I have long been a firm believer that to teach anything effectively, you have to first get the audience’s attention and, preferably, their interest. This belief stems from a personal experience I had early in my physics career. For the first year that I studied physics, at an English grammar school, my teacher regularly stood up in front of the class and talked to, or rather at, the students for about fifty minutes, nonstop. I soon got very bored with this class, coming close to failing it. The next year, because of a move brought on by a change in my father’s career, I attended a different school. My new physics teacher made liberal use of demonstrations when he taught, often with a dramatic flair. This got our attention. This made physics fun, exciting, and real to us. We could see what it was being applied to. I've been interested in physics ever since, and especially in dramatic demonstrations. In this article I describe the physics behind four of the more dramatic demonstrations that I now do on occasion for my physics classes: walking on a bed of broken glass, having a concrete block broken on me while lying sandwiched between two beds of nails, dipping my fingers in molten lead, and picking up an orange-hot piece of space shuttle tile.

Walking on Broken Glass

David Willey walking on broken glass

For this demonstration the glass bottles should first be soaked in water to remove any paper labels. An alternative is to use Mason jars. It is best to use fairly large bottles so that the pieces formed will have only a gentle curve to them. When breaking the bottles I place them in a canvas sack and use a hammer, being sure to wear gloves and eye protection. The glass should be broken into fairly small pieces. The bed for the glass may be made from half-inch-thick plywood framed by pieces of 2"34” wood. Once the glass has been poured into the bed it should be spread out to a uniform depth. Any piece that has a right-angled bend in it, where the sidewall of the bottle meets the base, is moved to the edges of the bed so that only relatively flat pieces of glass are included in the center of the bed where the walking takes place. As an extra precaution, I cover the glass with a cloth and then use a large cast iron skillet to pound the surface firmly. This ensures no points of glass are sticking up. This is usually done before the audience enters the room. A bed of glass about 8 cm (three inches) deep seems best, as this provides sufficient depth for the glass to be able to shift and settle somewhat as a foot is planted slowly and directly down upon it. When done this way the pieces of glass lay fairly flat and no edge presses perpendicularly against the sole. The bottom of the foot has some give to it and conforms to the shallow curve of the glass pieces. This is similar to a sharp knife being pressed with the flat of the blade against one’s flesh, where considerable force may be used without injury. When walking I place each foot slowly, moving it elsewhere if a point or edge is felt, although that is seldom necessary if the bed has been prepared correctly. Care must be taken to brush off any pieces of glass that stick to the bottom of the feet when stepping off the bed.

To show that the edges of the glass are sharp I use a piece from the bed to cut the string suspending a bowling ball about a half meter (two feet) above the floor.

Dipping Fingers in Molten Lead

David Willey dipping his fingers into molten lead

Dipping one’s fingers in molten lead is usually cited as being an example of the Leidenfrost effect in action. However, it is not quite the same situation as when a drop of water is lifted up and hence somewhat insulated from a very hot skillet by the steam formed beneath it. Before dipping one’s fingers in molten lead, the hand is dipped in a bowl of water. Then the drops are shaken off and the hand dipped quickly in and out of the lead. I usually dip the first seven or eight centimeters of my fingers. Heat from the lead goes into evaporating the water and hence not into burning the hand, and the resulting steam layer insulates the hand.

If we suppose that the fingers of one hand have a total surface area of about 100 square cm, then a layer of water 0.1 mm thick would require 2600 J of heat to warm it from 20°C to 100°C and then to boil it at 100°C. This would mean that even if the lead were to cool by 200°C, the amount cooled would need to be 100 grams, which would entail a layer almost a millimeter in thickness. The specific heat of lead is relatively small when compared to the specific heat-and more importantly the latent heat-of water.

It is very important when doing this demonstration that the lead be heated well above its melting point of 327.5°C. Having lead solidify on one’s fingers is not pleasant. When the molten lead is hot enough, about 200°C hotter than its melting point, a gold-colored film will form on its surface. It is a good idea to have well-trimmed fingernails so that no lead gets beneath them, although I have seen the demonstration done twice by women with long painted fingernails, apparently without damage or injury. Should the lead contain impurities, or for other reasons form a dross on the surface, this should be cleaned off using a spoon fastened to a wooden handle. I find that the density of the lead makes a stronger impression on those who perform this demonstration than its temperature. Remember that lead should only be melted where there is adequate ventilation.

Bed of Nails and Breaking a Concrete Block

David Willey breaking a concrete block over Jay Leno on the Tonight Show

Having a concrete block broken on your chest while lying sandwiched between two beds of nails usually elicits three different questions: Why one can lie on the bed of nails, what happens to the kinetic energy of the hammer, and what happens to the momentum of the hammer? The reason that one can lie on the bed of nails has to do with the difference between force and pressure. The nails are spaced about two centimeters apart, and hence when I lie flat a sufficient number of them support me such that no one nail has to press on my body particularly hard. I would estimate that for the bed of nails I use, made from a thousand nails, at least 150 nails support my 150 lb. weight. So even if my weight is not quite evenly distributed, no nail pushes on me with much more than 2.5 lbs. of force and that is not uncomfortable. The bed I use is made from aluminum gutter spikes, and as purchased the points of these are somewhat blunted. This is done by the manufacturer so that the spikes will not split a wooden board if driven into one. This does make for a more comfortable bed than if sharper steel nails are used. Particular care needs to be taken when getting on and off the bed, and I have seen side rails added to a bed to aid in this procedure.

When the concrete block is broken, the kinetic energy of the sledgehammer goes into causing the block’s destruction, ultimately warming the pieces, and the momentum of the hammer is passed through the prone person to the earth. The person swinging the sledge hammer needs to hit the block with sufficient force to shatter it, but not so hard that the hammer has a significant amount of energy left after the initial impact. It is quite possible for an adult to hit the block too hard, as I found out when an enthusiastic and strong gym teacher hit a block as hard as he could. All the breath was knocked from me and I had a matrix of puncture wounds on my chest and back. A tetanus shot saw me fine that day, and since then only my wife breaks the block. She practiced just breaking blocks on the ground many times before breaking them on me. Three-section blocks should be placed lengthwise on the top board whereas two-section blocks are best stood on end. I prefer two- section blocks as they shatter nicely.

The small pieces fly with force and must be guarded against. Also, the end pieces of the concrete block do tend to fall off the top bed of nails. Hence it is advisable to wear a face mask as well as safety goggles, hold your forearms over your face, and have other protection, such as a board placed over any other exposed areas.

Picking Up a Piece of Orange-hot Space Tile

The hot tile demonstration illustrates the difference between temperature and heat. Small sample pieces of tile from the space shuttle are occasionally obtainable from the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. If such a piece is heated using a Bunsen burner or propane torch until it is orange hot (about 1,000°C), it may be picked up by the edges a few seconds after the heat source is removed.

Several factors contribute to why this may be done. The basic raw material for the tile is 99.7% pure silica, which has low heat capacity and an extremely small thermal conductivity (approximately 5 J/cm.hr.°C.) Holding the tile by the edges puts the fingers in contact with the part of the tile that has cooled the most in the few seconds since the tile was heated. It also provides only a small area of contact, which can be changed if the tile is to be held for more than a few seconds.

An analogy may be made between heat flowing from the tile and water flowing from a hose pipe. Although the temperature difference between the tile and the hand, analogous to the pressure difference between inside and outside the hose, may be large, if the cross section of the hose is very small, analogous to the very small thermal conductivity of the tile, then the rate of water flow from the hose, analogous to the flow of heat from the tile to the hand, will still only be small. A small piece of tile seen from close up works best, as it is very difficult to heat a large piece uniformly unless the heating is done in an oven capable of temperatures in excess of 1,000°C. If a suitable oven, such as a ceramics kiln, is available, a dramatic photograph may be taken of a person holding a piece of the tile in a darkened room, the only illumination for the picture being the tile’s incandescence. The dead layer of skin on the fingertips is generally fairly thick, on the order of half a millimeter or so, and is also a poor heat conductor. Many of the same principles apply to someone firewalking, where the feet, ash, and coals are poor conductors and the time of contact is short.

These demonstrations can be dangerous; do not try them at home. If due care is exercised, however, each is relatively harmless and guaranteed to grab attention.

Eventually, positive findings using yet another novel paradigm are reported, followed by another round of replication failures, and so on. Moreover, in contrast to the argot of what Imre Lakatos termed “progressive” scientific research programs, the lexicon of parapsychology is replete with terms describing the absence of effects. The “experimenter (shyness) effect” refers to the failure to obtain positive findings when skeptical researchers are present, the “decline effect” refers to the disappearance or marked diminution of ESP effects within a session following an initial run of positive results, and “psi missing” refers to ESP performance that is significantly worse than chance (see Gilovich, T., 1991, How We Know What Isn't So, New York: Free Press, for a good discussion). These terms underscore the absence of a crucial feature that is a hallmark of mature laboratory sciences, namely a readily transportable “experimental recipe” that can yield replicable results across independent laboratories.

This pessimistic state of affairs appeared to change, however, in 1994, when Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem, in conjunction with the late University of Edinburgh parapsychologist Charles Honorton, published a remarkable article in Psychological Bulletin, one of psychology’s two most prestigious review journals. Bem and Honorton reported on a series of eleven studies using the "Ganzfeld” (a German word meaning “whole field”) paradigm, a method that originated in the 1930s. Subjects ("percipients”) in a Ganzfeld experiment are immersed in a uniform sensory field, typically by covering their eyes with Ping-Pong ball halves, directing a red floodlight toward their eyes, and pumping white noise into their ears through headphones. Another individual (the "sender”) located in an acoustically shielded room attempts to transmit a specific visual stimulus to the percipient, who then is asked to report all mental imagery that comes to mind. Finally, the percipient is presented with a set of several (typically four) visual stimuli, only one of which is the stimulus viewed by the sender, and asked to rate the extent to which each stimulus matches the mental imagery experienced during the session.

The logic of the Ganzfeld technique relies on the concept of the signal-to-noise ratio. The mental information ostensibly detected by ESP percipients is posited to be an extremely weak signal that is typically obscured by a large number of extraneous stimuli. By placing the percipient in a uniform sensory field, the Ganzfeld technique is hypothesized to decrease the proportion of noise relative to signal and thereby permit investigators to uncover normally weak ESP effects.

With the aid of a statistical technique termed meta-analysis, which permits researchers to quantitatively pool results across a number of studies, Bem and Honorton reported what appeared to be strong, if not convincing, evidence for ESP. The subjects in their meta-analysis obtained overall target “hit” rates of approximately 35 percent, where chance performance would be only 25 percent. Moreover, Bem and Honorton reported several psychologically meaningful predictors of Ganzfeld performance. Subjects who 1) were artistically creative (music, drama, and dance students recruited from the Julliard School), 2) extroverted, 3) had previous ESP-like experiences (but who were “novices,” i.e., had no previous experience as Ganzfeld subjects), 4) had previously studied a mental discipline, such as meditation (but who similarly were novices), and 5) received high scores on self-report indices of emotionality and perceptual orientation to the environment obtained especially high hit rates. In addition, experimental conditions using dynamic visual stimuli yielded higher hit rates than those using static visual stimuli.

Bem and Honorton’s findings, which were widely disseminated in both the popular and academic press, have stirred fresh hopes in the parapsychology community that a truly replicable method of eliciting ESP effects may at last be at hand. Moreover, they have been cited in several popular books, including Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe, and Courtney Brown’s Cosmic Voyage, as providing very promising, if not conclusive, support for the existence of ESP.

Although some critics, like Ray Hyman, found statistical anomalies in the Bem and Honorton data set suggesting the possible existence of subtle but damaging experimental artifacts (see Hyman, R., Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 1996; and Hyman, R., Psychological Bulletin, 1994), Bem and Honorton’s meta-analysis was regarded by many as offering the most compelling laboratory evidence to date for the existence of ESP.

This is essentially where things stood until a few months ago, when Julie Milton of the University of Edinburgh and Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire published an updated meta-analysis of thirty recent Ganzfeld studies not reviewed by Bem and Honorton. Milton and Wiseman’s findings, which were published recently ("Does Psi Exist? Lack of Replication of an Anomalous Process at Information Transfer,” Psychological Bulletin 125(4): 387-391), stand in stark contrast to those of Bem and Honorton and raise serious questions concerning the replicability of the Ganzfeld findings. Specifically, Milton and Wiseman reported a mean effect size across all thirty studies of .013, which corresponds to essentially chance performance and can most charitably be described as negligible.

Moreover, Milton and Wiseman failed to replicate Bem and Honorton’s findings that a previous history of ESP-like experiences and the use of dynamic targets predicted enhanced Ganzfeld performance. (Because of insufficient information in the studies, Milton and Wiseman were unable to directly examine Bem and Honorton’s other predictors, such as extroversion.) In contrast, Milton and Wiseman did find that previous participation in a mental discipline among novices predicted enhanced Ganzfeld performance. Ironically, however, a re-examination of Bem and Honorton’s analyses revealed that this predictor was incorrectly identified as statistically significant in their original article, suggesting that the overall findings for the mental discipline variable in fact amount to another replication failure. In the words of baseball hall-of-famer Yogi Berra, Milton and Wiseman’s findings appear to be a case of “déjà vu all over again.” Seemingly replicable parapsychological findings have again proven to be disconcertingly elusive, and the experimental ESP literature has again proven to be consistently inconsistent.

Parapsychologists have already begun to raise questions regarding Milton and Wiseman’s findings and conclusions. For example, some have criticized Milton and Wiseman for including a heterogeneous set of studies in their meta-analysis, and have pointed out that several studies in their database were in fact statistically significant. Nevertheless, Milton and Wiseman reported that a statistical test of homogeneity conducted on the individual effect sizes suggested that the studies in their meta-analysis can be regarded as being drawn from the same overall “population” of studies.

It seems likely that Milton and Wiseman’s meta-analysis will not be the final word on the Ganzfeld technique, and the question of whether this technique will prove to be the replicable paradigm long sought by parapsychologists or merely another tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp is far from conclusively resolved.

It is evident, however, that the ball is now back in the court of parapsychologists, who will need to convince open-minded skeptics that the Ganzfeld technique will not go the way of J. B. Rhine’s classic Zener card studies, Targ and Puthoff’s remote viewing studies, and other superficially promising but ultimately disappointing ESP paradigms. Otherwise, it may soon be back to the drawing board for yet another paradigm.

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. . . . and lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was. When they saw the star, the rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

Matthew 2: 1-2, 9-10

As Christmas approaches, Protestant and Catholic churches will be celebrating the birth of Jesus, with many references in sermons and Sunday schools to the Star of Bethlehem. The nation’s some hundred planetariums will be devoting Christmas programs to possible natural causes of the Star. According to the book of Matthew, the only gospel to give an account of the Star, the wise men from the east (their number is not given, but tradition makes it three) were guided westward by the Star to the stable where the newborn Jesus lay in a manger.¹ There was no room at the inn for his parents (perhaps I should say “parent” because the gospels make clear that Joseph was not the baby’s father).

Saint Augustine and other early Catholic theologians took for granted that the Star was one of God’s miracles, placed in the heavens to lead the wise men to Bethlehem. When Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo ushered in the rise of empirical science, it became fashionable for Christian scholars to seek natural causes for events which the Bible clearly describes as supernatural.

One of the most popular and longest lasting of natural explanations of the Star was put forth by Kepler. He suggested in a 1606 tract that the Star was actually a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that occurred in 7 B.C. in the constellation of Pisces the Fish. He was not the first to suggest this; the conjecture can be found in English church annals as far back as 1285, but Kepler was the first to argue the possibility at length. The constellation’s name was a happy coincidence because a fish had long been, as still is today, a symbol of the Christian church and its believers.

Scholars now agree that Jesus was born sometime between 4 and 8 B.C. Matthew dates the birth as in the “days of Herod.” Herod is known to have died early in 4 B.C. so Jesus must have been born before then. The exact year is, of course, unknown, though it could well have been at the time of the 7 B.C. Jupiter-Saturn conjunction.

Kepler later had doubts about his conjecture. As astronomer Roy K. Marshall points out in his booklet The Star of Bethlehem (published in 1949 by the Morehead Planetarium, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Jupiter and Saturn, throughout the period of their proximity, were never closer together than two diameters of the Moon as it appears in the sky. In 1846 British astronomer Charles Pritchard did some careful research on the event. Because of the erratic looping paths of the two planets, as seen from Earth, there were three separate close encounters. Astronomers call it a "triple conjunction.”

The two giant planets were closest on May 29, October 1, and December 5. “Even with . . . the strange postulate of someone with weak eyes,” Pritchard wrote, "the planets could not have appeared as one star.” Marshall adds: “Only an abysmally weak pair of eyes could have ever merged them.”

There are other objections to Kepler’s guess. A much closer meeting of the same two planets occurred in 66 B.C. As Arthur C. Clarke says in his entertaining essay “The Star of Bethlehem” (Chapter 4 in his collection of essays Report on Planet Three, 1972), this event “should have brought a delegation of wise men to Bethlehem sixty years too soon!”

Each of the three conjunctions of 7 B.C. lasted only a few days, whereas Matthew has the Star guiding the wise men throughout a journey that must have taken at least several weeks. Finally, the two planets would rise and set like ordinary stars, planets, and the Sun and Moon, but Matthew describes the Star as lingering in the sky as it glided slowly toward Bethlehem. Kepler eventually decided the Star was created by God between Jupiter and Saturn when they were close together.

Kepler’s original conjecture became popular among nineteenth- century Christians, especially in Germany where the so-called “higher criticism” of the Bible favored natural causes for Biblical miracles. The 7 B.C. theory was also defended in endless popular biographies of Jesus published in Christian countries. In England the Anglican cleric Frederic W. Farrar, in his Life of Christ (1874), devotes several pages to a scholarly discussion of the 7 B.C. conjunction. Samuel J. Andrews, in The Life of Our Lord Upon the Earth (1891), an American work, also takes Kepler’s theory seriously.

In recent years the 7 B.C. conjecture has been revived in the lengthy life of Jesus section that makes up the final third of the massive Urantia Book (1955). This bible of the Urantia movement purports to have been written entirely by supermortals who channeled the text through members of the movement to give to Urantia, the cult’s name for Earth, a new revelation destined to supersede Christianity. On page 1352 of the Urantia Book we learn that the Jupiter-Saturn encounter of May 29, 7 B.C., gave the appearance of a single star, which we know it didn't, and this accounts for what the supermortals call the “beautiful legend” that grew up about the “Star.” The supermortals, or “unseen friends” as Urantians like to call them, reveal that Jesus was born at noon, August 21, 7 B.C. It is a date celebrated annually by Urantians. (For more on the bizarre Urantia movement see my book Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery, recently reprinted in paperback by Prometheus Books.)

Other planetary conjunctions in later years have been considered as possible explanations of the Star. For example, a spectacular merging of Jupiter and Venus took place on June 17, 2 B.C. The disks of the two planets actually overlapped! This candidate for the Star is defended by James De Young and James Hilton in “Star of Bethlehem” (Sky and Telescope, April 1973), and again by Roger Sinnott in “Computing the Star of Bethlehem” (Sky and Telescope, December 1986). Jupiter and Venus were last that close in 1818, and won't be again until 2065.

Still another contender for the Star is a supernoval explosion that occurred in the spring of 5 B.C. in the constellation of Capricorn. You'll find this argued by British astronomer David H. Clark and two associates in The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (December 1977). Other speculations, too absurd to consider, have hung the Star on Venus, comets, exploding meteors, and even ball lightning.

Immanuel Velikovsky, an orthodox Jew, struggled to invent natural causes for Old Testament miracles. He was not, of course, interested in doing the same thing for the New Testament miracles. He even proposed a natural explanation of how Joshua made the Sun and Moon stop moving: It was really Earth that ceased rotating. This was caused by a mammoth comet that erupted from Jupiter, and passed close to Earth before it settled down to become Venus! Some of today’s far-out New Agers who believe in the reality of PK (psychokinesis) regard Jesus as a great psychic who used natural psi powers to walk on water, multiply loaves and fish, turn water into wine, and perform other stupendous feats of magic.

Ellen Gould White, prophetess and one of the founders of Seventh-day Adventism, had a much simpler, and more sensible, approach to the Bible’s great miracles. She took them to be miracles. In The Desire of Ages, her book on the life of Jesus, she explains the Star as follows:

The wise men had seen a mysterious light in the heavens upon that night when the glory of God flooded the hills of Bethlehem. As the light faded, a luminous star appeared, and lingered in the sky. It was not a fixed star nor a planet. . . . That star was a distant company of shining angels. . . .

The association of the Star with angels goes back to the early Church fathers. Longfellow, in the third section of his miracle-play “The Nativity” (it is part of his book Christus: A Mystery), toys with the notion that the Star was held in the sky by angels. There were seven: angels of the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Here is Longfellow’s opening stanza:

The Angels of the Planets Seven,
Across the shining fields of heaven
The natal star we bring!
Dropping our sevenfold virtues down
As priceless jewels in the crown
Of Christ, our new-born King.

What is my opinion about all this? I find it hard to comprehend why conservative and fundamentalist Christians, who believe the Bible’s miracles to be actual events, would even try to find natural explanations for what the Bible clearly describes as divine supernatural phenomena. The Jehovah of the Scriptures has awesome powers to suspend natural laws and do whatever He wants. Why trouble to look for natural causes of the great downpour by which God drowned every man, woman, and child on Earth, as well as their pets, except for one undistinguished family and the few animals they took on their Ark? I once asked a Seventh-day Adventist why God would be so cruel as to murder all the innocent little babies. He replied that God foresaw how wicked they would become if allowed to grow up!

In my not-so-humble opinion, the story of the Star is pure myth, similar to many ancient legends about the miraculous appearance of a star to herald a great event, such as the birth of Caesar, Pythagoras, Krishna (the Hindu savior), and other famous persons and deities. Aeneas is said to have been guided by a star as he traveled westward from Troy to the spot where he founded Rome. (I was unable to find a reference to this in Virgil’s Aenead, and would be grateful to any reader who can locate the reference for me.) The legend about the Star of Bethlehem is believed by many scholars to have arisen to fulfill a prophecy in Numbers 24:17, “I shall see him [God], but not now. I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel.”

Although I do not think the Star of Bethlehem ever existed, or was an illusion caused by a natural astronomical event, I find Mrs. White’s statement more to be admired than the futile efforts of liberal Christians to banish from the Bible all references to God’s miraculous powers. I find this almost as degrading of the Bible as the efforts of ultra-feminist Christian leaders to expunge from Scripture every sentence in which God is called “Father” (or given any other masculine term), and Jesus is called “Son.” The practice strikes me as even more ridiculous than trying to change “nigger,” in such classic novels as Huckleberry Finn, and Joseph Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus, to “African American.”

Let the Bible be the Bible! It’s not about science. It’s not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting. I think of the tragic legend about the rash vow of Jephtha that prompted him to sacrifice his daughter. (Why does St. Paul speak of Jephtha as a man of great faith?) Or the account of how an angry Jehovah slew Moses’ two nephews with lightning bolts merely because they failed to mix the incense properly for a sacrifice. God didn't like the way the smoke smelled! The Old Testament’s God is as skillful as Zeus at using lightning as a weapon of punishment.

The King James Bible is itself a near-miracle, its poetic style far more beautiful and moving than any modern translation in English or any other language. It is also an improvement over the frequently crude writing by the old Hebrew and Greek authors. The King James Bible is a literary masterpiece best left unaltered. It is a classic to put on a shelf alongside the great fantasies of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and yes, even the Koran.

Note

1. Matthew’s account of the visiting magi is retold in greater detail in the apocryphal Book of James, a Greek manuscript of the second century. Legend has it that it was written by a half brother of Jesus. According to Origen, he was one of Joseph’s sons by a former marriage. Chapter 15, verse 7, describes the Star as so huge and bright that it rendered all the other stars invisible.

Addendum

From Reader Robert Reno:

It is important to debunk pseudoscience, but so is being factually accurate, fair, and honest to context when quoting, summarizing, and paraphrasing to assure the original meaning is not distorted in any way by adding or subtracting from it. Gardner’s statement (see paragraph 10) above implies that the Urantia Book claims “the Jupiter-Saturn encounter of May 29, 7 B.C., gave the appearance of a single star.” This is false and a distortion of the actual paragraph’s meaning.

The actual complete paragraph in the Urantia Book states:

“These wise men saw no star to guide them to Bethlehem. The beautiful legend of the star of Bethlehem originated in this way: Jesus was born August 21 at noon, 7 B.C. On May 29, 7 B.C., there occurred an extraordinary conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces. And it is a remarkable astronomic fact that similar conjunctions occurred on September 29 and December 5 of the same year. Upon the basis of these extraordinary but wholly natural events the well-meaning zealots of the succeeding generation constructed the appealing legend of the star of Bethlehem and the adoring Magi led thereby to the manger, where they beheld and worshiped the newborn babe. Oriental and near-Oriental minds delight in fairy stories, and they are continually spinning such beautiful myths about the lives of their religious leaders and political heroes. In the absence of printing, when most human knowledge was passed by word of mouth from one generation to another, it was very easy for myths to become traditions and for traditions eventually to become accepted as facts.” (Urantia Book 1352)

The first sentence in the paragraph states clearly “These wise men saw no star to guide them to Bethlehem.” Nowhere in the paragraph in question is it stated that the Jupiter-Saturn encounter gave the appearance of a single star. I searched the online version of the Urantia Book and could find no statement that the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction “gave the appearance of a single star.” This appears to indicate that Gardner has misquoted the Urantia Book by adding information that was not in the original source and omitting information, the first sentence of the paragraph in question, which contradicts his own fallacious statement. Gardner then goes on to use his own false statement as a basis upon which to criticize the Urantia Book, by stating “which we know it didn’t.” I fail to see how this erroneous quotation, which falls short of even minimal accuracy and fairness, furthers the cause of good science.

Martin Gardner Responds:

The writer is correct. The Urantia Book does not state that the conjunction gave the appearance of a single star. However, it was widely believed by Christian scholars, especially in Germany, that the conjunction appeared as the Star of bethlehem. See pages 206-208 of my Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery (Prometheus Books) for a full discussion of this misconception.

The response to our special issue Science and Religion: Coflict or Conciliation? (July/August 1999) was the largest we ever received to a single issue. It was overwhelmingly positive. Of the more than 140 letters and e-mails we have received (more were still arriving at our time cutoff), only two complained of our devoting so much space to the topic. Most readers expressed appreciation. Many had thoughtful observations or criticisms of articles. We here present selected letters divided into two large categories: those addressing diverse points made throughout the special issue and those that focused specifically on the Non-Overlapping Magisteria concept advocated by Stephen Jay Gould.

The subject “science and religion” becomes even more fascinating when seen through the eyes of a biologist studying social animals.

All animals living in groups view being expelled from the group as a severe punishment; to prevent this they have to obey certain rules. Man is no exception; witness the feelings excited by the word “exile.”

Before the invention of the telescope and the microscope in the seventeenth century man’s mental view of his world was mainly formed by what he could observe with his naked eye and ear. To explain many incomprehensible phenomena in the world around him, man in every culture postulated the existence of gods with supernatural powers.

Some of the rules of a group conflict with an individual’s private wishes. The leaders of the group need strong arguments to keep the group intact; the fear of punishment by the gods (invented by man) in case of rule violation became a very powerful argument.

The advances of the sciences led to conclusions that were in conflict with the teachings of religion. Yet the use of religion to keep the group together continues.

As scientific knowledge of a phenomenon increases and also the technical power to control that phenomenon, the feeling of responsibility towards that phenomenon also grows. In the long run the feeling that we are all co-responsible for what happens in the biosphere will make it possible to keep Earth livable for man. Belief in supernatural gods will then have become obsolete.

Jacob van Noordwijk
Bosch en Duin,
The Netherlands

I just finished reading your excellent July/August issue on science and religion while I was on a trip. Imagine my surprise when I returned from my trip to learn that one of my closest and dearest friends had decided to join one of the most narrow-minded and dogmatic religious sects in the country! This man is a seemingly rational and intelligent man who has a fine family and a position of responsibility with the Federal government. When I spoke with him regarding his decision, he informed me that he felt a need for a network of support, and felt that a church was one of the few places that could provide it. I could only offer my love and support, and assure him that in spite of my total disdain for the attitudes and practices of fundamentalism, I would continue to be his friend and be supportive of him and his family.

This incident points out one of the strongest draws that the irrationality of fundamentalism exerts on the weak. Many people, for numerous reasons, have a strong emotional need for a support network. In our rather self-centered society, there are few places where one can go to have those kinds of emotional needs met. Churches, especially those of a more fundamentalist mindset, tend to offer a strong network of support to newcomers. This is due in great part to the “us against them” feeling they possess regarding those outside their particular belief system. Nothing unites people like a common enemy, and if you feel the Devil is hiding behind every bush, it tends to lend a feeling of mutual closeness and support, much like walking through a field of hungry lions with a group of hunters.

I can certainly understand my friend’s desire to be part of a close and supportive “family.” As a teenager, I too felt a strong emotional need for a sense of family, and I also joined a fundamentalist church. Over the years I grew to realize that I was paying a very high price for my sense of belonging. I was forced to deny the obvious fact of biological evolution, regard Earth as quite young (in spite of tremendous evidence to the contrary), and I was forced to be terribly bigoted and intolerant of anyone who did not share my group’s narrow beliefs. I grieve over the wonderful friends I never made because of the prohibition to associate with “infidels and unbelievers.” I am very glad that I did violate the group’s rule of not reading anything that disagreed with their views. Even when I was in the strongest grip of fundamentalism, I could not fathom a god so insecure that reading scientific facts would cause him to vanish.

I have grown to respect new views and new heroes. Stephen Jay Gould, James Randi and the late Isaac Asimov are among the people of this planet for whom I have the utmost respect. Each of these men (and too many others to mention) have approached the issues of science and religion with various aspects of humor, wit, compassion, and, most of all, honesty. Although I do not totally discount the possible existence of a god, I now know that he will prove to be a god who does not rely on fear, gullibility, or magic to lure followers. He will rather be a god who respects and honors those who seek honest and rational answers to the mysteries that surround us. It is my sincere hope that a time will soon come when humanity can develop enough care and compassion for one another to provide those with emotional needs for a sense of family to find it without having to resort to selling their intellect in the bargain.

Please keep up the wonderful work of striving for truth and enlightenment. Misguided religious beliefs have caused more pain, suffering and death than all the wars man has ever fought. Only when we can make it possible for each child in this country to have access to scientific truths can we truly regard ourselves as a civilized country.

Jim L. Brasfield
Collierville, Tenn.

In the July/August special issue on science and religion, several authors stated that Andrew D. White’s 1896 classic A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom chronicled the conflict between science and religion. In fact, however, White’s introduction makes clear that he saw the conflict as “a struggle between Science and Dogmatic Theology” rather than between science and religion. White was convinced that “Science, though it has evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on biblical texts and ancient modes of thought, will go hand in hand with Religion; and that, although theological control will continue to diminish, Religion, as seen in the recognition of 'a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,' and in the love of God and of our neighbor, will steadily grow stronger and stronger. . . .” White’s distinction between religion and theology might still be useful for those who think science should accommodate religion in general, but not the doctrines of particular religions.

C. Leon Harris
Department of Biological Sciences
State University of New York
Plattsburgh, N.Y.

The Science and Religion issue was very interesting. When authors point out that science is reason-based and religion is faith-based it is, of course, correct. But that is not sufficient.

Religion is very robust. It needs nothing but its followers. It can survive and sometimes thrive in the face of moderate government hostility. Science, on the other hand, is dependent. Without the support of industry, government, and academia, it would shrivel to the size of humanism or atheism. You need to understand that science is like a dairy cow. If it does not produce it will end up as hamburger.

Truth is not relevant to religion. Science uses reason and experiments to find truth. Palevitz writes “Creationists will always see inconsistencies or unexplained phenomena in evolutionary biology that make supernatural intervention an unavoidable conclusion.” That is the same as saying truth is not relevant. Not only that, creationism is a good example of the “Big Lie.” Religion seeks wealth, power, and control, and has acquired a great deal. If science does not it will remain dependent.

Palevitz writes about creationists, “We should force them to play by science’s rules.” We do not have the power to force them to do anything. Does he think creationists care about evidence or truth? Fundamentalist Christians are close to gaining control of the legislative arm of the federal government. Not long after that evolution will be banned from public schools and replaced by creationism. So it is not surprising that many of his students have chosen creationism. They probably want to be on the winning side.

Don Latimer
Lancaster, Calif.

I found the issue on science and religion quite fascinating, but I was a little surprised by the lack of treatment of the relation of science and religion as set down by Sir James G. Frazer in The Golden Bough.

According to Frazer, man sought to control his environment, and resorted to magic: by performing certain rituals, something could be caused to happen. One could make it rain, cure an illness, cause the livestock to be fertile, cause his children to be fertile, etc., by the performance of the appropriate ritual.

Later, the magic was not working well to control the environment, and man created god: man could not cause things to happen, but man could ask god, and god could cause things to happen. The ways of the world being as they are, of course the magic did not disappear, but evolved into religion. What previously caused something to happen now convinced god to do the same thing. Also, as one would expect, some plain old magic persisted-strongly in some cultures, and vestigially in other cultures.

I do not believe Frazer carries us to the next level, but it seems an ineluctability that science was the next effort to control the environment. With this in mind, it seems that there must be a conflict between science and religion. While, in the past, religion and magic could be intertwined and neither is much the worse for it, science cannot be so mixed. Some authors in the Skeptical Inquirer pointed out that fact, and the confusion that results. But the worst part of all is that science is successful-beyond reasonable doubt.

Thus, we have a tradition that is probably as old as mankind, and that tradition has evolved slowly, rarely throwing things out but always changing and reinterpreting. Now we have science that is not in the old mold, and refuses to conform to the old mold, preferring to replace everything that does not work (and we know how much does not work).

I believe what is left is to create a religion that can treat the “spiritual” side of people without getting into the physical side of life. Only then can we avoid the natural conflict. I offer no suggestions as to how this may be achieved.

Jim Middleton
Decatur, Ga.

I would like to compliment you on an excellent and highly relevant treatment of the relationship between science and religion. I note with disappointment, however, that many of your contributors persist in using the inappropriate term “supernatural” to describe those things which they perceive as being outside the boundaries of science. I would argue that there is, in fact, no such thing as the supernatural, except in our imaginations.

There are two, and only two, possibilities for existence: things can be conceptual or imaginary, existing only in our minds, or they can exist in the real, physical world. If such things as gods, angels, ghosts, or demons are anything but imaginary, then they must be considered as natural, existing in the natural world, amenable (at least in principle) to scientific inquiry, and subject to the same inviolable natural laws as all other things. Any appearance by such entities (assuming that they did, in fact, have a physical existence) of transcending these laws would be simply that-appearance. Like the alpha particles passing, ghostlike, though Rutherford’s gold foil, a ghost which passed through a solid wall or a god which could transform matter with the wave of a hand would not be exhibiting “supernatural” powers in violation of natural laws, but would rather be indicating to us that there are aspects of natural law which we simply have not yet discovered.

Scott F. Stoeffler
Downers Grove, Ill.

Congratulations on your special issue on science and religion. You covered all viewpoints well. About the only thing missing was an article by a Pentecostal minister.

I am a scientist and a religious person, and I never considered there was a conflict between science and religion. To me, the role of science is to observe, discover and comprehend the countless wonders of God’s creation. I believe God intended for us to do this; else, why would he have endowed man with an intellect that far surpasses that of any other animal?

I also believe that God intends us to use this knowledge to His glory and the betterment of mankind. Here, I conflict with some religions, such as Christian Science. I am unhappy about that, as I consider any religion that inspires an individual to love God and love his neighbor as himself is a worthy religion.

Our exploration may have its limits. How all that mass and energy came to be in the same place at the same time to create the Big Bang, what our universe was like before the Big Bang, and if there are other universes may be beyond our reach. The famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking was invited by the Pope to explain the Big Bang and black holes to him. After he was finished, the Pope announced: “from the Big Bang to black holes is your territory. Outside of that is my territory!”

W.E. Railing
Green Valley, Ariz.

I enjoyed the July/August issue on Science and Religion.

How embarrassing for American science and education that five generations after The Origin of Species was published, most Americans doubt evolution! One reason is that creationism, like religion in general, is never subjected to criticism in forums that reach its adherents. So the absurdities of creationism go unquestioned, and people continue to believe. In two debates I attended in my home city, the creationist attacked evolution but hardly explained or even stated his own beliefs about the origin of species. Fortunately in one debate his opponent brought and read from some of the creationist’s publications, and only in that way did we discover that he believed in the story of Noah’s Ark and thought that dinosaurs and humans coexisted (Fred Flintstone science). By the way, those debates lasted three hours each, almost as many people were in the seats at the end as at the beginning, and, in this city, the debates outdrew the Harlem Globetrotters and those dancing horses from Vienna. People do care; the question is important.

Keeping discussions of creationism out of the schools and ignoring the obvious conflicts between evolution and the religion that most Americans accept can only perpetuate ignorance. It is much better to discuss creationism in classrooms, but subject it to the same kind of criticism that evolution gets from creationists. The whole controversy could be settled in a generation or two, but only if we talk about it in forums that reach tens of millions, i.e., the schools and television.

Imagine a foundation-funded debate in the form of a series of, say, ten one-hour television programs, with half the programming prepared by creationists, half by science educators. . . .

Done right, and with luck, such a series might compare in interest with Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. It could give millions of people the knowledge they need to deal effectively with the creation/evolution controversy.

Jim Segesta
Bakersfield, Calif.

Several of the articles in the special Science and Religion issue use the word “natural” to describe science but use it in two distinct ways that are not clearly distinguished. It is said that science gives us natural explanations for our observations of the natural world. The meaning of the latter seems clear: The natural world is the one that we experience through our senses, one that is external to the private thoughts within our minds.

What, however, is a natural explanation? It seems to be one expressed in terms of certain predetermined concepts. Eugenie Scott ("The 'Science and Religion Movement'”), for example, says that it is “materialistic: matter, energy, and their interactions are used.” This is wrongheaded. Does science really limit itself a priori to using certain ideas? Is it so encumbered by bias that it would reject any explanation that uses other notions, no matter how well that explanation accounts for our observations?

The answer to these questions is no. Science is open-minded, not committed forever to its current concepts, always accepting of whatever ideas yield greater understanding. It seeks the best of all possible explanations, where “best” is characterized by parsimony, falsifiability, fruitfulness, and the like. Using such criteria, evolution, for example, easily triumphs over its rivals.

John G. Fletcher
Livermore, Calif.

Your excellent special issue on science and religion brought to my mind words Episcopal journalist Bruce Bawer wrote in his book Stealing Jesus (p. 324):

. . . every religious statement is a metaphor, a stab in the dark, an attempt to express in human words something that lies beyond human understanding or expression. To choose a religion is to choose a set of metaphors that comport best with the promptings of one’s own instincts and conscience and that seems to point most truly, virtuously, and beautifully to the “depth of reason.”

Bob Slaughter
Omaha, Neb.

Your special issue on science and religion lacks a major ingredient not easily named. Consider figure two in the article on scientific method by Zoran Pazameta (p. 38). It shows a block for observations and experiments, from which we go directly to theory. Some may assume a simple examination of the data is all that’s needed. A step or block is missing, namely the analysis, assessment, and interpretation of the data. Interpretation requires a thorough understanding of what has gone before, i.e., previous research and existing theory. It further requires careful logical thinking, including a need not to be misled by wishes, expectations, prejudices, or by the accepted wisdom. And, most of all, the analysis is likely to require lots and lots of mathematics, including calculus and statistics. Most people lack any or all of these prerequisites.

The average person lacks the prerequisite knowledge or tools to understand the evidence for scientific assertions. Victor Stenger assures us the universe started with a big bang and is about a dozen billions years old (p. 42). Very few have the mathematics background to check that conclusion. To understand the evidence for biological evolution is simpler, but still requires a determined effort to master facts and references. In my perception most people have only a vague idea why a car engine works, or what the principles of radio wave propagation are.

In consequence scientific arguments for most people are as much a matter of faith as are religious statements. That cars run, planes fly, television works, and refrigerators cool, of course strengthens our trust in science immensely. Most people do not have a clear understanding of the distinction between science and technology. Even some technically trained people have only a vague idea of scientific principles outside their specialty. It is not astonishing that Barry Palevitz finds many teachers have no clear understanding of the basis of the science they teach (p. 35). Most Americans don't have the mental tools to get from the technical wonders of our economy to an appreciation of abstract theories such as the Big Bang, evolution, or any of the more remote assertions of science. For the average person these are as much a matter of faith as are the Bible and prayer. And religion surely is more comforting and easier to comprehend than science.

Most people don't have the will or the education or the ability to sort religion from science or science from nonsense. The community of agnostics who rely on a scientific world view is only a few percent of the population. I would conclude we shall remain a small minority.

Wolf Roder
Cincinnati, Ohio

Steve Allen’s idea of two mind-sets, one for religion and one for science, (in the July/August issue) is a good one. That idea can help to explain even more about our minds if we broaden it to a subjective frame of mind and an objective one.

Consider, for example, the words of actor and drug addict Robert Downey, Jr. about his recent arrest: “It’s like I've got a shotgun in my mouth, my finger on the trigger and I like the taste of gun metal.” He’s explaining that his subjective mind-set makes him want the experience of taking drugs, while his objective mind-set gives him information that doing so may kill him.

Likewise, the subjective frame of mind suggests that experiencing belief in powerful nonhuman agents can give our lives meaning when we need it. It used to be that the only such agents-that people believed existed-were the supernatural ones suggested by religion. These days, there is also belief that such agents live nearby in UFOs. (Allen suggests there is a connection between such aliens from elsewhere and religion. Certainly, one connection is the subjective mind-set central to both.)

We also have the objective mind-set that provides the basis for gaining useful information about a world in which there is presently no evidence of powerful agents other than humans. That mind-set long ago helped us to find food, water, and shelter. It led to the relatively recent development of science.

How did we come to have such different mind-sets? There’s reason to think our ancestors had them before we were human and before we were apes. That is a large subject. It’s also one that I explore in How We Got To Be Human: Subjective Minds and Objective Bodies, which will be published next year by Prometheus Books.

William H. Libaw
Beverly Hills, Calif.

II. Non-Overlapping Magisteria . . . or Not?

The Stephen J. Gould concordat with the Vatican must not be allowed to settle the boundary between science and religion in your pages. His “NOMA” leaves the boundary where the Darwinian compromise with the bishops set it, more than a century ago. In that time the work of science has occupied the entire territory. It is no longer possible for scientists to yield-shirk-responsibility for ends and values while they busy themselves with means.

The act of Cain should have settled the question at the outset. The nuclear weapon has now irrevocably closed the false dichotomy that distinguishes means from ends and allows the employment of means to accomplish ends thus falsely distinguished and held to be desirable or “good.”

From times earlier than Cain, the emerging human species has looked outward for the purpose and value of its existence, into the farthest imagined regions of the universe and beyond. The last half-century of discovery in human evolution has shown that the natural locus of purpose and value is inside the human head. In this corner of the universe, it has established purpose, first formed in the heads of the primate toolmakers-they shaped those tools for later use-from whom the genus Homo stemmed 1.5-2 million years BP.

Objective knowledge, verified by its use in technology for myriad purposes, has changed not only humankind’s relation to nature, but the relation of human to human. Values have been seen thus to change with the advance of objective knowledge. Mechanical energy made slavery not alone technologically obsolete, but immoral as well. Now, it is the consumption not the production of goods that underlies the worry about jobs in the economy. Redistribution of income proceeds even in our country and in its re-embrace in fundamentalist Puritan ethic.

In place of the concordat and the compromise, let the following statement of the ethic of objective knowledge, by Jacques Monod, stand:

The sole end, the sovereign good, the supreme value in the ethic of knowledge- let us acknowledge it-is not the happiness of man, much less his comfort and security . . . it is objective knowledge itself. I believe it is necessary to state clearly and to systematize this ethic and . . . to teach and spread it abroad; for, creator of the modern world, this is the only ethic consistent with life in this world.

This, it must not be concealed, is a harsh and constraining ethic; while it looks to man to advance knowledge, it declares a value superior to man himself.

It is an ethic of conquest, a will to power, but to power solely in the sphere of knowledge. It is, in consequence, an ethic that teaches the evil of violence and of temporal domination.

It is an ethic of personal and political liberty, because to contest, to criticize, to constantly put in question is not only a right therein but a duty.

It is a social ethic, because objective knowledge can not be cherished except in a society that respects its norms.

It should be of concern to scientists, to begin with, that our society does not now respect those norms.

Gerard Piel
New York, N.Y.

I have a tremendous respect for Stephen J. Gould, and really appreciate the contribution he has made to the dissemination of clear thinking about evolution and biology to the lay public. However, I strongly disagree with his stand on the limits of science because this stance abrogates our responsibility for the future and puts it in the hands of those least able to determine the consequences of their actions. The future and how to influence it is what all of human activity is about. The past is what we can study to determine what actions to take in the fleeting present to bring about a future, near and far, in which we want to live. Our behavior today, the rules that guide that behavior, and reasons those rules were adopted rather than some others are as much a subject for scientific inquiry as are the rules of planetary motion. We do not want to abandon our responsibility to shape our future to those illiterate about the workings of reality. There is only one magisteria and it is a reality that is independent of our existence. Only by using science can we understand reality and use this understanding to set policy to produce a future in which we want to live.

Chuck Lemme
Tucson, Ariz.

I very much appreciated the July/August 1999 presentation of science versus religion.

I am a big fan of Stephen Jay Gould but I've always felt his “soft” approach to religion makes me wish he would concentrate more than ever on biology. I'm glad that Richard Dawkins was given space to present what I very strongly feel is what Gould has “swept under the rug.”

Religions will come and go but science will be with us from now on. I predict that one million years from now if we have not exterminated ourselves that no one will be waiting for the second coming of Christ and that science will be running strong!

I also greatly appreciated the space given to Victor J. Stenger.

Lance May
North Folk, Idaho

Apologists for religion often appear to derive comfort from the statement that science cannot prove the nonexistence of God. This is also the position of S. J. Gould (quoted by Martin Gardner), who describes any attempt at such proof as an arrogant mistake. We are, apparently, supposed to infer that equal weights are to be assigned to the alternatives of God’s existence versus his nonexistence, and that a believer is no less reasonable than a skeptic. It is amusing to apply this line of argument to defend belief in witches. Can a scientist, in his laboratory, perform an experiment demonstrating that there are no witches? No. Can he deduce that conclusion from quantum mechanics, relativity, or the theory of evolution? No. Must we acknowledge, therefore, that belief in witches is intellectually respectable? Again, no. Advocates of the science-cannot-disprove gambit seem to be unaware that they are opening the door to unwelcome guests. Witches are only one example; don't forget the tooth fairy.

Clergymen and theologians maintain that their moral precepts are derived from God. Professor Gould endorses their authority ("magisterium”), but does not, apparently, believe that it is of supernatural origin. What, then, is its source? The Catholic condemnation of contraception is a moral judgment rather than a scientific one; therefore, according to Gould, it falls within the scope of the Church’s teaching authority. But he has not explained why we should accept it.

David A. Shotwell
Alpine, Tex.

Being among the legion of Stephen Jay Gould fans, I was quite excited to read his contribution to the science/religion debate in your recent issue. His piece, however, had a curious ring of the familiar. Was it just by accident that Professor Gould chose a title with a decidedly, shall we say, romanistic afflatus? In fact, his arguments brought to mind those of another clear-minded analytic, synthetic, and sympathetic thinker: Thomas Aquinas.

The thirteenth century, though pre-scientific and Aristotelian, was not free of serious debate over the question of, as it was then phrased, revelation versus reason. Into this great philosophical battle stepped Aquinas, who carefully distinguished between the dual modes of thought by proposing a kind of intellectual fusion, in which reason and revelation, though distinct, are not opposed to each other. Of course, there was to be only one “truth,” that of revelation, but, as far as the natural world, rationalism, or at least the rational, could apply.

This apparent contradiction is overcome by Aquinas’s bedrock assertion that “de motu creaturae rationalis in Deum” (the rational creature advances toward God). In order to establish the true relation between faith and reason, Aquinas systematized theology. Today we might find some of his conclusions strained, but he attempted to forge a methodology based on process (advancement). His method and his relative openmindedness are noteworthy. Revelation may be the higher truth for Aquinas, but his spirit of accommodation does not seem all that far removed from that offered by Professor Gould. Dare it be suggested that the uniquely human quest for God and the uniquely human quest of science are in some sense the same? The two inexhaustibly parallel in endless revealment?

Steven Dowd
Heathrow, Fla.

In regard to the article “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” by Stephen Jay Gould, I'd like to submit this opinion: The October 1996 statement on evolution by Pope John Paul II is nothing more than another of those rare conciliatory expressions used for the sole purpose of forestalling the erosion of religion, namely Christianity, by indelible scientific revelations.

Phyllis Bugg
Clinton, Ky.

Gould says: “No supposed 'conflict' between science and religion should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority-and these magisteria do not overlap (nor do they encompass all inquiry). But the two magisteria bump right up against each other. . . .” Gould also says: “the Magisterium” merely stands for the “teaching authority of the [Roman Catholic] Church-a word derived not from any concept of majesty or unquestionable awe, but from the different notion of teaching, for magister means 'teacher' in Latin.”

Come again?

My Webster’s Dictionary defines “magisterium” as “the authority, office, and power to teach true doctrine by divine guidance, held by the Roman Catholic Church to have been given it alone by divine commission.” Thus, the magisterium is no ordinary teaching authority such as we would find coming down from, say, a state’s educational agency that governs its public schools. There is all the difference in the world when such religious terms are used such as “divine guidance,” “divine commission,” and “alone.”

You don't have to take Webster’s word for this definition. Just turn to the Catholic Almanac’s section about its magisterium. The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (No. 25), says in part: “Religious submission of will and of mind must be shown in a special way to the authentic teaching of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra. It must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to. . . .”

Bishops are also afforded the same magisterium because “they are authentic teachers . . . endowed with the authority of Christ, who preach to the people committed to them the faith they must believe and put into practice. . . .”

Because Gould admitted that he didn't understand the Church’s statement on evolution, he put into play what he calls “the primary rule of intellectual life: When puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents-a rather simple and self-evident principle that has, nonetheless, completely disappeared from large sectors of the American experience.” I submit that Gould failed to put this important principle to work in his anemic definition of “magisterium.”

Bernard Katz
Palmyra, N.J.

Stephen J. Gould makes the somewhat remarkable comment that science cannot touch the subject of souls and that such an issue is intrinsically religious. Consequently he has no problem with the position of the Roman Catholic Church that permits believers to accept the basic truth of the evolution of man while forbidding them from extending that process to the human soul (which is understood to have been infused into the human creature at some point in its evolutionary development).

Aside from the fact that such imposed restrictions are completely contrary to the spirit of science which demands free, open and courageous inquiry (and thus call into question the sincerity and integrity of the Pope’s message), Gould’s comment leaves me wondering what it is he thinks the ongoing research by various brain sciences into the nature of consciousness is all about. Are not these scientists, when they speak of the mind, consciousness and of our sense of self-

identity and self-awareness, not speaking of that very same phenomenon that mystics, poets, philosophers and religionists have typically called the soul? And if by the concept of the soul the Pope and the mainstream religions do not mean our minds, personalities, and our sense of “I,” then what do they understand souls to be? Certainly those who are working (and to some extent already succeeding) to provide a scientific and naturalistic explanation for human consciousness are obviating any need to regard souls as the product of supernatural intervention.

Bruce Wildish
wildish@interlog.com

I feel certain that you are getting a deluge of letters concerning the Science and Religion issue, but I thought I would add mine to the pile. While all of the articles were enjoyable and informative, the two that I most agreed with were the two that were supposedly in mutual opposition to each other, namely the Gould and Dawkins articles.

I think Gould is quite right in delineating areas of inquiry that are probably outside the scope of science for the time being and perhaps forever. These include such questions as the optimal system of ethics, the meaning of life, the nature of mind, etc., questions which most people would deem philosophical rather than scientific. Attention to these questions is important and may have more influence on the fate of humanity than scientific advances. However, in addition to having a different magisteria, traditional religions have also had a different attitude toward inquiry which Dawkins is right to deplore. This attitude is one of absolute prohibition towards criticism and change, the result being a continued belief in stories that are both cruel and ridiculous, simply because they are part of a set of “sacred” writings. I agree with Dawkins that to ignore this basic intolerance toward change is both intellectually dishonest and socially inadvisable. . . .

Cecil Wyche
Greenville, S.C.

I thoroughly enjoyed your issue on science versus religion, however I was somewhat alarmed at how readily everyone except Richard Dawkins ceded to religion matters of morality. As Stephen Jay Gould points out there are other “magisteria” besides religion and science (he mentions art as an example). No mention was made of law or philosophy, either of which is preferable to religion as a source of moral teaching.

Professor Gould gets warm and fuzzy when John Paul II declares evolution a scientific fact in contrast to Pius XII’s grudging admission that it might be valid and we can live with it if we have to. Welcome to the nineteenth century! Even if the Pope were trained in science and had arrived at his conclusion from his own research, no skeptic could accept his declaration as anything more than one scientist’s opinion based on the available data.

Ernest L. Asten
San Francisco, Calif.

All his life, Carl Sagan was troubled by grand dichotomies—between reason and irrationalism, between wonder and skepticism. The dichotomies clashed within him. He yearned to believe in marvelous things—in flying saucers, in Martians, in glistening civilizations across the Milky Way. Yet reason usually brought him back to Earth. Usually; not always. A visionary dreams of a better world than this one. He refuses to think that modern society and its trappings—money, marriage, children, a nine-to-five career, and seemingly blind obedience to a waving flag and an inscrutable God—are all that there is. Sagan was blinded, but not by these. He was blinded by the sheer glory of the new cosmos unveiled by science during the first two decades of his life. This cosmos was an ever-expanding, unbounded wonderland of billions of galaxies. And across the light-years, Sagan dreamed, random molecular jigglings had perhaps spawned creeping, crawling, thinking creatures on alien landscapes bathed in the glow of alien suns.

This vision blinded Sagan, sometimes, to the needs of the people around him. These included friends who worshipped him, although he hurt them; wives who were entranced by his passions, although enraged by his absenteeism and oft illogical “logic”; sons who were enthralled by his example, even as they struggled to escape his shadow; and colleagues who envied and honored him, even while they scorned his wilder notions and mocked his pomposities. Hardly anyone who knew Sagan intimately has an unmixed opinion of him. In the final analysis, he was the dichotomy: the prophet and the hardboiled skeptic, the boyish fantasist and the ultra-rigorous analyst, the warm companion and the brusque colleague, the oracle whose smooth exterior concealed inner fissures.

To Sagan, the rationale for his broader interests was simple: He refused to pigeonhole himself. He apparently sensed that the coming space age would be radically interdisciplinary: astronomers would have to talk to biologists and chemists and geologists and atmospheric physicists and many other experts whom they normally ignored. Hence he trained himself in subjects unrelated to astrophysics—in particular, biology, which was the topic closest to his first love, extraterrestrial life.

Rare is the scientist with world-class understanding of two broad disciplines—say, astronomy and biology. Sagan was one of the rare ones. The Hutchins program [at the University of Chicago] gave him the confidence to straddle disciplines. He traced this confidence to a biology course in which, he recalled, “there were only three topics. The first was enzyme chemistry; the second was diabetes; and the third was the physiological concomitants of the expression of emotions.” True, this selection of biological science “was unrepresentative—no Darwin, no genetics!” Yet the class explored those three topics so deeply—“we read diabetes papers published that very year”—that he evidently concluded that he could understand any topic he wished, if he worked hard enough. Millions of readers would later enjoy the results: a hyperpolymath conversant with astrophysics, biology, neuroscience, primate communication, atmospheric physics, geopolitics, nuclear strategy. . . . Sagan was the multidisciplinary scholar par excellence, the “Renaissance man” so uncommon in the age of specialization, of industrialized academia, where the divisions of labor are as real as in Henry Ford’s factories.

Why did an established scientist like H.J. Muller spend time with this impatient New Jersey teenager who had a short attention span for tedious research and was obsessed with UFOs and aliens? Muller was a generous man. For all the disappointments of his life—betrayed by a political ideology, revolted by Hitlerian perversion of the eugenic ideal—Muller clung to his socialist ethics, which cherished “ordinary” people, however unschooled and immature.

His kindness rubbed off on Sagan. Though later in life, after he had become famous, Sagan struck many colleagues as arrogant; he almost always displayed patience and good humor when addressing laypeople. After Sagan’s death, his friend Paul West published a novel, Life with Swan (1999), which featured a blatantly Saganish character, one Professor Raoul Bunsen, who, West wrote, was “as willing to answer stupid elementary questions as to formulate, almost as masochistic exercise, questions nobody could answer.” A true science popularizer must have a democratic soul; he cannot afford to feel contempt for his audience. Otherwise, why bother popularizing? As Sagan’s fame grew, he became accustomed to standing at a podium and listening as an audience member stood and asked him a question about UFOs or astrology or other silliness. Then, typically, Sagan responded firmly but politely, trying to make the questioner feel intelligent, not like an ignoramus. Any other speaker might have snapped, “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.” But Muller wouldn’t have said that; nor did Sagan.

Carl Sagan rejected religion from an early age. In the early twentieth century powerful forces of secularization were sweeping through American Judaism (as through all Western culture). The Holocaust caused some Jews to reject God altogether: what deity would have permitted such a horror?

Sagan celebrated his bar mitzvah at age thirteen. “But in exactly that period when I was sort of seriously reading the Bible,” he recalled, “I found all sorts of obvious contradictions with reality. [For example], two different, contradictory accounts of the origin of the world in Genesis. . . . That propelled me away” from religion. Previously, he had soured on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars novels because they contained logical inconsistencies. Now he started looking for similar inconsistencies in the ancient texts that had given hope to billions. Were they just old wives’ tales? He learned the Bible well. As an adult, debating preachers about religion, Sagan often startled them with his ability to cite passages by chapter and verse.

Sagan’s religious doubts upset his mother Rachel. Despite her flinty skepticism about most matters, she trusted in the unseen world. Her faith gave her a sense of stability. Now her only son—her future genius!—was rejecting the faith of his fathers? Their religious quarrels, Sagan later admitted, were “traumatic” because for Rachel “there were a lot of emotional, traditional connections” at stake. “There was a time,” he recalled, “when my mother and I would have, I guess, ‘fights,’ on this issue. It only lasted a year.” Then Rachel realized it was “hopeless” for her to try to change Sagan’s mind, and they stopped fighting.

Sagan’s loss of faith intersected neatly with his growing fascination with extraterrestrial life. He had rejected a supernatural explanation of the origin of life (and everything else); therefore he needed to find a scientific one. A great deal was at stake: If life emerged easily by mechanistic means on Earth, then it might be very common in the heavens; if it emerged with difficulty, then very rare. This stirred his interest in the scientific study of the origin of life. Until the early 1950s, such study was almost nonexistent; there had been theoretical papers published here and there, and a book or two, but not much else. While his teenage peers read Mickey Spillane and J.D. Salinger, Sagan turned to physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s What Is Life? (1946) and chemist A.I. Oparin’s Origin of Life (written in the 1920s and published in English in 1938).

In late 1951, when Sagan entered the University of Chicago, another entrant was Stanley Miller, a 21-year-old first-year graduate student fresh from the University of California at Berkeley. That autumn, Miller attended one of Harold Urey’s lectures. The chemist explained his theory that early Earth had a hydrogen atmosphere, in which the chemical building blocks of life could have easily formed. Perhaps (Urey noted) lightning bolts provided the energy that caused the early hydrogen-rich molecules, methane and ammonia, to assemble into organics. It’d be interesting, Urey added, if someone would demonstrate this experimentally—that is, by simulating the atmosphere of the primitive Earth in a flask. (Melvin Calvin of Berkeley had tried to, but used the wrong atmosphere, one too rich in carbon dioxide and water vapor.)

Miller was intrigued. He had been looking for a subject for his doctoral thesis, and this one sounded exciting. He approached Urey and asked for permission to do the experiment. Urey reacted cautiously, warning Miller that this was a risky project for a dissertation. But Miller persisted, and Urey finally went along—on one condition. If Miller failed to obtain interesting results within a year, then he had to find a different thesis topic. Miller agreed.

In Miller’s experiment, carbon (C) was available from methane (CH4), nitrogen (N) from ammonia (NH3), oxygen (O) from water (H2O), and hydrogen (H) from all three. An electrical discharge would break the molecules apart, possibly causing them to rearrange into organics.

About this time, H.J. Muller had written a letter to Urey, his fellow Nobelist, and urged him to meet Sagan. They did meet, and during their chat Urey mentioned Miller’s experiment. Intrigued, Sagan visited Miller in his dungeon-like basement lab. In the “dungeon,” Miller filled a flask with methane, ammonia and water. Miller then switched on the “sparking” device and left for the night. The next morning Miller examined the flask: The water within had turned “noticeably pink.” Inside were hydrocarbons—chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms. He let the sparking device run for another two days. The result: a scummy layer that, upon analysis, proved to contain an amino acid called glycine. Finally Miller let the experiment spark for a week, after which he found many more types of amino acids, including unknown types. This was a startling result. Previously, skeptics had argued that the building blocks of life could no more self-assemble into complex organics than a windstorm could turn a forest into wooden homes. Yet that is exactly what Miller appeared to have done, in an experiment mimicking presumed conditions on the primordial Earth.

News media jumped on the story. The experiment delighted that tough old Marxist, Haldane, who reportedly said he could “die happy now.” Some reporters interpreted the experiment as a latter-day version of the creation of the Frankenstein monster. Of course, Miller hadn’t created life—only its molecular building blocks. Still, a 1953 Gallup Poll asked Americans if they thought scientists would eventually create living creatures in the laboratory. Seventy-nine percent replied “No.”

Miller described his results in a seminar at the University of Chicago, with Urey present. Sagan sat in the audience. During the question period, Sagan later recalled, other professors didn’t seem to appreciate the importance of Miller’s experiment, and his results were “roundly condemned by nearly every faculty member that made a comment.” As he watched Urey try to defend Miller, and saw how nervous Miller was and how heated the discussion got, Sagan realized for the first time just how emotionally intense research could be.

Miller recalls the scene differently. Now in his late sixties, bustling, bespectacled and ebullient, he remains active in origin-of-life work at the University of California at San Diego. “What Carl didn’t realize” Miller says, “was, it wasn’t that they didn’t understand the importance, it’s just that they couldn’t believe the results!” All those amino acids! Thick coats of them! It seemed almost too easy. Almost a century after Pasteur claimed to shut the door for good on mechanistic explanations for life’s origin, young Stanley Miller had reopened it.

Sagan’s persistent interest in life’s origins was matched only by his persistent interest in UFOs. At least as late as mid-1954, when he was a college junior, he suspected they might be extraterrestrial vehicles, and he tried to persuade Muller of this. The Nobelist countered (perhaps tongue in cheek) by citing one “saucer” report that suggested UFOs were Soviet-built. Sagan replied, in a letter dated January 27, 1954, that there was no reason to believe that all UFOs were of Soviet making. In defense of his position, he pointed out that legitimate sightings had occurred much earlier than when the Soviets came to power. He also argued that the Soviets would not take the risk of flying their saucers over U.S. territory, where many sightings had happened, because if one crashed or was shot down and its origin was discovered, that might start a war. In addition, some of the saucers had been observed making flying maneuvers that would require materials much stronger than anything on Earth and which a human being would not be able to survive.

That letter was Sagan’s last known defense of UFOs. Thereafter, his faith was shaken by two books—Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952) by Martin Gardner (another University of Chicago graduate, and later the mathematics editor of Scientific American) and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) by Charles Mackay.

Fads and Fallacies was a founding tract of the modern “skeptics” movement. Breezily and wittily, Gardner details the pseudoscientific beliefs of anti-Einstein theorists, pyramidologists, medical quacks, psychic researchers, “orgone” therapists, L. Ron Hubbard (founder of Dianetics and its far more profitable descendant, Scientology), and crank cosmologist Immanuel Velikovsky, among others. While enjoying Gardner’s account, Sagan was startled to find that it included a devastating chapter on UFOs.

Mackay’s book didn’t deal with UFOs—it was written a century before the saucer craze. Still, Sagan drew major lessons from Mackay’s accounts of the repeated instances in which humans have been gulled by false notions, ranging from get-rich-quick schemes to fortune telling. Gradually, Sagan began to recognize what flying saucers really are: not a physical phenomenon, but a psychological and a sociological one. “It was stunning,” Sagan later reflected, “how many passionately argued and defended claims to knowledge had amounted to nothing. It slowly dawned on me that, human fallibility being what it is, there might be other explanations for flying saucers.”

In time, Sagan would become a devastatingly effective critic of the UFO cult—indeed, of the flood of pseudoscience and superstition engulfing America in the second half of the twentieth century.

At Harvard, Sagan would become a nationally known scientific figure—not famous, exactly, but getting there. With James Pollack, he would study the atmosphere and surface changes of Mars and propose a radical new view of their nature. They would also elaborate and defend Sagan’s embattled theory of the Venusian greenhouse effect. In time, these two men—with remarkably similar backgrounds, yet remarkably different personalities—would be one of the great “duos” of modern space science.

Also in the mid-1960s, the mass media began exploiting Sagan. He was not a complete unknown to journalists; his name had appeared in national newspapers and magazines at least as far back as 1956, late in the first term of the Eisenhower Administration. He had even appeared on a television broadcast about Venus, where he impressed viewers with his dualistic lecturing style: darkly serious, contagiously enthusiastic. But his real publicity breakthrough came in 1966, with the publication of his book Intelligent Life in the Universe (coauthored with the Russian astronomer I.S. Shklovskii). About this time, Sagan served briefly as an adviser on the film 2001. Dining with the film’s creators, he acquired his first taste of Hollywood.

Simultaneously, he rediscovered an old love: UFOs. In 1965–66, a wave of UFO sightings swept the nation. The resulting media hoopla sparked congressional and scientific investigations. Reporters called Sagan for the scoop on saucers. A Walter Cronkite television special on UFOs included a clip of Sagan, a dulcet-toned oracle of scientific wisdom. He offered journalists an amiably skeptical stance on UFOs—an engaging alternative to the harrumphy finger-wagging of astronomer Donald Menzel, the era’s only other well-known saucer skeptic. (By that time J. Allen Hynek had ceased to be very skeptical!)

When it came to extraterrestrial life, Sagan didn’t follow a dogmatic “party line.” Sometimes he argued that it was possible (as when he espoused lunar life, balloon animals in the skies of Venus and Jupiter, and polar bear-sized creatures on Mars). Other times he shot down arguments for exobiology (as when he showed that Venus is too hot for life). An example of the latter is his explanation for the Martian “wave of darkening.” Until the mid-1960s, many astronomers regarded the wave of darkening as evidence for Martian vegetation change. Yet Sagan and Pollack discovered its true nature, which was nonbiological. It’s ironic: Sagan blew away the last indirect evidence for Martian life even as he struggled to convince Americans to support Mars missions. He was a complicated man.

The Sagan-Pollack theory of Mars surface changes should also interest scholars who study how scientific ideas evolve. In recent decades, many historians and philosophers of science have claimed that scientific “objectivity” is a myth. They argue that scientists—like most of us—follow their hearts, not their minds; their desires, not the data. And this is certainly true, much of the time. Still, when it came to the nature of Martian surface change, Sagan followed his mind, not his heart.

During Sagan’s first decade at Cornell, he would show up all the snobs and green-eyed detractors at Harvard. He became the preeminent voice of American space science, a national (later international) celebrity visible enough to attract his first nonscientific critics. Meanwhile, he continued doing science as he liked to do it: by flitting, butterflylike, from flower to flower. Not for him was the life of the pigeon-holed academic who becomes a world-class expert on T-Tauri stars but knows nothing about the Big Bang. Nor for him was the stoic seclusion of the scholar, who takes bitter pride in refusing to popularize his life’s toil on the reproductive strategies of carp. Sagan liked talking to reporters. He had liked being on stage, in the spotlight, ever since high school, when he delivered Thurber’s bons mots to an audience of proud parents.

True, Sagan worked too hard. He did too much. His scientific accomplishments might have been less arguable had he restricted himself to one or two main fields and diligently plowed them until it was time to abandon all hope and become chair of the department. He bit off more than he could chew—and thus enjoyed one wonderful banquet after another, while his colleagues picked at their beets and parsley. In the process, Sagan befriended many fascinating fellow diners. His scientific lone-wolf days (for example, when he taught himself greenhouse theory) were over. Increasingly, he relied on collaborations, usually transient ones. The results were sometimes scientifically significant, or at least headline-grabbing. They ranged from his work with George Mullen on the role of ammonia in the early atmosphere to his Astrophysical Journal article with E. E. Salpeter on the hypothetical “balloon animals” of Jupiter. He maintained close collaborations with a chosen few, particularly Jim Pollack and Bishun Khare. With Pollack, Sagan would erect an impressive edifice of research on the Venusian atmosphere. And with Khare, he would develop an iconoclastic view of cosmic organic chemistry, one centered on inexplicable brownish smears that he dubbed “tholins.”

Also in the 1968–78 decade, Sagan cultivated his nonscientific side. He had just married an artist; she helped him tap his inner feelings, instincts, intuitions. Though he felt awkward in social situations at Harvard, his social skills blossomed after he moved to Cornell. Perhaps in this less stuffy setting, he felt free to let his idiosyncratic conversational style out of the box. Eventually, he would become a Noel Coward of science, a man for whom bold articulation and quickness of wit were absolute virtues. His eyes shone as he dominated a conversation, and deservedly so, for he typically knew more about the topic at hand—and discussed it more suavely—than anyone else present. At the same time, he listened as well as he talked. During intense conversation, his dark eyes gazed at you as if you were the sole other sentience in the cosmos. If you anxiously described the sorry state of your own research, he generously offered tips and suggestions—often crazy ones, but occasionally brilliant ones, too. History does not record how many intellectual Gordian knots were cut by Sagan’s razor-sharp tongue at wine and cheese faculty gatherings; there were more than a few. And he remembered what you said with almost photographic precision; months later, he recalled your statements as accurately as if he had tape-recorded them. When he entered a room, the conversational level noticeably improved, as it must have in Oscar Wilde’s day when he sauntered into a salon. Through conferences jammed with colleagues Sagan floated, beaming and chatting and joking; he was a six-foot-two gravity well toward whom everyone naturally gravitated. He was fun. “Hey, Carl is here!” It would be an overstatement to say that everyone loved him, for his bluntness upset many and his talent many more; in any case, he rarely failed to cause excitement.

Sagan flexed his new-found artistic muscles in his breakthrough bestseller, The Cosmic Connection. He became a TV star, the upbeat educator of sleepy-eyed millions viewing The Tonight Show. During the Viking mission, he was the TV networks’ favorite “talking head,” whose playful speculations about an inhabited Mars maddened his colleagues but titillated viewers. And like a performance artist with a NASA-sized budget, he engaged in grand forms of self-expression: he sent “messages” to aliens aboard star-bound space probes, the Pioneers 10 and 11 and the Voyagers 1 and 2.

Sagan was a contradiction. To critics like Urey, the young astronomer was a reckless speculator. But to laypeople absorbed by pseudosciences and occultism, Sagan was the Dark Prince of skepticism—the party pooper who coldly shot down their ideas about UFOs, psychic phenomena, and other silliness.

By the 1960s, Sagan had long since rejected the thesis that UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships. Yet he could not quite put the subject out of his mind. Like a disappointed lover, he continued to hang around this subject. He discussed it with reporters, testified about saucers before Congress, served on an Air Force UFO panel, personally investigated lurid UFO reports, and starred in the first scientific “debate” on the subject. Sentimental journeys, all.

Sagan served on an Air Force UFO advisory panel, the O’Brien committee. The committee (named for its chief, scientist Brian O’Brien) evaluated the Air Force’s official saucer project, Blue Book. Although depicted in a subsequent TV series as an expensive, computerized outfit, Blue Book was in fact a backwater operation, with a few staffers and filing cabinets crammed into an office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Blue Book was primarily for show. The Air Force had not taken UFOs seriously for years but felt it had to keep up appearances to deal with inquiries from UFO-titillated members of Congress and their constituents. If UFOs represented an unknown physical phenomenon, Blue Book would never figure it out. So Sagan and the rest of the O’Brien committee advised the Air Force to commission an independent, full-scale scientific study. The result was the controversial Condon Commission, chaired by noted physicist E.U. Condon.

Meanwhile, Sagan conducted private investigations of the UFO mania. In 1966, the first UFO “abduction” was described in journalist John G. Fuller’s book The Interrupted Journey. Fuller (who also wrote about “ghosts” seen on airplanes) said that one night in the early 1960s, when Betty and Barney Hill were driving through New Hampshire, they noticed a distant UFO. The next thing they knew, several hours had passed and they couldn’t recall what had happened. They consulted a Boston psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon. He hypnotized them. Under hypnosis, they claimed that UFOnauts had stopped their car and taken them aboard a saucer, then subjected them to medical examinations.

Sagan spent a “fair amount of time” with the Hills and Simon. The psychiatrist suspected that the Hills’ story was an innocent dual hallucination, perhaps related to the stresses of their marriage, which was interracial—an extreme novelty at that time. (Decades later, Sagan was baffled to watch as his Harvard friend Dr. John Mack, a noted psychiatrist and author, became a leading defender of the validity of UFO abduction claims.) In the mid-1960s, at least one respectable American scientist, James McDonald, a professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Arizona, claimed that UFOs were alien spaceships. McDonald met with Sagan and his fellow member of the Order of the Dolphin (a SETI group), MIT physicist Phil Morrison. “I spent many hours with Jim McDonald,” Sagan later wrote to UFO investigator Walter N. Webb, adding that he saw no reason to believe that there were any sightings that were credible evidence of extraterrestrial visits.

McDonald’s data was “pitiful,” Morrison recalls. McDonald showed them “pounds and pounds” of data, including news clippings and tape recordings, about a UFO sighting on Long Island. The witness—a naval architect—drew a sketch of the “saucer.” One thing puzzled Sagan and Morrison: the saucer had rivets on its side. “Are we really to believe this?” they asked McDonald. “Look at the rivets that cross the plates here. Do you suppose [aliens] use rivets? Don’t you think [the witness] is drawing on his long experience in the Navy yard?” In retrospect, Morrison says of McDonald, “it was distressing that a serious scientist, a good man, would get involved in such research.” Like Brian O’Leary, John Lilly, Timothy Leary, J. Allen Hynek and a few other renegade scientists of the 1960s and 1970s, McDonald had heard the siren call of the unknown and would pursue it to the end—in his case, to suicide.

There are celebrities, and then there are Celebrities. Before The Tonight Show, Sagan was slightly known to a small percentage of Americans who had caught his sound bites on TV or read Intelligent Life in the Universe. After The Tonight Show, he became America’s best-known scientist. Sitting in bed at 12:45 a.m., insomniacs watched Sagan with growing excitement. This was no tweedy Mr. Science, filling beakers with smelly chemicals on a black-and-white TV image from the 1950s. Rather, this was a Mr. Science for the hip, disillusioned early 1970s, a boy-man with a startling basso profundo voice, one who kept his cool yet laughed merrily (sometimes at a startling high pitch). Sagan was, simply speaking, sexy, in a sense that transcends mere sexuality.

The young went on alert. Until that moment, the space program offered no convincing heroes for disaffected, anti-establishment, long-haired, pot-smoking college students. To them, astronauts were cornball patriots in crewcuts, blood brothers of the militarists then napalming Vietnam. But Sagan was different: he was youthful-looking (like the class president, but in a fun way). Perhaps he was a secret would-be hipster—the kind of guy who, if handed a joint, might look surprised, then accept it with a laugh and politely try it, coughing afterwards. (In fact, he was secretly an enthusiastic smoker of marijuana.) In college dorms from coast to coast, students (like this writer) didn’t stay up until 1:00 a.m. to watch Dinah Shore plug her golf tournament. They stayed up to see Carl Sagan.

On Sagan’s first appearance—November 30, 1973—he and Carson discussed what we might want to say to an alien civilization if we ever did contact one, and also the far-out pseudoscientific theories of writer Erich Von Däniken, who had been on the show the previous night. Carson and Sagan were perfect together: Carson bubbled with enthusiastic questions, and Sagan had all the answers.

Over the next thirteen years, Sagan appeared on the Carson show twenty-six times—an average of twice a year. He once explained why he made every effort to fulfill an invitation to appear on the show—because it gave him the biggest classroom in the country.

In Other Worlds, Sagan lit into pseudoscientists such as Erich Von Däniken, whom he had criticized before, and Immanuel Velikovsky. Von Däniken wanted to rewrite the history of humanity: He claimed that aliens were responsible for the pyramids and other historic artifacts. Velikovsky was even more ambitious: he wanted to rewrite the history of the whole solar system.

In 1950, Velikovsky had published a sensational book, Worlds in Collision. It argued that thousands of years ago, Venus was a comet. This comet was somehow ejected from Jupiter, as a tennis ball is shot from an ejector. After its ejection, Venus then barreled around the inner solar system like the ball in a pinball machine. It careened past Earth, triggering apocalyptic events and inspiring scary legends of doom, disaster, locusts, and so forth. While Moses was leading his people out of Egypt, Velikovsky asserted, the comet flew by and exerted mysterious forces on Earth, with the result that the Red Sea parted. Eventually—like teenage hoodlums in the B-movies of that era—Venus calmed down and settled into its present middle-class, predictable orbit.

Velikovsky based his hypothesis on ancient manuscripts and legends that, he said, recorded these apocalyptic events. He claimed that very old astronomical records did not mention the planet Venus—and naturally not, because Jupiter hadn’t ejected it yet! He also insisted that his hypothesis predicted certain celestial phenomena, including the great heat of Venus (a result of its violent ejection from Jupiter), which had been observed by Mariner 2. Velikovsky’s claims led to his showdown with Sagan, who, of course, had his own ideas about the Venusian hothouse.

Worlds in Collision blatantly violated the laws of physics. Although Velikovsky had certain scholarly credentials (he was a Russian-born psychoanalyst), he “had only the vaguest understanding of such basic physical principles as conservation of angular momentum, gravity, and entropy,” wrote the physicist Lloyd Motz, who was on friendly terms with him. Velikovsky described celestial objects behaving in ways that they simply cannot behave—unless something is terribly wrong with modem physics textbooks. For example, Motz noted, to expel Venus, Jupiter would have had to “release or expend in a matter of seconds or minutes as much energy as our Sun emits in more than a year.” Such an eruption would have expelled enough energy in those few seconds to have vaporized most of the planets, including Earth.

When physicists cited these huge discrepancies between Velikovsky’s hypothesis and physics doctrine, he shrugged and replied that his historical research showed that celestial objects behave in previously unknown ways, and that therefore it was physics that would have to change to accommodate his findings. Throughout history, of course, scientists have proposed radical new theories that violated the commonsense physics of their time, yet proved (on the whole, despite some technical errors) to be correct. Copernicus’s heliocentric hypothesis is one example; another is Alfred Wegener’s concept of continental drift. In both cases, physics was modified to accommodate the heretical idea.

Velikovsky’s theories, however, do not even fall into the category of science. Archaeologists and ancient historians have totally repudiated his interpretations of ancient records. Even if the records backed him, his predictions and calculations are not of the rigor that true science requires.

How does one distinguish a bona fide scientific hypothesis from a pseudoscientific one? The classic response is that of philosopher Karl Popper, that no hypothesis can be considered “scientific” (which is not necessarily the same thing as saying it is “true”) unless it generates predictions that are conceivably disprovable (“falsifiable,” in Popper’s term).

Velikovsky’s work raises two key questions: Were his original hypotheses conceivably falsifiable? And have they subsequently been falsified or verified by astronomical observations? If falsifiable but verified, then our knowledge of astrophysics must be seriously incomplete. If not falsifiable, we can confidently toss his notions into the historical wastebin along with dusty tracts on phrenology, spiritualism, sea monsters and other flummery.

A hallmark of pseudoscientific hypotheses is their vagueness and malleability: their proponents always manage to think up ad hoc ideas to “explain away” discrepant data (for example, the “Mars face” enthusiast who claims NASA hides photos of the “face,” the parapsychologist who blames negative results on “bad vibes” from skeptical observers, and so forth). Occasionally ad hoc explanations turn out to be correct, but the burden of proving them must rest on their proponents. Orthodox scientists are simply too busy wrestling with acknowledged mysteries to waste time chasing will-o’-the-wisps (especially those proposed by scientific ignoramuses that brazenly transgress well-established scientific principles). Yet Velikovsky—despite his obvious ignorance of physics—angrily insisted that the burden of proof lay on his critics. It was not his job to prove his theory; it was their job to disprove him.

Velikovsky and his reverential fans presented Sagan with a challenge that, in his newly emerging role as defender of the scientific faith, he simply could not refuse. Sagan decided to combat Velikovsky in something of a scientific duel—a public debate in which Velikovsky could make his case, while a panel of scientists, Sagan included, could critique them.

This was a radically different way to confront pseudoscience. True, the UFO symposium at the AAAS symposium of 1969 had pitted UFO advocates against detractors, but all were bona fide physical scientists. Velikovsky, by contrast, had no significant training in the physical sciences; his books implied that the “expertise” of his critics was a sham, that his historical scholarship was just as valid a source of knowledge about the natural world as their professional training in physics and astronomy. In other words, the Sagan versus Velikovsky debate promised to be a particularly extreme form of “turf battle”—a fight over who deserves recognition as an “authority” in a given subject. The history of science is full of such turf battles; they often decide the fate of fundamental ideas.

The Velikovsky debate certainly differed from the usual old-fashioned scientific responses to pseudoscience: ignore it or suppress it. Sagan—a fierce devotee of free speech—believed that astronomer Harlow Shapley’s boycott of Velikovsky’s initial publisher had been unjustified. The AAAS public debate would constitute, in effect, an apology to Velikovsky, giving him the opportunity to submit ideas to direct scientific scrutiny. The debate’s ultimate goal was not to reassess Velikovsky’s ideas (hardly any scientist took these seriously) but, rather, to reassure the public of science’s basic fairmindedness, at a time when a growing number of leftists and academics were depicting it as intellectual camouflage for ideological and social prejudices.

Some AAAS members, of course, opposed holding the debate. “Certain powers in the AAAS didn’t want the symposium to happen,” recalls Sagan’s friend Don Goldsmith, an astronomer who helped organize the debate. “They felt, ‘We’ve had enough bullshit from this guy [Velikovsky]. AAAS is for science, this is non-science.’” However, the AAAS president at the time, Margaret Mead, thought the symposium would be worthwhile. She was an anthropologist famous for her affectionate studies of non-Western culture, and she apparently viewed the pseudosciences as many social scientists do—as generally harmless alternative perceptions of reality, which should be tolerated (if not accepted) as one might tolerate, say, Azande cosmology or Eskimo marriage rituals. Besides, Mead was quietly interested in fringe science. In 1969 she had pushed the AAAS to accept the Parapsychological Association as an institutional member; late in life, she served on the board of J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies. Says Goldsmith: “Whereas physical scientists thought, ‘why should we give this bullshit a hearing?’, Margaret Mead was of the anthropological bent. . . . She felt this might be interesting whether it’s true or not.”

The symposium was held on February 25, 1974, in the Grand Ballroom of San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. There were seven speakers, two of them pro-Velikovsky—Velikovsky himself and the Illinois scientist Irving Michelson. (There were only these because no other pro-Velikovsky scientists could be found.) The room was packed. As Don Goldsmith recalled, “It is hard to outdo the spectacle of a seventy-seven-year-old gentleman rising to confront the critics who had rejected him for scores of years, with his supporters in the audience cheering his wit and hissing at his opponents, while his detractors sat applauding and protesting in opposite phase.”

The astronomer Dale Cruikshank attended the debate to see what he calls the “clash of the titans”—Sagan versus Velikovsky. And indeed it was Sagan who dominated on the anti-Velikovsky side. “I’m not sure who won on the arrogance side, but they were both in top form,” Cruikshank recalls wryly. Velikovsky “was an elderly man, tall and slender, big head of gray hair, and he sort of swept in with two or three people in his entourage, each of them carrying a big bundle of papers. And whenever he would snap his fingers somebody would run up with another document to support the point he had just made.” During his address, Velikovsky presented the full set of his so-called “predictions” and then declared defiantly that “Nobody can change a single sentence in my books.” His supporters in the audience stood and applauded.

Sagan was coolly composed by comparison. In the view of many present, his talk was a blend of intense analysis and amiable wit, with imaginative arguments so compelling that they seemed unanswerable. One of his key points was that Velikovsky’s most heralded “prediction,” that Venus was hot, was not a prediction in any meaningful sense of the word. Velikovsky claimed that he had anticipated Venus’s great heat long before the Mariner 2 space probe flew by the planet in 1962 and gathered data to that effect. The trouble with this claim is multifold. First, Sagan pointed out, Velikovsky never defined precisely what he meant by “heat.” To say Venus is “hot” is like saying the Sun is “big.” How hot? A specific temperature is not needed—just a range will do: say, 600 to 800 degrees Kelvin? Yet Velikovsky never provided this. Second, Sagan highlighted, Velikovsky never provided a convincing explanation of why Venus would be hot. He implied it was because of the heat experienced by Venus on being ejected from Jupiter, although (as Motz previously explained) in fact this would have vaporized it instead. Finally, such a prediction is of questionable meaningfulness, Sagan argued. People before Velikovsky had known that Venus is hot, partly based on its closeness to the Sun and partly on its atmosphere (Rupert Wildt’s 1940 suggestion of a greenhouse-driven high surface temperature). So Velikovsky’s “prediction” was not a true prediction—not even a lucky guess. His overall theory was so maddeningly vague, Sagan concluded, that it was impossible to use it to make any meaningful predictions at all. Hence Velikovsky’s theory was classic pseudoscience.

Opinions of Sagan’s performance vary. Staff writer Robert Gillette of Science magazine later described Sagan as “Velikovsky’s bete noire . . . An articulate man with a switchblade wit. . . .” A reporter from Science News, however, observed: “Sagan’s 56 pages of criticism would ordinarily be sufficient to lay to rest for all time such a picked-apart theory, but Velikovsky’s supporters are not easily dissuaded, and the controversy is sure to continue.” In fact, Sagan’s speech trounced Velikovsky. Nowadays, the pseudoscientific psychoanalyst is largely forgotten, save by a handful of devotees who haunt the World Wide Web. Sagan remains their leading bete noire.

Was Sagan’s campaign against the forces of pseudoscience really worth his time? After all, Von Däniken and Velikovsky were just the latest variations on old themes. Pseudoscientific and occult ideas are as old as the hills. Yet in the 1970s, their growing popularity—coincident with the rise of various cults (from the silly “pyramid power” to the scary Scientology) and the decline of student interest in science—alarmed many. In response, philosophy professor Paul Kurtz, a controversial figure within the American Humanist Association, formed the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, pronounced “sigh-cop”), with the goal of challenging the intellectual merits of pseudoscientific and occult notions.

Sagan was a founding member of CSICOP. Certainly he was attracted to the skeptics movement by his scorn for pseudoscience, and by his desire to educate the public about real science. He might also, however, have joined the skeptics movement partly to reassure his colleagues—the Donald Menzel types who suspected his loyalty to orthodox science—that he really was a loyal (if highly speculative) member of the epistemological mainstream, and not a budding Lilly or Hynek about to saunter off to fairyland.

At the same time, Sagan would always feel ambivalence about certain elements of the skeptics movement. Some of its members were too fanatical, too lacking in “compassion” (as Sagan complained) for those deluded by foolish ideas. He refused to sign astronomer Bart Bok’s anti-astrology petition because, in Sagan’s view, its tone was too authoritarian; in an age when the public increasingly distrusted “experts,” astrology buffs would not be converted to reason by an elitist-sounding petition signed by a band of astronomers. More subtle means were required to combat pseudoscience. One must not talk to the people as if they are children babbling about Santa Claus; they must be educated, patiently and respectfully so. And for that educational mission, Carl Sagan was ideally suited.

The Cosmos television series is the achievement that finally fixed Carl Sagan’s place in the celebrity firmament. With assistance from Ann Druyan and a team of others, Sagan told the saga of our universe—“all that is, ever has been and ever will be.” The thirteen-part series was eventually seen by more than four hundred million people and became a spectacularly successful book (still in print today). It inspired countless teenagers to consider science careers. Most significantly for Sagan, Cosmos gave him the celebrity status that later allowed him to challenge the revival of cold war militarism, which he and many others believed threatened terrestrial life. The series was the climax of his ascent into fame, even into iconic status in American culture. From the broadcast of the series on, his face was immediately recognizable to the generations of Americans who huddled in their living rooms raptly glued to their TV sets for each episode.

With Sagan’s striking, strangely halting and melodic voice and his emphatic gestures, he was the perfect scientific sage on screen, the entrancing visionary who could reveal the marvels of the universe, from the smallest grain of sand to the most distant stars. One journalist who wrote about the series described his unusual appeal by commenting that Sagan’s “face combines hauteur, sensuality, and a winning boyishness—a pleasing amalgam of Rudolph Nureyev and George Plimpton.”

The bad news started coming in batches. NASA’s SETI project did not long survive the Cold War; its sudden death—only months after its birth—unhappily vindicated one of Carl’s oldest worries: that the public’s inability to distinguish between UFO claptrap and SETI science would doom the latter.

In early 1993, Senator Richard Bryan, a Republican from Nevada, stood on the floor of the Senate and asked his colleagues to kill SETI. Showing no ability to distinguish between SETI and UFO-chasing, he referred to SETI as a “great Martian hunt.” The Senate went along; all SETI funding was ended.

After it all ended, SETI scientist Jill Tarter flew home, crushed. “I literally asked my husband to stay around over the weekend and not go into his office and not leave me alone with any sharp objects,” she recalls with a laugh. “It was pretty grim. How could we have screwed up so badly? How could we have let this happen?” Fortunately, the SETI program was privatized and has since survived with support from Silicon Valley industrialists and other sugar daddies. Based at the SETI Institute in a tree-shaded office park in Mountain View, California, the search is conducted under the name Project Phoenix—after the mythical bird that ascended from its own ashes.

It was the same scenario that Carl had envisioned in his book Contact, where Ellie Arroway, abandoned by a federal scientific agency, seeks support for her SETI project from a private donor. The whole episode illustrated one of Carl’s oldest fears—that poor science education would create a society unable to distinguish between scientific exploration and pseudoscientific flummery.

What is a visionary? Carl Sagan measured time in eons and space in light-years; he maintained an interplanetary perspective. To such a person, the petty bigotries and tyrannies of terrestrial life are provincialism in the extreme, utterly absurd. That was the core theme of another book, Pale Blue Dot: Ours is one planet in a vast cosmos—who are we to subdivide it into the privileged and the oppressed? “He took science so seriously, so deeply to heart,” Ann Druyan says, “he understood the human species to be precisely what it is—part of the fabric of nature, obviously related to the non-human primates in ways that were very striking. So to him racism was completely appalling. And sexism, too. Since there was no scientific basis for any kind of inferiority for women or non-white people, he couldn’t bear it. . . .

“That was true in our relationship, personally, in terms of arguments we would have,” says Druyan. “[There were] no arguments ‘from authority,’ no ‘Because I say so’ or ‘Because I want it this way.’ He was really concerned about the truth. So you had a sense that not only would every problem ultimately be solved—because it was a process of getting at the truth—but that this guy wanted to keep on growing for the rest of his life! He didn’t want to settle for the boring rituals and repetitions that most people are happy with. For him what mattered was what was true, not what would affirm his cherished belief. That’s what the real dream of science is: not the universe is as I want it to be, to make myself less afraid of the vastness, but the universe as it really is.”