Louisville Process Theology Network

Carl Sagan's Search for Religion in ''Contact'' the Novel

May 04, 2009

Our public library categorizes ?“Contact?” as Science Fiction which seems appropriate based on what we?’d heard of it.

The story involves a search for extra-terrestrial life that begins when SETI receives a radio signal of prime numbers. The plot thickens. More messages follow. Everyone has an opinion. Many pages later, a team of astrophysicists travel to the source; passing through a worm-hole in curved space-time on the way.

There had been several debates and discussions about science and religion up to this point in the story. Still, we were pretty surprised by who the senders of the radio signal turned out to be. (We haven?’t seen movie version yet.)

Sagan seems to have been more religious than we realized. Not conventionally, though. Consider these pages.



A Tremendous Mystery, p.158 ---

?“She reached toward the bedside table for Volume 16 of an old ?‘Encyclopedia Britannica Macropaedia?’, titled ?‘Rubens to Somalia?’, and opened a page where a scrap of computer printout had been inserted as a bookmark. She pointed to an article called ?‘Sacred or Holy.?’

?‘The theologians seem to have recognized a special nonrational ?– I wouldn?’t call it irrational ?– aspect of feeling of sacred or holy. They call it ?‘numinous.?’

The term was first used by?… let?’s see?… somebody named Rudolph Otto in a 1923 book, ?‘The Idea of the Holy.?’ He believed that humans were predisposed to detect and revere the numinous. He called it the ?‘misterium tremendum.?’ Even my Latin is good enough for that.

In the presence of the misterium tremendum, people feel utterly insignificant but, if I read this right, not personally alienated. He thought of the numinous as a thing ?‘wholly other?’, and the human response to it as ?‘absolute astonishment.?’

Now, if that?’s what religious people mean when they use words like sacred or holy, I?’m with them. I felt something like that?… I think all of science elicits that sense of awe. Now, listen to this.?’ She read from the text:

Throughout the past hundred years a number of philosophers and social scientists has asserted the disappearance of the sacred and predicted the demise of religion. A study of the history of religions shows that religious forms change and that there has never been unanimity on the nature of expression of religion. Whether of not man (sic) is now in a new situation for developing ultimate values radically different from those provided in traditionally affirmed awareness of the sacred is the a vital question.

?‘I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly --- like looking through a six inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion who?’s more religious would you say ?– the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science??’?”



A Transforming Experience, p.315 ---

?“She asked Eda if he had ever had a transforming religious experience.

?‘Yes,?’ he said.

?‘When??’ Sometimes you had to encourage him to talk.

?‘When I first picked up Euclid. Also when I understood Newtonian gravitation. And Maxwell?’s equations, and general relativity. And during my work on super-unification. I have been fortunate enough to have many religious experiences.?’

?‘No,?’ she returned. ?‘You know what I mean. Apart from science.?’

?‘Never,?’ he replied instantly. ?‘Never apart from science.?’ He told her a little of the religion he had been born into. He did not consider himself bound by all its tenets, he said, but he was comfortable with it. He thought it could do much good.?”




A Brave Religion, p.420 ---

?“I?’ve been searching, Eleanor. After all these years, believe me, I know the truth when I see it. Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. I mean the real universe. All those light-years. All those worlds.

I think of the scope of your universe, the opportunities it affords the Creator, and it takes my breath away. It?’s much better than bottling Him up in one small world.

I never liked the idea of Earth as God?’s green footstool. It was too reassuring, like a children?’s story, like a tranquilizer. But your universe has room enough, and time enough, for the kind of God I believe in. I say you don?’t need any more proofs. There are proofs enough already.?”