Bedtime Reading Report

I'll skip past my regrettable (but occasional) interest in Bernard Cornwell novels as literature to put one to sleep: which it does.

My latest reading, which does not induce slumber, has been Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience. In case you missed it, this is Ann Druyan's recent edition of Sagan's Gifford lectures of 1985, just issued. Apart from a occasional, single-minded obsession with the Cold War arms race, the ideas are as relevant, and attractive, as they were a generation ago.

At the end of 221 pages of elegant arguments, self-deprecating humour, and tolerant insight, one comes to a section called "Selected Q& A." Turning into this section is rather like discovering one has turned a corner and been accidentally locked in a psychiatric ward. With a few welcome exceptions, the questions come from religious people who, one presumes, had been present at least for the lecture in question. They were, apparently, asleep or catatonic. The contrast between Sagan's exquisitely sensitive replies to these questions, and the questions themselves, may say more about the nature of religious belief than did the lectures.

I may be mistaken, but I do not think the Gifford lectures on natural theology, held in Scotland, attract a large crowd of redneck bible-thumpers. One would suspect the audience is rather more mainstream. Nevertheless Sagan's content, which was logically complete and rooted in his own ideas of personal faith, clearly presented an intolerable challenge to the faithful. Certainly, the lectures elicited what I can only describe as psychotic babbling from a good number of his questioners.

Some while back, I passed the point of thinking it possible to hold any sort of meaningful philosophical dialogue with anyone professing any of the desert religions. In the Q&A pages of Sagan's last work, you see why. It is all mad, all of it. I can hold back and treat the hearer with courtesy and respect, but my courtesy doesn't change what seems fact to me. It is all the stuff of madness, bereft of any shreds of reason. Distinctions between liberal this and conservative that, between Christian, Muslim and Jew fade to insignificance. The only distinction worthy of the name is between those who have shaken free of three millenia of insanity, and those who have not.

For those of us who have cast off these chains, Sagan is an admirable role model. I may not be able to match him, but he has certainly given me something to aim for.