The Varieties of Scientific Experience

CHAPTER ONE

Questioner; When will we be likely to make contact with another intelligence?

CS: Prophecy is a lost art. But what I would say is that it's clear that if we don't try to seek such intelligence, it will be more difficult to find it. And it is remarkable that we live in a time when the technology permits us, at least in a halting way, to seek such intelligences, mainly by constructing large radio telescopes to listen for signals being sent to us-radio signals- by civilizations on planets of other stars.

Questioner: Considering the accomplishments of scientists like Newton and Kepler, is it likely that science will one day come upon a demonstration of the existence of God?

CS: The answer depends very much on what we mean by God. The word "god" is used to cover a vast multitude of mutually exclusive ideas. And the distinctions are, I believe in some cases, intentionally fuzzed so that no one will be offended that people are not talking about their god.

But let me give a sense of two poles of the definition of God. One is the view of, say, Spinoza or Einstein, which is more or less God as the sum total of the laws of physics. Now, it would be foolish to deny that there are laws of physics. If that's what we mean by God, then surely God exists. All we have to do is watch the apples drop.

Newtonian gravitation works throughout the entire universe. We could have imagined a universe in which the laws of nature were restricted to only a small portion of space or time. That does not seem to be the case. And Newtonian gravitation is one example, but quantum mechanics is another. We can look at the spectra of distant galaxies and see that the same laws of quantum mechanics apply there as here. So that is itself a deep and extraordinary fact: that the laws of nature exist and that they are the same everywhere. So if that is what you mean by God, then I would say that we already have excellent evidence that God exists.

But now take the opposite pole: the concept of God as an outsize male with a long white beard, sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow. Now, for that kind of god I maintain there is no evidence. And while I'm open to suggestions of evidence for that kind of god, I personally am dubious that there will be powerful evidence for such a god not only in the near future but even in the distant future. And the two examples I've given you are hardly the full range of ideas that people mean when they use the word "god."

CS: The questioner asked whether I was familiar with Democritus, bearing in mind my suggestion that we now know things that were not known in the past. Democritus is one of my heroes. I think I know more than Democritus. Now, I don't claim to be smarter than Democritus, but I have the advantage that Democritus did not of having twenty-five hundred years of scientists between him and me. So, for example, I'll give you a few things that I know and that Democritus did not know. Democritus proposed that the Milky Way Galaxy was composed of stars. Far ahead of his time. He did not know that there were other galaxies. We know that.

We know of the existence of many more planets than he did. We have examined them close up. We know what their physical natures are. He did not, although he speculated that they were at least made of matter. We have an idea of how many stars there are in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Democritus was an atomist. You will not exceed me in your admiration for Democritus. And were the vision of Democritus to have been adopted by Western civilization, instead of being cast aside for the pale views of Plato and Aristotle, we would be vastly further ahead today, in my personal view.

CS: The questioner asks have I not perhaps been looking through the wrong end of the telescope; that is, is not the proper province of religion the human heart and mind and ethical questions and so on, and not the universe?

Well, I couldn't agree with you more, except that it is striking how many religions have felt that astronomy is their province and have made confident statements about matters astronomical. It is possible to design religions that are incapable of disproof. All they have to do is to make statements that cannot be validated or falsified. And some religions have very neatly positioned themselves in that respect. Now, that means that you cannot make any statements on how old the world is; you cannot make any statements about evolution; you cannot make any statements about the shape of the Earth (the Bible is quite clear about the Earth being flat, for example), and so on. And then you have religions that are making statements on human behavior, where religions have, in my view, made significant contributions. But it is a very rare religion that avoids the temptation to make pronouncements on matters astronomical and physical and biological.

Questioner: Do you think humans at this time could cope with us finding extraterrestrial intelligence?

CS: Sure. Why not? Well, there's no question that the discovery of something very different will worry people precisely because it's different. Look at the degree of xenophobia in human cultures in which it is other humans, trivially different from us, who are the object of great fear and concern and violence and aggression and murder and terrible crimes. So there's no question that were we to receive a signal, much less come face-to-face, or whatever the appropriate bodily part is, with another intelligent being, there would be a sense of fear, horror, loathing, avoidance, and so on.

But the receipt of a message is a very different story. You are not even obligated to decode. If you find it offensive, you can ignore it. And there is a kind of providential quarantine between the stars, with very long transit times even at the speed of light, that I think obviates, if not altogether eliminates, this difficulty.

CS: The questioner asks that is not one central goal of religions the idea of a personal god, of a purpose for individuals and for the species as a whole, and is that not one of the reasons for the success on an emotional level (I'm paraphrasing) of many religions? And he then goes on to say that he, himself, does not see much evidence in the astronomical universe for a purpose.

I tend very much to agree with you, but I would say that purpose is not imposed from the outside; it is generated from the inside. We make our purpose. And there is a kind of dereliction of duty of us humans when we say that the purpose is to be imposed on the outside or found in some book written thousands of years ago. We live in a very different world than we lived in thousands of years ago. There is no question that we have many obligations to guarantee our purposes, one of which is to survive. And that we have to work out for ourselves.