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.

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?