Varieties of Scientific Experience

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

"Well, I read the Varieties of Scientific Experience due to its title, due to its author, due to its - from what I read about it, its evident connection with this recent spate of books about the tensions between religion and science.

So it's a - Varieties of Scientific Experience is a set of I guess ten lectures given at this Institute for - I think they're still calling it Natural Theology; I'd need to look that up. The lectures are a very compelling set of perspectives on finding meaning and intelligence in the universe and looking at where we appear to have come from and in dealing with the apparent reality that we're not necessarily unique - but we might be, but we're probably not, and there's no naturally drivable evidence for God.

It's really the overall tone of the thing that drives me the most, more than any one particular element in the book or one particular episode. It's the fact that slides improved color reproductions of slides that he actually used in these lectures are presented along the way, especially in the early lectures. They're just a sheer pleasure to read. The quality of the writing is both fine and appropriate and embracing, but he just sort of presents his perspective and makes his arguments and steps aside.

At the end of the Varieties of Scientific Experience, you have for each chapter - shorter or longer, depending on what they were able to come up with - excerpts of questions from the audience and how he responded to them. Thinking back through the Sagan book, it's really hard to come up with anything I didn't like about it. He's very accessible; his audience that he was giving the lectures to was people that didn't have a strong grounding in science necessarily; and it seems as though a key objective that he had was to reach them and enable them to feel situated. For me the Varieties of Scientific Experience has to get a five stars."

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