Not Every Two-Sidedness is a Dualism: A Response to Lessl

In the movie Contact, based on a novel by Carl Sagan, Jody Foster plays the part of a scientist, Ellie, who may have made the first human contact ever with extraterrestrials. She is lucky to have been chosen for the mission, because she is an unapologetic atheist applying for a role as humanity's first ambassador to the aliens. Given that the vast majority of this planet's citizens have been religious believers, she is asked in a public hearing, would we, by sending her, be misrepresenting both our traditions and aspirations? For our heroine, who provides a pretty good reflection of Sagan's own view, the point of the question seems to be about politics, not about science, and it is almost offensive. When circumstances conspire to send her on the mission after all, she returns from space with an extraterrestrial encounter that seemed powerfully real; and yet she was empty-handed as far as empirical evidence was concerned. So she is reduced to acknowledging that there are some things that a person can just know, even if he or she can't prove it.

This ironic turn is a small bone to pitch to the religious believers in the audience, and I believe it is an instance of what Lessl is calling Sagan's "flattery," where "he gives with one hand what he has already taken back with another." In her final testimony before a congressional committee, Ellie (Jody) extracts a kind of spiritual lesson from her extraordinary experience. Besides commenting on the comfort that comes from thinking we are not alone in the universe, she makes a paradoxical (one might even say contradictory) statement about how from afar one can see how tiny and insignificant our species is—and yet (therefore?) how precious.

Through Ellie, Sagan seems to be looking for a rhetorical palliative—words to take the harsh edge off of his antitheistic worldview without really compromising his own beliefs. But if, as Lessl implies, any "ultimate concern" one may have qualifies as religious belief, then Sagan was showing his religion after all. Despite a lifetime of advocating science as something utterly different from religion, he would have fallen into Lessl's trap, because he nods toward fundamental questions and even flirts with mystery in the universe. Lessl believes that we can't really opt out of this level of meaning; rather, we can just displace it in one way or another. I think there is much to this idea that questions about ultimate meaning are going to reinstate themselves, no matter how hard we may try to push them aside. (It is a very Burkean insight, even if that is not the lens through which Lessl views the matter.) So, for the sake of argument, stipulate that if one celebrates above all else the values of science, then one is taking it into something like a faithful embrace. That said, it seems to me that the comparison of the science advocates to the gnostics follows a somewhat tortuous logic. Lessl himself points to many of the differences between the two belief sets, and so it may partly come down to whether one thinks the differences outweigh the similarities. I opt for the former, without denying that there is some insight afforded by this perspective by incongruity.

First, let me try to establish some common ground. I share a concern that with at least some of these voices for science, there is a kind of arrogance, part of it reflecting their failure to acknowledge the rootedness of science in history, culture, ideology, anthropology, and rhetoric (which helps mediate all of these, some of us want to insist). Lessl makes the wonderfully telling observation that Steven Pinker reduces every arena of human cognition to the evolutionary mechanism that created it—except science. A blind spot, indeed. Some of them make sweeping generalizations or grandiose reductions in order to...