CS: Would you grant the possibility that there is no psychic part of life?
Questioner: No.
CS: Not a possibility? Not a smidgen of doubt in your mind?
Questioner: I'm one of those who lives with one foot on each side of life. One foot on the psychic and a very practical other foot, as a businesswoman, on the world. I've proved it.
CS: What in general should we do in a dialogue like this? Here I am. I say that my mind is open. I am happy to see the evidence, and the response I sometimes get is, "I've had this experience. It's compelling to me. But I can't give it over to you." Now, doesn't that prevent any dialogue whatever? How are we to communicate?
Questioner: Well, you see, I think you're stopping with the mental faculties you have and saying, "This is me. This is wrong." Now, there are faculties that one could certainly not create, because they're already in the mind, spiritual faculties.
CS: Well, you see, I say they're not-that's not demonstrated- that there's no evidence that they exist. First you have to show that they exist before you can have a major program to encourage them.
Questioner: I don't know that you have to play the piano to know that you can.
CS: No. But I can require, at least, before I start practicing the piano that I see that a piano exists, that I see someone sit down at the piano, move his or her fingers, and produce music. That then convinces me that there is such a thing as a piano, there is such a thing as music, and it is not hopelessly beyond the ability of humans to produce music from a piano. But when I ask for something comparable in the psychic world, I am never shown it. I never have someone come up and produce an-I don't know-a twenty-foot-high psychic dragon. Or have someone come and write down on the blackboard the demonstration of Fermat's last theorem. There simply is never anything that you can get your teeth into. You understand why I feel a little frustrated about this?
Questioner: I do. Yes. But then you possess faculties that can open that door to you.
CS: You're relying on me to find the psychic world? No.
Questioner: I'm hoping every individual can find it for themselves. It's a question of education within oneself.
CS: I believe that before we do the education, we have to first demonstrate that there is something to be educated on. I don't for a moment maintain that there isn't an enormous amount we have yet to learn. I believe that we have in fact discovered the tiniest fraction of the wonders of nature that are out there. But I just think until those who believe in the spiritual or psychic or whatever-you-want-to-call-it world can actually demonstrate in any way its existence, that it is not likely that scientists will be devoting a great deal of their time to adumbrating this possibility.
Questioner: How dependable an evidence would you say is the electroencephalograph readings that have been taken in certain experiments on those who practice different types of meditation, perhaps from the Eastern teachings, and have been able to record more central brain-wave patterns during a time when the physical senses have been shut off and the mind has gone deep into the conscious, subconscious, unconsciousness if you like? That was done at Berkeley University [the University of California, Berkeley] with a good friend of mine, where she was put into a simulated environment to create these circumstances.
CS: Well, I certainly agree that there is such a thing as the unconscious mind. There is all sorts of evidence for it in our everyday lives, and Freud provided a compelling argument that it exists. And I think it is essential that we understand it, and I believe that it plays a powerful, maybe even dominant, role in international relations, and that's therefore a very practical reason for understanding it.
I also believe that there are altered states of consciousness that can be brought about by some-it's related to what I said before-by sensory deprivation and by certain molecular assists. But I don't know of any evidence that it isn't a different mode of interaction of the molecules in our brain, a different sequence of flashing connections of neurons; that is, that there are other ways in which the brain works is guaranteed. That we don't fully understand those ways is also guaranteed. But that this is something other than matter-not a smidgen of evidence for that. Is that responsive?
Questioner: Yes it is.
CS: Thank you.
Questioner: Professor Sagan, this is a question on the God hypothesis. Don't you think that science, out of habitually having to find the answers for material things and having to be seen to attempt to find the answers, subject to public pressure and admiration, has ventured on this occasion into religious territory on which it should perhaps make a more cautious approach, in relation to your own admitted lack of scrupulous proof and unsubstantial faith? To my mind I thought science was a servant of mankind and not mankind a servant of science.
CS: I certainly agree with the last sentence, but I don't see how that is connected with the rest of what you said. My personal sense is that there are limitations, of course, to science, and I just indicated what a tiny fraction of the world I think we understand. But it is the only method that has been demonstrated to work. And if we bear in mind how liable we are to be deceived, to deceive ourselves-that was the point of some of the UFO discussions we had-then it is clear that what we need is a very hard-nosed and skeptical approach to contentions that are made in this area. And that hard-nosed and skeptical approach has been tested and honed, and it is called science.
"Science" is only a Latin word for "knowledge." And it's hard for me to believe that anyone is opposed to knowledge. I think that science works by a careful balance of two apparently contradictory impulses. One, a synthetic, holistic, hypothesis-spinning capability, which some people believe is localized in the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex, and an analytic, skeptical, scrutinizing capability, which some people believe is localized in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex. And it is only the mix of these two, the generating of creative hypotheses and the scrupulous rejection of those that do not correspond to the facts, that permits science or any other human activity, I believe, to make progress.
As far as me bringing a scientific approach to the matters of religion, I think that is implicit in inviting a scientist to give the Gifford Lectures. I could hardly have left my science outside the door as I walked in. I would have appeared before you naked.
Questioner: Just at the end of your lecture, you referred to Bertrand Russell saying that you should not believe a proposition that you do not have good grounds for believing to be true.
Now, surely that in itself is a proposition. What grounds would you have for believing that proposition?
CS: Yes. That's a very good question that leads to an infinite regress. And notice that Russell said he would merely propose for our consideration this proposition. Russell was, in his mathematician incarnation, the author of precisely such logical paradoxes as the one you just suggested. So if you wish to have the statement justified in internal logic-that is, a self-consistent closed system-obviously it cannot, because it leads to an infinite regress. But as I was saying, it seems to me that the approach of skeptical scrutiny commends itself to our attention because it has worked so well in the past. So many findings-I tried to give some simple physical and astronomical ones in the earlier lectures-were made possible by science not accepting the conventional wisdom, not taking on blind faith what was taught in the religious and secular schools, that everybody knew-the teachings of Aristotle on physics and astronomy, for example-but instead by asking, "Is there really evidence for it?" It is the method of science. And at every step along the way, it has produced some agonizing reappraisals and some powerful emotions that don't like it. And I understand that very well. But it seems to me that if we are not dedicated to the truth in this sense of truth, then we are in very bad shape.