March 18, 2014
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Thus sayeth Saint Sagan:
Science…is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.
Religious scripture is poetry directed toward the ultimate, and to that extent, there is plenty of religious hoodoo smoldering in the secularist spirit. It’s as if Hubble blasted God in the face with a fire extinguisher and now atheists bow to the powdery outline. As with any place of worship, the longer I hang around the First Materialist Church, the more I ask questions.
I once asked PZ Myers if the encroaching Eternal Zero ever bums him out.
“Not in the slightest,” he replied cheerily. “Every human has died or will die. We find purpose in what we do.”
Pop scientists always work around the fact that ultimately, nothing means anything in a purely material world. A man can tell himself that what he does today makes a difference in the moment, that he will live on through his children, or through his legacy, or that his legacy will at least influence some other, more enduring legacy. Maybe one day this guy’s every detail will be uploaded, packed onto a rocket, and sent hurtling away from the expanding red giant our sun will inevitably become. It doesn’t matter. Nothingness is nipping at his heels, and if the Big Crunch doesn’t get him, the heat death of the universe will.
If the cosmos is all there is or will be, it doesn’t matter if you save twenty people from a time bomb or just blow them up yourself”in the long view of cosmic consciousness, it all amounts to nothing. Every trace of your existence, of anyone’s existence, will be flattened in the galactic Ragnarok. But who could sell a primetime TV show based on that premise?
Religions need drama, and a good drama never ends at The End.
How ironic that the first episode of Cosmos features the tragic tale of Giordano Bruno as a warning against religion. The mad Dominican monk was possessed by visions of an infinite cosmos beyond the veil of our earthly vantage point. Bruno’s universe was animated by a pantheistic, all-forgiving God and filled with alien worlds. Without the benefit of empirical evidence, Bruno imagined that the Earth was not the center of the solar system, which Tyson describes as a “good guess.” Church authorities burned Bruno at the stake for heresy.
The implication is that organized religion is an oppressive force. Yeah, we get that. But we see in Bruno that inspiration springs from irrational dreamworlds. Some of these dreams are empirically testable; others are not. The scientific method does not determine absolute value, no matter how much noise its loudest practitioners make.
Onscreen, Bruno yells at the Inquisitors, “Your God is too small!” So is Carl Sagan’s autistic cosmos, but that doesn’t stop me from applauding his imagination.
