To me personally, the first line, "I found Him in the shining of the stars," is not entirely apparent. It depends on who the Him is. But surely there is a message in the heavens that the finiteness not just of life but of whole worlds, in fact of whole galaxies, is a bit antithetical to the conventional theological views in the West, although not in the East. And this then suggests a broader conclusion. And that is the idea of an immortal Creator. By definition, as Ann Druyan has pointed out, an immortal Creator is a cruel god, because He, never having to face the fear of death, creates innumerable creatures who do. Why should He do that? If He's omniscient, He could be kinder and create immortals, secure from the danger of death. He sets about creating a universe in which at least many parts of it, and perhaps the universe as a whole, dies. And in many myths, the one possibility the gods are most anxious about is that humans will discover some secret of immortality or even, as in the myth of the Tower of Babel, for example, attempt to stride the high heavens. There is a clear imperative in Western religion that humans must remain small and mortal creatures. Why? It's a little bit like the rich imposing poverty on the poor and then asking to be loved because of it. And there are other challenges to the conventional religions from even the most casual look at the sort of cosmos I have presented to you.
Let me read a passage from Thomas Paine, from The Age of Reason. Paine was an Englishman who played a major role in both the American and French revolutions. "From whence," Paine asks-"From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world because, they say, one man and one woman ate an apple? And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer?"
Paine is saying that we have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.
Now, we can say, "Well, that's just because the right words weren't available back when the first Jewish or Christian or Islamic holy books were written." But clearly that's not the problem; it is certainly possible in the beautiful metaphors in these books to describe something like the galaxy and the universe, and it isn't there. It is a god of one small world, a problem, I believe, that theologians have not adequately addressed.
I don't propose that it is a virtue to revel in our limitations. But it's important to understand how much we do not know. There is an enormous amount we do not know; there is a tiny amount that we do. But what we do understand brings us face-to-face with an awesome cosmos that is simply different from the cosmos of our pious ancestors.
Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.
Two
All of us grow up with the sense that there is some personal relationship between us, ourselves, and the universe. And there is a natural tendency to project our own knowledge, especially self-knowledge, our own feelings, on others. This is a commonplace in psychology and psychiatry. And so it is with our view of the natural world. Anthropologists and historians of religion sometimes call this animism and attribute it to so-called primitive tribes-that is, ones who have not constructed instruments of mass destruction. This is the idea that every tree and brook has a kind of actuating spirit-that, as Thales, the first scientist, said in one of the few surviving fragments of his work, "There are gods in everything." It's a natural idea. But it's not restricted to animists, of whom there are many millions on the planet today. Physicists, for example, do it all the time, except where nature does not oblige. It is the commonest thing in the world in, say, the kinetic theory of gases, to imagine each of these little molecules of air that are busily colliding in front of us as, maybe, billiard balls. Well, that's not exactly projection, since physicists are not strictly speaking of billiard balls, but it is taking something from everyday experience and projecting it into a different realm. It's very common for physicists to refer to molecules or asteroids as "guys." You can more easily imagine what a molecule or an asteroid is like if you imagine them as beings something like us. And this, I believe, reveals the prevalence in this day of these ancient modes of thinking.
Yet you cannot carry this projection too far, because sooner or later you bump your nose. For example, when we get to relativity or quantum mechanics, we discover realms that are alien to our everyday experience, and suddenly the laws of nature turn out to be astonishingly different. The idea that as I walk in this direction my watch goes slightly slower and I am contracted in the direction of motion and my mass has increased slightly does not correspond to everyday experience. Nevertheless, that is an absolutely certain consequence of special relativity, and the reason it does not conform to common sense is that we are not in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. We may one day be in that habit, and then the Lorentz transformations [1] will be natural, intuitive. But they aren't yet.
The idea that there is a cosmic speed limit, the speed of light, beyond which no material object can travel, again seems counterintuitive, even though it can be demonstrated, as Einstein did, from an astonishingly simple and basic analysis of what we mean by space, time, simultaneity, and so on.
Or if I were to propose to you that my arm could be in this position or in that position but it would be forbidden by the laws of nature to be in some intermediate position, that would likely strike you as absurd, as contrary to experience. And yet on the subatomic level, there is quantization of energy and position and momentum. The reason it seems counterintuitive is that we are not ordinarily down at the level of the very small, where quantum effects dominate.
So the history of science-especially physics-has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance with this human tendency.
Now, there is another tendency from the psychological or social sphere projected upon the natural world. And that is the idea of privilege. Ever since the invention of civilization, there have been privileged classes in societies. There have been some groups that oppress others and that work to maintain these hierarchies of power. The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position. At birth all of us imagine that we are the universe, and we don't distinguish the boundaries between ourselves and those around us. This is well established in infants. As we grow up, we discover that there are others who are apparently autonomous and that we're only one among many other people. And then, at least in some social situations, there is the sense that we are central, important. Other social groups, of course, don't have that view. 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.