Edited transcripts from Carl Saganās Gifford Lectures, given at the University of Glasgow in 1985. Beautiful and full of wonder, as usual.
They cover his thinking on the existence of God and of our place in the world.
He highlights the numerous occassions on which weāve mistakenly put ourselves at the centre of things, and how we yet continue to do so;
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Weāre born assuming that we are all there is, without distinction between ourselves and others.
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We grow up retaining a sense of central importance in some social situations.
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We assumed that the Earth was the center of the solar system.
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We assumed our solar system was the only one.
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We hoped that we were at the centre of the galaxy.
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We hoped maybe our galaxy was at the centre of the other galaxies.
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We assumed that we were different from, and special amongst, all the plants and animals on Earth, which evolution quashed.
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We assumed that our frame of reference was of special importance, which special relativity quashed.
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Still, we believe that we are the smartest beings in the universe.
It ends with very poignant acknowledgements from his wife:
āEditing these lectures afforded me, for precious moments at a time, the happy delusion that I was working with Carl once again. The words he spoke in these lectures would sound in my head and it felt wonderfully as if we had somehow been transported back to the two heavenly decades when we thought and wrote together.ā
Highlights
By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night.
Thomas Carlyle said that wonder is the basis of worship.
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 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.
The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position. [...] But it is generally those with privilege and status, especially in ancient times, who became the scientists, and there was a natural projection of those attitudes upon the universe.
So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.
And then evolution itself was still a further disquieting discovery, because at least it had been hoped that humans were separate from the rest of the natural world, that we had been specifically put here in a way different from petunias, let's say. [...]
This sense of offense hasāI'm only speculatingādeep psychological roots. Part of it is, I believe, an unwillingness to come to grips with the more instinctive aspects of human nature. But I think ignoring that, imagining all humans are rational actors in the present phase, is enormously dangerous in an age of nuclear weapons. I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.
The ideas behind natural selection were that there was such a thing as hereditary material, that there were sponteneous changes in the hereditary material, that those changes were expressed in the external form and function of the organism, that organisms made many more copies of themselves than the environment could support, and therefore that some selection among various natural experiments was made by the environment for reproductive success, that some organisms, by pure accident, were better suited to leaving offspring than others.
Newton believed that the distribution of cometary orbits was the state of nature and that is how the planets would have moved had there not been an intervening hand. He believed that God established the initial conditions for the planets that made them all go around the Sun in the same direction, in the same plane, and rotation in a compatible sense.
What Kant and Laplace proposed is what we now call a solar nebula, or accretion disk, whose flattened form was the ancestor of the planets, and that it is perfectly easy to understand how it is that the planets are in the same plane with the same direction of revolution and the same sense of rotation.
What is more, we now know that the random orientation of the comets is not primordial and that very likely the comets began in the solar nebula, all going around the Sun in the same sense, were ejected by gravitational interactions with the major planets, and then, by the gravitational perturbations of passing stars, had their orbits randomized.
So Newton was wrong in both senses: (a) in the sense of believing that chaotic distribution of cometary orbits is what you would expect in a primordial system and (b) in assuming that there was no natural way in which the regularities of planetary motion could be understood without divine intervention, from which he deduces the exitence of a Creator.
The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r^2, which is a little more abstract. And in the course of that transformation, the gods and angels were relgated to more remote times and more distant causality skeins.
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