I truly want to believe that there is a God and that religion
might be on to something. But until religion is able to subdue its overwhelming
lust for power, control, and wealth (since that is where religion
hypocritically teaches God is not found), I don't think it will ever be able to
demonstrate who God is.
The following is an excerpt from Carl Sagan's book, The Varieties of
Scientific Experience, A personal View of
the Search for God. (New York : Penguin Group US, 2006)
Without a doubt it is
more interesting if miracles occur than if they do not. It makes a better
story. And I can recall a case that happened to me. I was at a restaurant
nearby Harvard University. Suddenly the proprietor and most of the diners
rushed outside, napkins still trucked under their belts. My attention was
attracted. I rushed outside also and saw a very strange light in the sky. I
lived not far away, walked home... got a pair of binoculars, came back and with
the binoculars was able to see that the one light was actually divided into two
lights, that exterior to the two lights were a red light and a green light. The
red light and the green light were blinking, and it was, it later turned out, a
massive weather airplane with two powerful searchlights to determine the
turbidity of the atmosphere. I told the people at the restaurant what I had
seen. Everyone was uniformly disappointed. I asked why. And everyone had the
same answer. It is a memorable story to go home and say, "I just saw a
spaceship from another planet hovering over Harvard Square." It is a
highly non-memorable story to go home and say, "I saw an airplane with a
bright light."
But beyond that, miracles speak to us of all sorts of things
religious that we have powerful wishes to believe. This is true to such an
extent that people become very angry when miracles are debunked. One of the
most interesting cases of this sort - and there are thousands of them - is
within the Roman Catholic Church where there is an established procedure for
verifying alleged miracles. It is, in fact, where the phrase "devil's
advocate" comes from. The devil's advocate is the person who proposes
alternative explanations of the alleged miracle, to see how good the evidence
is. I have in front of me a newspaper clipping from June, 1983 (click
here) titled "Priests Denounced After Rejecting Miracle Claim."
And let me just read a few sentences:
Stockton, California... Angry believers
denounced a panel of priests as "a bunch of devils" after the
clergymen ruled that a weeping Madonna in a rural Roman Catholic Church is
probably a hoax, not a miracle. One woman, Lavergne Pita, burst into tears when
the findings were announced Wednesday by the Diocese of Stockton. Manuel Pita
protested that "these investigators are not investigators. They're a bunch
of devils. How can they do this?" Reports that the sixty-pound statue
sheds real tears and can move as far as thirty feet from its niche in Mater Ecclesiae
Mission Church in Thornton California began circulating two years ago. Church
attendance has tripled since then. ... Last year, the Diocese named a
commission to study the reports. In announcing the panel's finding, Bishop
Roger M. Mahoney said the events connected with the statue "do not meet
the criteria for an authenticated appearance of Mary, the mother of Jesus
Christ." The statue may have been moved, the tears may have been applied.
... Actually, the tears were never reported to flow, they were just seen, and
they were gluey. One of the proponents said, "When the virgin appeared to
the kids in Portugal, they didn't believe them either. These things usually
happen to the humble and low incomes, the poor," he added.
Well, I would like now to tell you about one of the most
extraordinary studies on this subject that I know of, which is one of the few
cases where not just supposed miraculous events occurred but where they were
studied in great detail by a team of observers, who infiltrated the religious
group in order to do sociological research. They convinced the group that they
were there because they were also believers. This is an extremely interesting
case, because the prophecies, every one of them, failed utterly. And those are
not the cases we tend to hear about.
The story comes from a book called, When Prophecy Fails, by
Leon Festinger et al. (For
more information, click here.) It was published in the middle 1960's and
refers to events that occurred in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the 1950's. A
woman in Minneapolis believed that she was receiving a message by automatic
writing. Do you know what automatic writing is? It happens to people all over
the world. It's where the hand with the pen or pencil in it seemingly takes on
a life of its own and writes things when, as far as anyone else can see, the
person who belongs to the hand is asleep or doing something else. There seems
little doubt that the person who is attached to the hand is responsible for
what is happening on the paper. But it has an eerie sense of happening not just
unconsciously but from some external source. In this case, the automatic
writing was from Jesus -- or at least a modem incarnation of him -- who was
resident on an otherwise undiscovered planet called Clarion. The message was
urgent. It said that a flood would inundate the Earth (despite the biblical
promise made to Noah), on the twenty-first of December, would cover most of the
United States and the Soviet Union, among other nations, and would raise the
lost continents of Atlantis and Mu. Spacemen from the planet Clarion would
arrive before the flood to rescue the faithful, take them up on the flying saucers,
and bring them to Clarion.
The group that formed around the woman who did the automatic
writing were ordinary people, in no sense obviously deranged. One of the
leaders of the group was a physician who was examined by psychiatrists, I guess
on the grounds that it was extraordinary for a physician to believe this but
for anyone else it was expected. He was adjudged to be entirely sane although
"holding unusual ideas." The group received numerous messages -- six
or eight -- advising them to be present at a certain time in a certain place to
be picked up by flying saucers before the event, and, as will be no surprise to
you, the Clarionites never appeared. If they had appeared, you would have heard
of it before now. The flood itself also never appeared, although earthquakes in
several parts of the world occurred within a day of the predicted inundation,
and that was taken by the enthusiasts in the group to be partial confirmation
of the flood.
As you can imagine, the failure of the flood on December 21
produced some consternation in the group but by no means led to the group
falling apart. They responded wholeheartedly to a subsequent automatic-writing
message that they were to sing Christmas carols in the cold outside the house
of one of their leaders, preparatory to still another UFO pickup, which they
did, surrounded by a crowd of some two hundred taunting onlookers and police to
separate them from the onlookers. They showed great dedication, great courage.
But a skeptical approach to the world, they cannot be said to have exhibited.
Now, as to their understanding of how it is that they were
not picked up, there were several sets of explanations, and I'll just list
them: They had misunderstood the message (although it said in plain English
what they were to do and it was signed "Jesus" or "God
Almighty"). Another explanation was that they had been insufficiently
dedicated, that their faith had not been strong enough. Or that all this was
merely a test by the extraterrestrials to see how committed they were and that
the extraterrestrials never intended to flood the Earth, just to test their
faith. Or that the predictions were entirely valid but they got the date wrong.
It would happen ten thousand years later... a small mistake. Or that the
inundation would have happened but the coterie of the faithful sufficiently
impressed God with their faith that God intervened on behalf of mankind, and
we're all alive because these people had believed strongly enough.
All these explanations are not mutually consistent, but they
show a remarkable inventiveness and a striking unwillingness to change a set of
beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence. Eventually most of the adherents
drifted away from the movement, but even those who left first had repeatedly
shown heroic fidelity in the face of what they call
"disconfirmation," to say nothing of external skepticism. It's clear
that mutual support within the belief system was central to the success,
however short-lived, of the faith.
There was no charismatic leader here. No ambitious
scoundrel. It was automatic writing and ordinary people. Indeed, the group cast
about looking for guidance. They thought that spacemen from Clarion must be
around them in the most unlikely contexts. For example, there were a bunch of
leather-jacketed, motorcycle-riding young men who had come to scoff, whom they
immediately took to be the angels from Clarion. And likewise the members of the
social-science research team, who had infiltrated the movement trying to
understand how religious movements get started, were also taken as angels from
Clarion. This posed all sorts of challenges to the proper detachment of
scientist from subject.
Most of these people had previously been involved in other borderline
religions or pseudoscientific groups, including UFO clubs, spiritualists,
Dianetics, which has since transmogrified into something called Scientology,
and so on. But it is the very ordinariness of this group that I believe gives
some real insights into the origins of religion. Let me Quote the concluding sentences
by Festinger et al.:
They were unskilled proselytizers.
It is interesting to speculate, however, on what they might have made of their
opportunities had they been more effective apostles. For about a week they were
headline news throughout the nation. Their ideas were not without popular
appeal and they received hundreds of visitors, telephone calls and letters from
seriously interested citizens as well as offers of money which they invariably
refused. Events conspired to offer them a truly magnificent opportunity to grow
in numbers. Had they been more effective, disconfirmation might have portended
the beginning and not the end.
Suppose they'd had a charismatic leader. Or suppose that by
chance there had been a spectacular UFO sighting at the time of the predicted
inundation, for example, an Air Force test of a new kind of aircraft. Or
suppose that the message that came from Clarion was not just that there was
going to be a flood but something powerful, something moving, something that spoke
to an oppressed minority in the United states or elsewhere. Then I think we can
see the possibility that the Clarion religion would have grown into something
much larger. If we look at recent religions - and let me restrict myself to
those that have more than a million adherents - we find, for example, one that
confidently predicted that the world would end in 1914. Unambiguous. And when
the world did not end in 1914 (as far as one can tell it has not), they did not
argue that, oh, they made a small mistake in arithmetic, it was actually 2014,
hope no one was inconvenienced. They did not say that, well, the world would have ended, but they were
sufficiently faithful that God intervened. No. They said, and it is still the
major tenet of their faith, that the world did
end in 1914 and we simply haven't noticed yet. This is a religion with millions
of adherents, currently in the United States. (Click
here)
Or there is a religion that says that all diseases are
psychogenic, that there is no such thing as a microorganism producing disease.
There is no such thing as a cellular malfunction producing a disease, that the
only thing that produces disease is not thinking right, not having adequate faith.
And I need not remind you that there is a significant body of medical evidence
to the contrary. (Click
here)
There is a religion that believes that in the nineteenth
century a set of golden tablets was prepared by an angel and dug up by a
divinely inspired human being. And the tablets were written in an unknown
language of Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics and had on them a hitherto-unknown
set of books like those in the Old Testament. And, unfortunately, the angel
took them back and the tablets are not available for any scrutiny these days. In
addition, there is powerful evidence of conscious fraud at the time that the
religion was founded, which led, last week, to two people being killed in the
state of Utah, having to do with some early letters from the founders of the
religion that were inconsistent with doctrine. (Click here)
Or there is a religion that believes that if you only have
enough faith, you can levitate. I mean, that you can bodily float off the
ground and propel yourself. It has many practical applications, if only it were
true. (Click
here) These are perfectly typical tenets or aspects of modern religions.
And if that is true, what about ancient religions? After
all, there is a much greater distance in time between us and those earlier
religions. And that means that there are much larger opportunities for fraud
and for changing the disquieting details. I remind you that rewriting history is
done all the time. To give an example - there are so many - one of the leaders
of the Russian Revolution was a man named Lev Davidovich Bronstein, also known
as Leon Trotsky. He founded the Red Army, he established the modern Soviet
railroad system, he was the founder and first editor of Pravda, he played a
leading role in both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions, but he does not exist
in the Soviet Union. He's not there. You cannot find anything about him. There
is no picture of him. In a two-volume Soviet history of the world, he appears
once, as having inappropriate agricultural views. Otherwise unmentioned. They
have simply written him out of the history of their own revolution, in which he
played an absolutely central role, second perhaps only to that of Lenin. So now
imagine that a religion is founded not just a few decades ago but a few
centuries or a few thousand years ago, in which the received wisdom passes
through a small group--a small priesthood. Think of the opportunities for
changing disquieting facts in the interim. David Hume says,
"The many instances of forged
miracles and prophecies and supernatural events, which in all ages have either
been detected by contrary evidence or which detect themselves by their
absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the
extraordinary and marvelous and ought reasonably to beget a suspicion against
all relations of this kind. It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say,
that such prodigious events never happen in our day, but it is nothing strange
that men should lie in all ages."
And then on the point that I was just making, he says,
"In the infancy of new
religions the wise and learned commonly esteem the matter too inconsiderable to
deserve their attention or regard. And then when afterwards they would
willingly detect the cheat in order to undeceive the deluded multitudes, the
season is now past and the records and witnesses which might clear up the
matter have perished beyond recovery."
Well, it seems to me that there is only one conceivable
approach to these matters. If we have such an emotional stake in the answers,
if we want badly to believe, and if it is important to know the truth, then
nothing other than a committed, skeptical scrutiny is required. It is not very
different from buying a used car. When you buy a used car, it is insufficient
to remember that you badly need a car. After all, it has to work. It is
insufficient to say that the used-car salesman is a friendly fellow. What you
generally do is you kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the
hood. If you do not feel yourself expert in automobile engines, you bring a
friend who is. And you do this for something as unimportant as an automobile.
But on issues of the transcendent, of ethics and morals, of the origin of the
world, of the nature of human beings, on those issues should we not insist upon
at least equally skeptical scrutiny?
