided Western societies with the mythology which informed all of Western literature.

Northrop Frye thus found the spirit of the Bible in its poetic, mythic power. Many Christians dispute this. The ones who do not typically have little trouble reconciling faith with modern science. The ones who do gave Carl Sagan dyspepsia. In reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience, one wonders whether Sagan would have had much to say if fundamentalists weren't talking so loud.