Prisoner of bad philosophy: Carl Sagan couldn’t allow himself to hope

It’s impossible not to love Carl Sagan, a prophet and a poet of the space age. But why couldn’t he allow himself to hope?

I’ve grown up reading Sagan’s books, and Sagan is one of my heroes. That’s why I find so saddening these words of Sagan’s collaborator and wife Ann Druyan:

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl.”

Here are two great persons who gave up hope and accepted despair to remain true to bad philosophy. Atheism can become a mental prison that leaves imagination and hope locked out.

Sagan’s overall philosophy and views on religion are outlined in “The Varieties of Scientific Experience,” a version of Sagan’s 1985 Gifford Lectures edited by Druyan and published in 2006, ten years after Sagan’s premature death.

The book is a powerful defense of the scientific method as a better way to search for truth than religious revelation. I agree, with three caveats: First, I don’t entirely dismiss the value of subjective experiences that can’t be reproduced. Second, science at its best starts with visionary leaps of imagination that often have much in common with religion. Third, hope is more important than truth.

While Sagan never called himself an atheist (one who knows that God doesn’t exist) but an agnostic (one who doesn’t know if God exists), it’s easy to interpret his writings as a passionate defense of atheism.

At the same time, it’s worth noting that Sagan had a deep knowledge of religions, and was open to considering the positive side of religions. For example, in “Pale Blue Dot,” Sagan noted that “we are in need of other sorts of myth, myths of encouragement. Many religions, from Hinduism to Gnostic Christianity to Mormon doctrine, teach that — as impious as it may sound — it is the goal of humans to become gods.”

“Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the apple, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden.) In the Garden, God tells Eve and Adam that He has intentionally left the Universe unfinished. It is the responsibility of humans, over countless generations, to participate with God in a ‘glorious’ experiment — ‘completing the Creation.’”

This shows that Sagan was perfectly aware of the interpretation of religion that I am proposing: The promises of religion are true, because we’ll make them true. Carl Sagan was a highly imaginative scientist, certainly imaginative enough to conceive of natural Gods and technological resurrection with the same openness of Arthur Clarke.

Sagan’s science fiction novel “Contact,” a rightfully acclaimed masterpiece, shows a “startling sympathy for the epistemological premise of revealed religions” and reveals that Sagan had many building blocks of physical theology in mind: The existence of advanced civilizations with God-like powers in the universe (which implies that we could become God-like ourselves), spacetime engineering, [faster than light travel through wormholes], some form of time travel and “time magic,” and high resolution mind scanning. My central thesis is that time magic and mind scanning will permit to resurrect the dead by copying them out.

Even more startlingly:

“The universe was made on purpose… In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.”

I think the fact that Sagan chose to include these visions only in his single science fiction novel (too bad he didn’t write others) reveals that he wanted to take distance from his imagination… because his imagination sounded too much like religion.

I suspect that Carl Sagan was afraid of falling back into beliefs from which he had escaped with difficulties and pain. Sagan’s familiarity with religions seems to confirm this possibility. In her introduction to “The Varieties of Scientific Experience,” Druyan says:

“He couldn’t live a compartmentalized life, operating on one set of assumptions in the laboratory and keeping another, conflicting set for the Sabbath. He took the idea of God so seriously that it had to pass the most rigorous standards of scrutiny.”

Taking things too seriously is often paralyzing. Perhaps serious things, especially serious things, shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but with a healthy degree of playfulness.

Sagan was a champion of skeptical scrutiny and popularized the often heard principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I find this short formulation of Sagan’s principle misleading: If there is evidence, a claim is not an extraordinary claim but an evident claim.

What (I think) Sagan’s principle means that you should require extraordinary evidence before accepting a claim that seems extraordinary. OK with that, of course. But you can’t require extraordinary evidence before considering a claim, otherwise things become circular, nobody ever considers anything new, and we are still living in caves.

Also, there are situations in which suspending disbelief and acting on an extraordinary claim is all you can do.

Stranded on a hopeless shore

Suppose you are stranded on the shore of a big island. You have done a quick reconnaissance and found no sources of drinkable water. You don’t know how to desalinate sea water, or if such a thing is even possible.

So, no drinkable water in the island, and no way to make some. Should you give up hope and force yourself to make peace with the inevitable fact that you’ll be dead in a few days?

No, you shouldn’t. Yes, perhaps you’ll be dead in a couple of days, but you shouldn’t sit down and do nothing waiting for death. Rather, you should bet on the extraordinary claim that you’ll find or make drinkable water, suspend disbelief, and get busy to establish the evidence.

The island is big, and you have explored only a small part of it. Who’s to say that there’s no drinkable water in the rest of the island? Go and look for some, for fuck’s sake! The island seems uninhabited, but who’s to say that there can’t be people inland who can give you water?

Finally, who’s to say that sea water can’t be desalinated, or that you can’t desalinate sea water yourself? As a matter of fact, there are ways to desalinate sea water without special equipment. I guess you would think of one if your life depended on it.

I guess I don’t need to decode this metaphor, but just in case here you go: The drinkable water stands for the hope to be reunited with your loved ones after physical death. Just like I can’t live without water, I can’t live without this hope.

The only thing I can do is to suspend disbelief in the extraordinary claim that I’ll be reunited with my loved ones, and try to establish some degree of plausibility for natural resurrection (finding water) or technological resurrection (making water).

Picture from Wikimedia Commons.