She is one smart person .... and hot too!
Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe . . .
" It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out
what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the
vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all
life, and life's preciousness on our tiny planet. "
I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our
culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is
completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are
alienated from science. We are estranged from its methods, its values, and
its language. Who is the scientist in our culture? He is Dr. Faustus, Dr.
Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove. He's the maker of the Faustian bargain that
is bound to end badly. Where does that come from? We've had a long period of
unprecedented success in scientific discovery. We can do things that even
our recent ancestors would consider magic, and yet our self-esteem as a
species seems low. We hate and fear science. We fear science and we fear the
scientist. A common theme of popular movies is some crazed scientist
somewhere setting about ruining what is most precious to all of us.
I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're
ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of
ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a
question, for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It's puzzling
that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all,
it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance.
It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken
full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is
a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from
most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these
formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to
know.
So here are Adam and Eve, who have awakened full grown, without the
tenderness and memory of childhood. They have no mother, nor did they ever
have one. The idea of a mammal without a mother is, by definition, tragic.
It's the deepest kind of wound for our species; antithetical to our
flourishing, to who we are.
Their father is a terrifying, disembodied voice who is furious with them
from the moment they first awaken. He doesn't say, "Welcome to the planet
Earth, my beautiful children! Welcome to this paradise. Billions of years of
evolution have shaped you to be happier here than anywhere else in the vast
universe. This is your paradise." No, instead God places Adam and Eve in a
place where there can be no love; only fear, and fear-based behavior,
obedience. God threatens to kill Adam and Eve if they disobey his wishes.
God tells them that the worst crime, a capital offense, is to ask a
question; to partake of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. What kind of
father is this? As Diderot observed, the God of Genesis "loved his apples
more than he did his children."
This imperative not to be curious is probably the most self-hating aspect of
all, because what is our selective advantage as a species? We're not the
fastest. We're not the strongest. We're not the biggest. However, we do have
one selective advantage that has enabled us to survive and prosper and
endure: A fairly large brain relative to our body size. This has made it
possible for us to ask questions and to recognize patterns. And slowly over
the generations we've turned this aptitude into an ability to reconstruct
our distant past, to question the very origins of the universe and life
itself. It's our only advantage, and yet this is the one thing that God does
not want us to have: consciousness, self-awareness.
Perhaps Genesis should be read as an ironic story. Here's a god who does not
give us the knowledge of good and evil. He knows we don't know right from
wrong. Yet he tells us not to do something anyway. How can someone who
doesn't know right from wrong be expected to do the right thing? By
disobeying god, we escape from his totalitarian prison where you cannot ask
any questions, where you must never question authority. We become our human
selves.
Our nation was founded on a heroic act of disobedience to a king who was
presumed to rule by divine right. We created social and legal mechanisms to
institutionalize the questioning of authority and the participation of every
person in the decision-making process. It's the most original thing about
us, our greatest contribution to global civilization. Today, our
not-exactly-elected officials try to make it seem as if questioning this
ancient story is wrong. . . . That the teaching of our evolving
understanding of nature, which is a product of what we have been able to
discover over generations, is somehow un-American or disrespectful of
strongly held beliefs. As if we should not teach our children what we've
learned about our origins, but rather we should continue to teach them this
story which demonizes the best qualities of our founding fathers.
This makes no sense and it leads me to a question: Why do we separate the
scientific, which is just a way of searching for truth, from what we hold
sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe? Science is nothing
more than a never-ending search for truth. What could be more profoundly
sacred than that? I'm sure most of what we all hold dearest and cherish
most, believing at this very moment, will be revealed at some future time to
be merely a product of our age and our history and our understanding of
reality. So here's this process, this way, this mechanism for finding bits
of reality. No single bit is sacred. But the search is.
And so we pursue knowledge by using the scientific method to constantly
ferret out all the mistakes that human beings chronically make, all of the
lies we tell ourselves to combat our fears, all of the lies we tell each
other. Here's science, just working like a tireless machine. It's a
phenomenally successful one, but its work will never be finished.
.........
Copyright (c)2003 Ann Druyan
http://www.csicop.org/si/2003-11/ann-druyan.html
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