To conclude our series on genuine spirituality in fiction, this post contrasts the secular spirituality of the science fiction novel, Parable of the Sower, discussed in part 2 and part 3, with another perhaps surprising novel of the same genre: Carl Sagan’s Contact.
I say surprising because one normally doesn’t think of Sagan, an adamantly science-minded astrophysicist, as a religious or spiritual person. In fact, many would assume and have assumed that, as a scientist, he was an atheist and a materialist. The truth, however, is that he referred to himself as agnostic for the primary reason that to him there just wasn’t evidence to decide one way or another about God and the nature/existence of the soul. In The Demon Haunted World, a work that expresses his clear distaste for untested dogmas, blind beliefs, and fanciful speculations of every kind, whether religious or secular, Sagan wrote:
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.
In many ways, the pursuit of science also expresses a kind of devotion, namely a devotion to truth. It’s not a formal devotion to a greater being or something necessarily expressed in ceremonies and rituals, although the scientific method itself is a ritual in its own way. Whatever the case, I think many scientists feel that they’re participating in something cosmic. That feeling can even be mystical in a way, especially if it translates to an inner presence of sorts.
But let’s get back to the story of Contact.
The plot in brief
The basic plot of Contact is that the protagonist, an astrophysicist named Eleanor (Ellie) Arroway, who easily represents Sagan’s own views of spirituality throughout the story, is searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Her work pays off when a strong and unmistakably intelligent signal arrives from the star Vega that, after many months of decryption effort, is found to contain plans to build what is called the Machine. After a long international construction effort, Ellie and four others, together representing different nationalities and faiths (including a Soviet materialist), embark on a journey in the Machine. They all have profound experiences during what to them feels like a day or more, but to everyone on Earth they were gone for only a brief time and didn’t appear to go anywhere. And to the crew’s dismay, there’s no evidence to back their stories. Thus, the powers that be decide that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax, until…
SPOILER ALERT: for the purposes of this discussion I disclose a few important plot details, including the ending. So, if you don’t like spoilers, go read the book and watch the movie before proceeding!
The triad of science, religion, and spirituality
Within this plot arc, Sagan explores the assumed conflict between science and religion, which people often assume is also a conflict between science and spirituality. With Ellie of course representing science, Sagan demonstrates that the real conflict isn’t between science and religion or spirituality so much as between science and dogmatism, that is, between those approaches that are willing to test one’s beliefs and those that are not. For a genuine spirituality, as Sagan advocates, approaches all claims with enough skepticism to take nothing for granted but with enough openness to test them.1
For this reason, Sagan has not one but two characters that speak for religion. One, Billy Jo Rankin, is a dogmatist; the other, Palmer Joss, is a deeply religious but sincere man of faith who wins Ellie’s respect. “There’s something genuine about him,” she says. “He’s not a phony.” (232)
Through the interactions between Ellie and Joss, which occur periodically throughout the novel, Sagan presents a view of genuine spirituality that can accommodate both science and those positive aspects of religion listed in part 3 of this series.
For example, if Sagan himself wasn’t a “believer” in the usual religious idea of God, it’s that he wasn’t a believer in the utter smallness of those ideas, especially in those sects that lay exclusive claim to God for themselves, as if the Infinite could ever be owned. Sagan expresses such thoughts through Joss, speaking to Ellie:
“Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. I mean the real universe. All those light years. All those worlds. I think of the scope of your universe, the opportunities it affords the Creator, and it takes my breath away. It’s much better than bottling Him up in one small world. I never liked the idea of Earth as God’s green footstool. It was too reassuring, like a children’s story…like a tranquilizer. But your universe has room enough, and time enough, for the kind of God I believe in.” (Page 420, Chapter 23, of the 1985 first edition hardcover)
This statement is really the climax of a series of exchanges between Joss and Ellie. I suspect that Joss represents people of sincere faith with whom Sagan likely had fruitful discussions himself (unlike the Rankin types, with whom I expect he came to loggerheads). To underscore this respect, Sagan has Joss share with Ellie a deep experience of God in Chapter 14. Of that experience he says:
“I guess you imagine that we [religious people] just make this stuff up, that we read it in some book, or pick it up in some prayer tent. But that’s not how it is. I have certain, positive knowledge from my own direct experience. I can’t put it any plainer than that. I have seen God face to face.” (253)
What’s significant here is that Sagan doesn’t at all mock or dismiss Joss’ experience as mystical mumbo-jumbo, as he could have easily done. Elsewhere, in fact, he clearly ridicules the many “harebrained interpretations” of the message received from Vega and the Machine design, such as the emergence of the sham “Ancient and Mystical Order of the Dodecahedron” (222). Contact, in other words, illustrates the differences between genuine spirituality and both religious dogmatism and New Age fanaticism. On the opening page of Chapter 9, “The Numinous,” (149) he even includes these two real-world quotes that underscore a respect for the genuine:
Wonder is the basis of worship. —Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833-34)
I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. —Albert Einstein, Idea and Opinions (1954)
In the end, it’s especially satisfying that Ellie, in her journey in the Machine, has a deep spiritual experience but has no evidence with which to prove it. But Joss can relate:
[Ellie] “Don’t you think it’s been a strange…reversal of our positions? Here I am, the bearer of a profound religious experience I can’t prove—really, Palmer, I can barely fathom it. And here you are, the hardened skeptic trying—more successfully than I ever did—to be kind to the credulous.”
[Joss] “Oh no, Eleanor,” [Joss] said, “I’m not a skeptic. I’m a believer.”
[Ellie] “Are you? The story I have to tell isn’t exactly about Punishment and Reward. It’s not exactly Advent and Rapture. There’s not a word in it about Jesus. Part of my message is that we’re not central to the purpose of the Cosmos. What happened to me makes us all seem very small.”
[Joss] “It does. But it also makes God very big.”
The movie version of Contact, in which Ellie (played by Jodie Foster) is the sole passenger in the Machine, ends on this note. Lacking evidence, her impassioned defense of the vision bestowed upon her falls upon unsympathetic ears when she’s brought to testify before Congress as to why the whole scheme wasn’t merely some elaborate hoax. During her testimony, she catches sight of Palmer Joss (played by Matthew McConaughy) and realizes that he, because of his experience of God that he shared early in the movie, truly understands.
This is brought to a beautiful conclusion when, as they get into a car outside the U.S. Capitol building, the press asks Joss, “What do you believe?” He replies:
“As a person of faith, I’m bound by a different covenant than Dr. Arroway. But our goal is one and the same: the pursuit of Truth. I, for one, believe her.”
Ellie then takes his hand, symbolizing that there is, in the end, a healthy partnership between science and religion. You can watch that scene here.
Note, by the way, that in the book, Joss convinces Ellie to go public with her story because the populace at large doesn’t mind her lack of proof. For them, Joss says, the vision itself is true enough. In the movie clip above, this popular acceptance is shown visually by the massive crowds outside of the Capitol who have come to demonstrate their “faith.” Ellie is rather stunned to realize that, for all her own insistence on the scientific method, she has become the beneficiary of that faith.
And the last part of the clip above is the denouement that reveals that there is, in fact, a piece of evidence.
Contact’s profound ending (book version)
The ending in the book is provides that evidence in a different and even more profound way. Fair warning! this is the real spoiler.
During her journey, Ellie is told that there’s a “message” hidden deeply in pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (3.1415926…). Ellie knows that finding that message would be the proof she needs for her story, so she programs a supercomputer to crunch pi to something like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 decimal places.2 It pays off on the concluding page of the book:
The Argus computer was so persistent and inventive in its attempts to contact Eleanor Arroway that it almost conveyed an urgent personal need to share the discovery.
The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base 11 arithmetic, where [the digits of pi] could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. … The program reassembled the digits into a square raster, an equal number across and down. The first line was an uninterrupted file of zeros, left to right. The second line showed a single numeral one, exactly in the middle, with zeros to the borders, left and right. After a few more lines, an unmistakable arc had formed, composed of ones. The simple geometrical figure had been quickly constructed, line by line, self-reflexive, rich with promise. The last line of the figure emerged, all zeros except for a single centered one. The subsequent line would be zeros only, part of the frame.
Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts.
And if that isn’t enough, Sagan’s closing commentary on this discovery, in the voice of the story’s unnamed narrator, speaks to a God as a conscious intelligence that’s worth believing in, even for a scientist like Ellie:
The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle—another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn’t matter what you look like, or what you’re made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it. It’s in the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons … there is an intelligence that predates the universe.
The circle had closed.
She found what she had been searching for.
This conclusion, which I consider inpletional because it brings a reader to a point of breathtaking stillness.3 For Ellie has been searching not only for evidence for her story, but, put simply, evidence for God and for belonging. As she says in the movie version of Contact, “For as long as I can remember I’ve been searching for something, some reason why we’re here.” The “artist’s signature” deep within pi provides that evidence. I suspect such evidence would have satisfied Sagan himself, and the fact that he postulates that there could be such an answer expresses a hope and a faith.
Contact’s message to its real-world readers, then, is this: cling neither to blind belief nor dogmatism nor even to stubborn scientific skepticism, all of which say, "We've decided that this must be so and we’ll accept no arguments regardless of the evidence." Instead, keep searching. Whether one follows the path of science or religion or spirituality or some combination of all of them—seek direct experience of truth rather than simply declaring it as such.
That, to me, is genuine spirituality and spiritual realism.
As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.
General opinion assumes that spiritual principles and/or practices are inherently unscientific and therefore unprovable. One might go so far as to cite the dearth of any attempts to even try to study such matters scientifically. But consider the fact that the vast majority of funds for research come either from the National Science Foundation, which because of the separation of church and state isn't going to fund anything remotely "religious," or from wealthy corporations that have little interest in supporting research that doesn’t lead to intellectual property that they can exploit for profit. That leaves such research to private institutions that are then too easily accused of bias, duplicity, or exercising "pseudo-science" because they likely already have some degree of faith in their hypotheses. Thus, what room is there for true scientific research into genuine spiritual experience?
To put that number in perspective, printing out that many digits in a 10-point font would require a stripe of paper that’s over 158 billion miles long, which is 850 round trips between the Sun and the Earth, 21 round trips between the Sun and Pluto, or 13 times farther away from the Earth than the Voyager probes are at present.
See Emotion, “inpletion,” and devotion, part 1. Others have told me that they have this response to the book’s ending, thus I feel justified in claiming it as something more than a personal response.