The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

"Of all these books, this is the one that resonates most for me. It was edited by his wife and published in 2006. It’s a distillation of the Gifford Lectures , a very prestigious series of lectures given in Scotland, endowed to give famous people a chance to talk about natural theology i.e. the relationship between science and religion. They’ve been going more than 100 years by now and they gave rise to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience , a very famous book. Sagan was a Gifford lecturer in 1985 and he titled his book after James’s. It’s a reflection, at the end of his life, on the dangers of superstition and of faith. It’s very well written and a lot more succinct than his more popular book, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark which was a big bestseller in the US. That’s a bit bloated. This book is much more concise, much more tightly argued. It makes a good case for basing your actions on rationality rather than superstition and he talks about the dangers of not doing so from his experiences in fighting medical quackery, UFOs, the purported existence of canals on Mars etc. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The reason I like the book is that he makes a lot of good points. First of all, he maintains that pseudosciences — and he includes religion in that — have to be judged as sciences, because they make empirical claims about reality. That’s a claim that most religious people instinctively reject. Shelley was the first person to say that God is a hypothesis, therefore believers should be forced to give evidence for it. This is more or less Sagan’s view. Second, he shows that the way pseudoscientists insulate their beliefs from disconfirmation is very similar to the way religionists do. Sagan is often thought of as somebody who attacked pseudoscience but was friendly to religion. If you read this book, you’ll see that he was not. It’s clear that he sees religion as just one of the many brands of irrationality he was fighting his whole life. He was a New Atheist before there were New Atheists. A lot of people do. Because aliens are naturalistic phenomena whereas gods are supernatural and we don’t have evidence for anything supernatural. Sagan was involved in the SETI project to detect alien life. He was unsuccessful, but if I had to put my money on either, ‘Is there life somewhere else in the universe?’ or ‘Is there a supernatural being?’ I’d definitely bet on the former. It is likely that there are other forms of life somewhere. Yes, but on the other side is his famous pale blue dot speech: we’re a lonely spot in the universe and so we have to take care of it and take care of each other. He wasn’t doing down humanity, he was just trying to give us some perspective. It’s not so much that humans are worthless, but that that the universe is large and there’s many mysteries to be discovered. That, in itself, is worthy of awe."