Ironwolf

DJ Grothe: Let’s get back to spirituality in terms of science. You talk about that he viewed science as something like “informed worship.” Let me ask you, worship of what, if not God?

Ann Druyan: No, not God, because of course we don’t know anything about God. But Nature… I believe that that impulse to find certain things sacred is in itself— and Carl felt this way and we learned this together— the impulse to find something sacred… there’s nothing foolish about that or necessarily reactionary about that. It’s the supernatural aspect that is corrosive. But the natural… to feel a sense of awe and wonder and goose bumps and humility in the face of a cosmos that science has revealed to be so much more vast and more ancient than our ancestors and their prophets ever even dreamed… Or just like the fact that life… that the way that humans reproduce is at a moment when they are as close to each other as they can possibly be, and at that moment their DNA combines to produce new life so that an ancient continuity that stretches back four billion years on this planet continues on with the information, the secret of life, at its heart. What’s more beautiful than that? It’s so much better than the religious myths that we’d been given, and it could only be revealed by science. I feel that Carl’s sense of wonder is another reason why, even though he was uncompromising about the kind of flimsy logic and phony thinking that goes into the supernatural, he was not at all immune to the beauty of life. And the beauty of life, and the rarity and preciousness of life— these are things that one can feel awe about, and a sense of the sacred. And “informed worship,” yes. Because before we had the methodology of science, as one great scientist remarked, “Nature was like an art gallery with all of its paintings turned to the wall.” And so, yes, informed worship— but not worshipping some primate projection, some alpha in the sky, no.

DJ Grothe: You’re talking about appreciating the beauty and wonder of our existence. The brute facticity of our existence is beautiful and amazing in many ways, but you used the term “spiritual—” that science for you, for Carl is a “spiritual” experience. Literally, or metaphorically?

Ann Druyan: Well, because our language is a pre-scientific phenomenon we don’t have a word for this feeling that isn’t imbued with a sorry history. But we still have that feeling.

DJ Grothe: You don’t feel compelled to jettison a word because of its baggage, because it means these important things to you.

Ann Druyan: Well, it’s just like back in the days of the Vietnam War, when there were demonstrations and when the people who were demonstrating against the war carried the American flag. It was as if they were saying, “Just because this flag has stood for things which are not good as well as some things which are, we’re not going to cede this to people who believe in a war that’s a crime and a mistake.” And it’s the same thing with the word “spirituality—” you know it has to do with things that have not withstood the test of time, and yet when I say that word you know what I mean. And I’m not ceding that feeling to the fundamentalists or to anyone else because it belongs to all of us. And not only that: without that, we’re not going to attract many people to our way of thinking.

DJ Grothe: So it’s not just strategic, but you’re saying it is strategic. An atheist or a humanist, a skeptic, a rationalist, can go to the Grand Canyon or go out under the stars and feel that sense of wonder. You’re saying it’s all right to use that word “spiritual.”

Ann Druyan: I think so, and I think we have to take it back, yes.