Carl Sagan on The argument from religious experience
Sagan argued that religious experiences reveal something about the brain, not about the cosmos, and that genuine wonder does not require supernatural interpretation.
Carl Sagan approached religious experience with a combination of scientific scepticism and genuine respect for the sense of wonder that often accompanies it. He did not deny that people have profound, transformative experiences that they interpret as encounters with the divine. What he denied was that the supernatural interpretation is warranted by the experience itself.
In The Demon-Haunted World (1995), Sagan documented how easily the brain can produce vivid experiences — hallucinations, sleep paralysis, temporal lobe seizures — that feel overwhelmingly real to the experiencer. The feeling of certainty that accompanies a religious experience is a feature of the brain state, not evidence of an external reality. People who experience sleep paralysis are certain they are being held down by an entity; this certainty does not make the entity real.
Sagan was distinctive in offering an alternative source of awe. He argued that the actual universe — its scale, its age, its complexity, the improbability of our existence — is more worthy of wonder than any religious myth. The pale blue dot, the billions of galaxies, the deep time of cosmic evolution — these are real, and they do not require supernatural supplementation to inspire reverence.
“A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”