He Had the Universe
February 14, 2007I ran into an interesting article yesterday in the New York Times about a new book from Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow and collaborator. The article, very well written I might add, by Dennis Overbye; speaks to the legacy Dr. Sagan left.
The new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, is about Carl’s beliefs in God, war and peace, the future of mankind, and as Overbye states is “based on a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985”.
I blog about it here, under the Sustainable Growth section, because as Sagan said, “I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship”. Sustainable Growth is at its core a human issue and at the pinnacle a religious issue. For the novice, sustainable growth is about “establishing a sound ethical foundation for the emerging global society and to help build a sustainable world based on respect for nature, diversity, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace1”. These issues are both humanistic and spiritual and will determine if we as a species survives our headlong rush toward self-destruction.
Overbye writes in his article, “Never afraid to venture into global politics, Dr. Sagan warns at one point of the danger that a leader under the sway of religious fundamentalism might not try too hard to avoid nuclear Armageddon, reasoning that it was God’s plan”.
If Carl only knew that today, we face a world with the Nuclear or Doomsday Clock sitting at 5 Minutes to Midnight, he would indeed be sounding the alarm as loud as he could. Again, for the newbie to the world of Democratic information, that is these Blogs on the World Wide Web, I offer the quick and simple explanation. There is an actual clock sitting at the University of Chicago, which has its hands pointed at some time before Midnight. Midnight being the time the human race ceases to exist because of Nuclear war and annihilation.
Introduced in 1947, it has seen its hands pointed at a range from 2 minutes to midnight (1953) to 17 minutes to midnight (1991). In 1953, the old Soviet Union had already detonated its first atomic bomb and the U.S. had detonated its first hydrogen bomb; it appeared we were on the fast track toward mutual assured destruction (MAD). In 1991, both the Russians and Americans had begun dismantling part of their nuclear arsenal, so it looked like the human race would be saved.
Today however, the clock stands at 5 minutes to midnight. To quote from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist Doomsday Clock web site, “The world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age. The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb. Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.2”
Back to Carl, in the Overbye article, he states, “Almost in the same breath, Dr. Sagan acknowledges that religion can engender hope and speak truth to power, as in the civil rights movement in the United States, but that it rarely does. It’s curious, he says, that no allegedly Christian nation has adopted the Golden Rule as a basis for foreign policy. Rather, in the nuclear age, mutually assured destruction was the policy of choice. “Christianity says that you should love your enemy. It certainly doesn’t say that you should vaporize his children.”
He goes on to say, “Ever the questioner, Dr. Sagan asks at one point in his lectures why the God of the Scriptures seems to betray no apparent knowledge of the wider universe that “He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is” allegedly created. Why not a commandment, for instance, that thou shalt not exceed the speed of light? Or why not engrave the Ten Commandments on the Moon in such a way that they would not be discovered until now, à la the slab in “2001: A Space Odyssey”?
Continuing with Overbye’s review, “The search for who we are does not lead to complacency or arrogance, he (Sagan) explains. “It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us. Dr. Sagan was many things, but shrill was not one of them. The last word may as well go to Dr. Dawkins himself, who in a 1996 book nominated Dr. Sagan as the ideal spokesman for Earth. In a blurb for the new book, Dr. Dawkins said that the astronomer was more than religious, having left behind the priests and mullahs. “He left them behind, because he had so much more to be religious about,” Dr. Dawkins wrote. “They have their Bronze Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wishful thinking. He had the universe.”
We may not have to worry about Sustainable Growth; we may just succeed in our seeming less endless quest to destroy the human race after all. We do however possess the ability to turn this all around, but it will take courage to do the right thing, not just the political advantageous thing. It is time we look at where we are heading as the leader of the society of nations. It is time we take back our political system from special interest and their corporate donors. It is time we tell our leaders, both private and public, that we are like Carl said, “If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing”3.
Click here to read the entire NY Times article.
1. Mission statement of the Earth Charter, see http://www.earthcharter.org/
2. http://www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/timeline.html
3. Cosmos, pg. 339
