Are We Talking About the Same Religion Here?

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
--Carl Sagan

So maybe it's just me being dumb (I'm sure Carl Sagan is much smarter than an 11th grader who can barely pass an introductory chemistry course), but this quote completely bewilders me. Who did this man talk to, what did he read, which behavior did he observe, that gave him this impression of religion? Christianity, for example, is "a religion...that stress[es] the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science". A Christian is fully free to look at a single-celled organism, or a star, or a tree, or a fellow human and say "wow, that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen".

Religions like Christianity prefer a little God? I'm sorry, but this is simply false, even from the perspective of a dedicated atheist. If a Christian observes and accepts the complex scientific structure of the universe (which is a perfectly logical thing for anyone to do), and if he in fact believes that God constructed this complex scientific structure from nothing and out of his own head, so to speak, then that Christian is most certainly believing in a God of the greatest possible sort. Even a non-believer like Sagan must acknowledge this. A God that conceived and created the universe in its stunning detail and perfection of structure must be unimaginably great and powerful. Therefore, it makes more sense to accuse Christians of, if anything, giving God too much credit, not too little.

The discoveries of modern science--and note I am speaking here of discoveries, not theories like evolution which I will get to later--make no threat whatsoever to the Christian position on the nature of the universe. Sagan seems to be writing of a conflict that does not exist. No Christian, at least that I know of, is observing the internal structure of a bacterium or the chemical makeup of the atmosphere of Jupiter or the navigation techniques of a particular butterfly and decrying these things as being against their view of God. So on this level, Sagan is countering an argument that was never made.

Of course there is still the matter of something like evolution, which could very well be what Sagan is referring to here--under the surface of everything else. From Sagan's point of view, it could look something like this: scientists come up with this very elegant system of natural selection and so on that has eventually produced every living species of which we know, and Christians are rejecting this and moaning on about how God couldn't possibly have anything to do with evolution. Well, let us consider this. Modern science has not "revealed" evolution the way it has "revealed" the structure of a molecule. So Christians are free to respond differently to evolution than to actual scientific discoveries. This is the distinction, the disambiguation, that must be made, and which I don't think Sagan makes. Anyway, everyone reading this, I'm sure, has already heard about the strong evidence against evolution, and the shaky evidence for it. I'm not going to go into all that here. All I am going to say is that I do not understand how viewing the world and all it contains as a series of random molecular accidents can be more magnificent, more subtle, more elegant than the idea that the world is a grand plan created by a masterful, all-seeing God. Completely regardless of whether or not either of these ideas is true or false, they must be fairly compared. And one does not seem smaller in scope than the other.

I'll conclude with an interesting theory I very recently read in my history curriculum on the subject of Galileo. Basically, the universe was created by God and exists as a witness to his glory. Therefore, those who look at science from a non-Christian perspective will be unable to ascertain its true nature, rather remaining stuck in purely technological achievements or in incorrect theories. Consider how all the "advanced" (and pagan) civilizations of the ancient world were advanced only through their technological achievements (architecture, calendars, medicine, etc.). They did not understand the actual nature of the universe. Then, those from these cultures who attempted to understand the nature of things came up with only incorrect theorems (think Aristotle, who thought Earth was at the center of the universe with all the other heavenly bodies suspended and circling it). Galileo--a Christian--was one of the first people who was able to discover the nature of the universe as it actually is, and to build a Christian foundation for science. I don't know if this theory is accurate or not--no one can know something like that--but it is certainly something interesting to think about, and lends a whole new element to Sagan's ideas. What if the religious people were actually the ones who discovered "the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science"?

So there are my thoughts on that. Tomorrow, I hope to write more about Don Miller, having finished "Blue Like Jazz". I think it's fascinating how people both across the country and in this English class are responding to the book. So tune in tomorrow for my own response.