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...Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" (Random House, 457 pages, $25.95),
[is] a repetitious, cloying, sanctimonious, self-regarding--yet oddly
entertaining--sermon on the evils of superstition.
The TV astronomer, famous for his plummy pronunciation of "primordial soup,"
blasts an array of sitting ducks out of the water. If you believe in alien
abduction, crop circles, levitating gurus, astrology, telepathy, faith-healing
or psychoanalysis, take cover. If you are of a more skeptical bent, like Mr.
Sagan, you will doubtless be disturbed by his evidence of widespread
gullibility and scientific illiteracy among Americans.
How to combat the "siren song of unreason"? Well for one thing, says Mr.
Sagan, the best scientists should get out in public more to convey the wonder
of what they do. Not only would this advance the cause of critical thinking,
it would also show that, contrary to the stereotype, "there are scientists who
dress elegantly, who are devastatingly cool, who many people long to date." I
wonder whom he could have in mind.
Reading Mr. Sagan's catalog of credulity, one is reminded of G. K.
Chesterton's observation that when people cease to believe in God, they end up
believing not in nothing but in anything. Scientific thinking might check this
tendency. But could it lead one back to God?
Yes, if it is deployed with the clarity and rigor that Richard Swinburne
displays in "Is There a God?" (Oxford, 144 pages, $19.95). Using the logic of
scientific explanation, this distinguished Oxford philosopher argues that the
simple hypothesis of theism--that the sort of deity worshipped by the major
Western religions actually exists--is more probable than the alternative.
And what is the evidence? Briefly, that there is a universe rather than
nothing at all, that the scientific laws operating within it are "fine-tuned"
to evolve conscious humans, that these humans are provided with opportunities
to mold themselves and do good. As for the most powerful contrary
evidence--the problem of evil--Mr. Swinburne points out that it is
contradictory to suppose that God could give his creatures free will and also
ensure that they use it the right way.
The God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it has
been said. Still, for sheer intellectual bravura, I like Mr. Swinburne's God.
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