A recent comment in Carl Sagan: little gods suggested that religion provides awe, and science doesn’t; therefore, science will never be enough, since we thirst for something more — to be awed.
The problem with that is that the awe of religion is the awe of not understanding. And you aren’t even supposed to understand, in fact. You’re supposed to “just know” (since it says so in a holy book), but never actually think too hard about it. It’s the awe of ignorance.
On the other hand, the awe of science is the awe of beginning to understand. It’s the awe of a child, when he realizes that there’s a wondrous universe out there, and that he can understand things about it – that there’s an infinity of new things to learn. It’s the awe of starting to grasp something, and realizing that it opens so many new avenues, that there’s so much out there that you can now comprehend — or begin to.
In fact, it’s religion that is resistant to awe.
Take the example in Sagan’s quote. Once, we didn’t really see much of the universe, and we understood it even less; to us, it probably appeared magical. We thought it was young, ridiculously small, and that our world (which we also believed to be much smaller than it is) was at the center of the universe. Anything we saw on the sky was close to us, and not really that big. Many things — the sun, animals, plants, etc. – were so useful. Therefore, it was natural to conclude that the universe was made just for us.
And, as that was what people believed back then, so it was included in religion.
Much later, we began to realize that the universe was much larger, much older, and that there was a lot of stuff out there. Nebulas, pulsars, stars of many sizes. Entire galaxies. And space – distances almost inconceivable to us (have you ever thought about how much a single light-year is? Try calculating it, just for fun.) And it had also been there for much longer than we first thought — indeed, for much longer than our puny little planet, or our puny little sun.
To me, that’s like being blind, and suddenly starting to see. To me, that is awe. Beginning to understand.
As Sagan says, religion could have made use of it. It could have used this newfound vast universe to show a much greater god, an infinite, complex, cosmic god, a deity that wasn’t restricted by what little was known by Bronze Age shepherds. A god who didn’t reflect the prejudices of its time, and who didn’t act much like a human, only “bigger”.
But no.
They’d rather keep their deities small and petty, our earth absurdly young (despite all the physical evidence to the contrary), our universe as an irrelevant backdrop for the real reason everything exists: to decide whether our souls are saved or not.
Can you really be awed by that, after you know the least bit about what the universe is really like?
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i can honestly say i’ve been in awe of the sheer number of stars and the size of the universe (which is really probably finite and shaped like a soccer ball but big, anyway [http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4250]). You can be in awe of different things.
Awe is just an epiphany that you realize something is bigger than you expected, or different.
As always, Pedro, a great post. I challenge anyone to look at space through a telescope, gaze at the sheer multitude of stars above their heads and not be awestruck. Nature is amazingly beautiful by itself. There is no need of a God to make it so!
It baffles me that the insular and ‘small’ world described in the Bible can be judged even a tenth as awe inducing as the truth of space and the natural world.
Glenn.
Christians and other religious folks somehow believe that atheists have no respect for life, or are incapable of respecting life.
By the same token as what’s presented in this post, I posit that we have a greater respect for life and th universe around us because we’re capable of accepting it at face value. The true age and size of the universe around us is far, far more awe-inspiring than any religious explanation I have ever read. The idea that all of this resolved from chaos is incredible to me–far more so than the idea that some God simply made it. The scientific explanations are far more intense.
And back to my initial issue of life, it is my belief that my respect for life is heightened by my atheism. Why? Because I believe (or perhaps “know”) that this is all there is. That my life and the world I see and touch and smell and so on is it. There’s no God, no heave, no hell, no afterlife, no reincarnation, nothing outside of this. Sure there may be other dimensions we can’t yet see or access, and there may be far more to the universe than we yet know, but the point is, what we have is what we have. And because I know I have only one life, I intend to live it. I’m not living it to prove myself worthy of an afterlife that doesn’t exist. I don’t treat the lives of the people around me as though I can see them “on the other side” (or not see them because I believe they’re going to a different worse place than I after we die), but instead acknowledge that each moment I spend with them is precious and irreplaceable, and that when they’re gone, they’re gone, and I have only my memories of them.
Atheists are often regarded as cold, soulless, and detached from spirit. It’s my belief that we’re capable of far more than the believers. I’m not saying that we all extend this deeply into our beliefs, as just like Christians there’s plenty of people who identify themselves as atheists who don’t really “get it.” But as a whole, there’s actually far more to our view of life and the universe than most religions are capable of accepting.