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I recently enjoyed Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Uncompromising, logical, compelling, convincing; great stuff. But there’s something exquisite about Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience. Sagan’s magic—in the words of his wife and collaborator, Ann Druyan—“was his extraordinary combination of principled, crystal-clear advocacy coupled with respect and tenderness toward those who did not share his views.” (p. xiv) This is a tremendously important book, and I think everyone should read it. And everyone can read it. There’s no heavy physics or math here, just a very smart guy who’s studied a great deal on a wide range of subjects telling you what he thinks about truth. Naturally, I think he’s spot-on.

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Sagan was invited to give the historic annual Gifford Lectures in 1985. Not just any installment of the Gifford Lectures, but the hundredth annual installment (Dawkins, for his part, delivered the lectures three years later). Decades ago, William James called the book he wrote based on his Gifford Lectures The Varieties of Religious Experience. This was consistent with Gifford’s mission in establishing the program, to (in his own words) “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term — in other words, the knowledge of God.” Sagan’s 2006 book, edited from the 1985 audio transcripts and released ten years after his death, answers James with the title The Varieties of Scientific Experience, and Sagan’s commentary illuminates a wide range of religious, social and (of course) scientific topics. As Druyan explains in the introduction, “his argument was not with God but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed.” (p. xi) Sagan himself adds, “if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.” (p. 31)

Sagan begins with a quick tour of the universe and the basics of what we know about it, since “the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night. I believe it is very difficult to know who we are until we understand where and when we are.” (p. 2) He goes on in the first chapter to describe how galaxies, stars and solar systems are known to have formed, and provides some initial food for theological thought.

Some 5 or 6 or 7 billion years from now, the Sun will become a red giant star and will engulf the orbits of Mercury and Venus and probably the Earth. The Earth then would be inside the Sun, and some of the problems that face us on this particular day will appear, by comparison, modest. On the other hand, since it is 5,000 or more million years away, it is not our most pressing problem. But it is something to bear in mind. It has theological implications. (p. 20)

Chapter one also includes a description of the impossible vastness of the universe, and describes a variety of attempts by humans to estimate our stature within it. And he notes “the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religions.” (p. 27)

This apparent lack of awareness receives attention throughout the book, particularly in chapter two where Sagan examines the way theology is called upon to answer the questions which science cannot. He points out how scientific discoveries inexorably displace religious explanations for big mysteries: the world is not flat; the Earth is not at the center of the solar system; the solar system is not at the center of the galaxy; our galaxy is nowhere near the center of the universe (if such a place exists at all). Those who made these discoveries knew all too well that religion didn’t accept them without a fight. “A grinding of heels can be heard across the last five centuries as scientists have revealed the noncentrality of our position and as many others have fought to resist that insight to the bitter end.” (p. 37)

Sagan then shifts from theological views regarding stars and planets to those regarding biology on earth.

It used to be that the flowering of every plant was due to direct intervention by the Deity. Now we understand something about plant hormones and phototropism, and virtually no one imagines that God directly commands the individual flowers to bloom.

So as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It’s a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm. The theologicians give that one up, and it walks over onto the science side of the duty roster. (p. 64)

Of course, the origin of life is just such a gap, though scientists agree on natural selection as the foundation for the process through which primitive forms of life—once established—have evolved to more complex ones. So in chapter three Sagan looks at organic chemistry and how life began, examining theories (and objections to those theories) related to how the spark of life on Earth was ignited.

Chapter four discusses the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and provides a convincing argument that it would be quite useful to know, one way or another, whether we are alone in the universe. But not before he slides in this zinger:

Certainly on this planet it is not apparent that there are beings more intelligent than humans, although a case can be made for dolphins and whales, and in fact if humans succeed in destroying themselves with nuclear weapons, a case could be made that all the other animals are smarter than humans. (p. 103)

Sagan is well known for his interest in the search for extraterrestrial life and he provides very interesting reading, not just on the scientific side but on the folklore side as well: stories of UFOs and abductions are covered in some detail and examined from a rigorous, scientific perspective. (Spoiler: it’s all hogwash.)

Then in chapter six, he gets to the big questions. Does God exist? For that matter, what exactly do we mean by “God”?

Now, think again of all the possibilities: worlds without gods; gods without worlds; gods that are made by preexisting gods; gods that were always here; gods that never die; gods that do die; gods that die more than once; different degrees of divine intervention in human affairs; zero, one or many prophets; zero, one, or many saviors; zero, one, or many resurrections; zero, one, or many gods. And related questions about sacrament, religious mutilation, and scarification, baptism, monastic orders, ascetic expectations, the presence or absence of an afterlife, days to eat fish, days not to eat at all, how many afterlives you have coming to you, justice in this world or the next world or no world at all, reincarnation, human sacrifice, temple prostitution, jihads, and so forth. It’s a vast array of things that people believe. Different religions believe different things. There’s a grab bag of religious alternatives. And there are clearly more combinations of alternatives than there are religions, even though there are something like a few thousand religions on the planet today. (p. 151)

And what of the origin of the universe? And if God made the universe, who or what made God? Scientists agree on the basics of the big bang theory, but there’s no good answer to the “what happened before that?” question. At the end of the book, Sagan concedes that, to an astrophysicist, “questions such as ‘Why did the universe expand?’ are considered off-limits [because] there’s no experiment you can do to check it out.” (p. 232) The same problem plagues the “uncaused cause”/”first cause” cosmological argument for the existence of God. Sagan describes each of the attempts to logically prove God’s existence, and examines them from a rigorous, scientific perspective. (Spoiler: it’s all hogwash.)

So if I then run through these arguments–the cosmological argument, the argument from design, the moral argument, the ontological argument, the argument from consciousness, and the argument from experience–I must say that the net result is not very impressive. It is very much as if we are seeking a rational justification for something that we otherwise hope will be true. (p. 163)

Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” suggests that there are theological topics closed to science, and scientific topics closed to theology. Dawkins is harshly critical of this view, and while Sagan is careful not to provoke, he is quite adamant that reaching agreement on any important topic requires inquiry, skepticism, logic and (most of all) evidence.

The book’s final chapters look more closely at modern life. The cold war was still simmering (indeed, the Soviet Union still existed) when these lectures were given, and Sagan was acutely concerned about the prospect that humanity was on the verge of self-destruction. Many people feel that we are at least as close to annihilation in 2007 as we were in 1985. I suspect that Sagan himself would too, particularly given the events of the last five years; his ideas and warnings on contemporary issues are therefore at least as potent now as they were then.

• Do we truly love our neighbor, and our enemy, as God commands? “…it’s remarkable that there are nations that take great pride in their Christian tradition that nevertheless do not see any contradiction between that and their attitudes on nuclear war.” (pp. 208-209) “It may be…hopelessly naive. But should not those who make conspicuous public displays of their devotion to Christianity follow what is certainly among the central tenets of the faith?” (p. 209)
• How does religion fail us? “We have Ten Commandments in the West. Why is there no commandment exhorting us to learn? ‘Thou shalt understand the world. Figure things out.’ There’s nothing like that. And very few religions urge us to enhance our understanding of the natural world. I think it is striking how poorly religions, by and large, have accommodated to the astonishing truths that have emerged in the last few centuries.” (pp. 217-218)
• Why do we kill each other? “I will go to almost any lengths to prevent myself from seeing that the worldview that I have dedicated my life to is inadequate….Instead of this, what we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected….There is a worldwide closed-mindedness that imperils the species. It was always with us, but the risks weren’t as grave, because weapons of mass destruction were not then available.” (p. 217)

The book concludes with selections from a vigorous and fascinating interchange between Sagan and his audience. Clearly not everyone in the room agreed with him, but the mutual respect was evident, and the result was a model for intelligent debate that is almost impossible to find anywhere today.

When I started reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience, marking passages and quotations that I might want to refer to later, it was hard to avoid annotating the whole book. Sagan has a great deal of importance to say on topics that I haven’t touched on here. It’s all very wonderful stuff, one of the most powerful minds of the 20th century openly and articulately and simply laying out a comprehensive and well-reasoned view on theology and the big questions. I’ve picked out some gems, but it’s all quite eye-opening and thought provoking without any sense of arrogance or exasperation often attributed to other atheist authors. Believers and nonbelievers alike should read this book, then come together and figure out how to bridge our differences.