Contact, Carl Sagan, and Bad Fruit

Contact, Carl Sagan, and Bad Fruit


Just watched the 1997 movie Contact again. Hadn’t thought of it for years, but someone suggested looking at it to see what kind of world-view it portrayed. In some ways, it was exactly what you would expect given that the author of the book upon which it was based was Carl Sagan.

But there were signs that either his “science is everything” armor was chinking, or there was a glimmer of uncertainty always lurking inside. Why? Look at Ellie Arroway. She is the ultimate experimental scientist, yet, there is a clear emotional aspect to her search. As the movie (and I presume the book) progresses, we begin to see the desire to find something that makes her significant — not in the sense of importance to others, but in terms of the ultimate significance of man.

One of the most profound statements was when she finally saw the Vegan landscape and sky, her first reaction was to say that they should have sent a poet. Not a likely statement for someone who is all about her science. And her comments at the government inquiry, while not religious, point more to belief in experience and the unprovable than to anything about science. As a scientist she even reassesses her experience, admitting that if she were the inquisitor she would doubt. But she cannot because “everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real!”

But in the midst of this, either the scriptwriters, or Sagan himself, makes a huge error in logic. At the reception following the “interviews” for the one to take the ride in the machine, Ellie mentions “Occham’s razor.” (I note that the spelling of the name is not clear. Some also spell it Ockham, and others Occam. And most search engines will get you to it with “Achem’s razor.”) Occham’s razor is a principle sometimes used to choose between two explanations that are otherwise equal in merit. It is stated most clearly as “do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily.” Someone else tried to explain that better by saying “If there are two possible explanations for something, experimenting should prove which explanation is better, and if they both reach the same conclusion, opt for the one that doesn't have ‘additional baggage’,” the additional baggage being a multiple of hypothesis.

So how does it come up? Ellie mentions it then says about God “So what's more likely? That an all-powerful, mysterious God created the Universe, and decided not to give any proof of his existence? Or, that He simply doesn't exist at all, and that we created Him, so that we wouldn't have to feel so small and alone?” I’ve heard this kind of argument before.

But as I heard it spoken that evening, I realized that the very application was posited as a comparison of apples and oranges. If we are concerned with whether God created the universe, then the alternative explanation is that something else created it. An alternative theory is not that something created God. So the correct comparison is that either God created the universe, or a random set of events over a vast expanse of time evolved life as we know it and all animals evolved from an original single source yet are unable to cross-breed (among many other complex limitations and hypotheses).

While I do have a clear preference in this discussion, I will leave it that Occham’s razor is not proof, but an expectation or anticipation of truth. It does not prove any answer, but presupposes that the less complex will ultimately be correct. Here, it seems to disagree with Sagan. If I am left to seek the less complex series of hypotheses, God is singular while the opposite is quite a collection of one idea after another.

Maybe there is a better way to disprove God. But this movie seems to suggest that there is something more than a meaningless birth-to-death human experience. Even the encounter with the Vegan (morphed to look like Ellie’s dead father) simply moved the source back at least one layer. They interacted with Ellie like a father with his daughter, or a god with his loved creation. They offered no evidence for her to take back; no tidbit of science to quickly improve the condition of man. They didn’t even suggest a time for a second meeting.

They did not create the machine or its design. It came from others who got it from somewhere else. They had no knowledge of its source. So Sagan, in his work of fiction, has created a more evolved race of beings that got their knowledge from a more evolved race of beings who got . . . you get the picture. In a universe that is posited to have a finite time since its start (the big bang?) and took all this time to get man on this earth to a state where he is only as technologically advanced as he is now, there is no time for multiple replications of "creation." Sagan is screaming for a god or gods, yet will not even contemplate one as possible, choosing instead to fall into an apples to oranges error in reasoning to disprove any such god.

The early account of the death of Ellie’s father and the abandonment she felt, along with the “can’t understand God’s ways” (I wish that imdb.com had the exact quote) seems to put her on a course of distrust of a God and trust in science. Is this what Sagan’s strong claim of atheism is about? Wikipedia lists his religious beliefs as “agnostic humanist.” His mother never knew her mother, much as Ellie. And besides some significant discoveries concerning Venus and other planets and moons of our solar system, he was best known for his research on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. We will never know what was driving his quest because a rare bone marrow disease took his life at age 62, in late 1996, only months before the movie brought his vision to the public at large.