Carl
Sagan is perhaps best remembered as the host of the PBS series,
Cosmos, but another, enduring legacy he left us is his analogy, “The
Dragon In My Garage.” I invite you to read it for yourself but
here's a summary. Sagan claims to have a fire-breathing dragon in
his garage and invites you to see it (he refers to the reader in the
second person, “you”). However, when you enter the garage, you
see nothing. Sagan then claims the dragon is invisible. So how do
you know it's there? You think of a few possible ways to try to
detect the dragon: flour on the floor to see if it leaves footprints,
spray painting the dragon to make it visible, or an infrared sensor
to detect the heat from its flames. However, Sagan has an excuse
that shoots down each experiment: the dragon flies so it doesn't
leave footprints, it's incorporeal so paint won't stick to it, and
its flames don't produce heat.
The
story is meant to be an analogy of how atheists see Christians'
belief in God. It's clever in a couple of ways. First, Sagan
predicts a few possible objections to his argument and attempts to
address them in the story. This isn't necessarily novel since most
apologists will try to consider possible objections to any point they
make, but the fact that Sagan does it here shows that he thought
through his analogy a little better than the ordinary critic.
The
other clever thing that Sagan does in his story is refer to the
reader as, “you.” By doing this, he attempts to put the reader
in the shoes of the atheist, making him sympathetic to the atheist's
plight. He's very complementary to the reader, making him feel very
fair, open-minded, and inquisitive. The reader almost forgets that
the skeptic in the
story represents atheists!
Sagan deftly paints atheists as being painfully open-minded and
their skepticism as being healthy, ordinary, and rational. Also,
since Sagan makes himself the keeper of the dragon, he is able to
portray Christians as deranged or delusional without seeming to
direct these insults toward them.
Consider
these two quotes from the story:
Imagine
that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be
scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion
that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it
on hold.
… the
only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon
hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what
the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people
share the same strange delusion.
Do
you see what I mean? “You” (reader) = atheist = enlightened
thinker; Sagan = Christian = loon. It's clever to the point of being
maniacal. I can almost hear Sagan laughing as he wrote it, “bwa
ha ha!”
I
disagree with his characterization of atheists. It's been my
experience that atheists in general aren't merely withholding
judgment about the existence of God until they see more evidence.
Instead, they reject a priori any possibility of there being a
God. Any evidence for God, like miracles, is rejected in favor of a
natural explanation – even in those instances where no natural
explanation exists. Dawkins, for example, would rather believe that
life on earth was planted by aliens rather than believe God created
life. Some atheists go even further. Rather than simply not
believing in God themselves, Dawkins, Myers, and others of that ilk
openly mock and ridicule the idea of believing in God. They aren't
anything like the friendly skeptic in Sagan's story, optimistically
looking for any evidence for the existence of the invisible dragon.
Regardless
of how clever the analogy is, it fails on the grounds that it doesn't
accurately represent the way Christians believe in God. In other
words, it's a straw man. There are several subtle ways the story is
wrong but the primary error is this: Christians don't ask people to
believe in God while offering excuse after excuse why there is no
evidence that He exists. To the contrary, Christians offer many
reasons why people should believe in God and it's the atheist, the
supposed “open-minded” skeptic in the story, who rejects them one
by one.
First,
God is revealed in His creation. The simple fact that the universe
exists strongly suggests there is a cause behind it. To believe that
God is the First Cause seems far more reasonable than believing that
the universe just poofed
into existence without a cause. Furthermore, the universe
doesn't just exist, it's also sublime. The enormity, the beauty, and
the complexity all suggest design. Design always suggests purpose,
purpose always suggests intent, and intent always suggests a
designer. To believe that “uncaused” matter randomly,
purposelessly arranged itself into the complex cosmos is far less
credible than believing it was intended to be so by the design of an
intelligent Creator. The existence of the universe and the design of
the universe is evidence for God whether or not the skeptic wants to
accept it.
But
the greatest evidence for God is the Bible. While the universe might
reveal there is a God, the Bible tells us Who He is. The Bible is a
written record, the testimony of people who were first hand witnesses
to God. These are the people who have heard His voice and seen His
miracles. He is Jehovah of the Old Testament, the One Who spoke the
universe into existence; He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob;
He is the One who delivered the children of Israel out of Egypt and
made them a great nation. He is also Jesus of the New Testament, the
I AM Who was before Abraham; He walked on water, calmed the storm,
healed the sick, and raised the dead; He shed His blood on the cross
as the payment for our sins and, three days later, rose from the
dead; He now sits at the right hand of the Father making intercession
for us.
The
words and miracles recorded in the Bible bear witness that there is a
God. Critics are welcome to suggest natural causes for the miracles.
They're welcome to suggest the history of Bible is somehow not as
trustworthy as other books of antiquity. However, they cannot
credibly say the Bible cannot be considered by Christians to be
evidence for God.
There
are more things I could discuss as evidence for God but it really
isn't necessary. The analogy fails. No matter how cleverly it was
written, it doesn't accurately represent Christians, nor does it
fairly depict how skeptics evaluate the evidence for God. It's a
straw man. It has endured only because it is an amusing straw man.
If
the only thing that would convince someone that God exists is that he saw Him with his own eyes, then perhaps he will be disappointed because that's not likely to happen. Even so, I suspect that even
if it did, it wouldn't convince some people anyway. Regardless, there is plenty
of evidence for God available to anyone who truly seeks Him.
1 comment:
Dawkins, for example, would rather believe that life on earth was planted by aliens rather than believe God created life.
Dawkins believes that aliens -- physical beings constrained by natural laws -- designing species is a topic that could in principle be investigated by science. "Intelligent design" by an Entity unconstrained by natural laws or any discernible design philosophy is not so investigatable. This has nothing much to do with personal preferences, unless you count a preference for testable hypotheses.
The simple fact that the universe exists strongly suggests there is a cause behind it.
Yet the assumed fact that God exists does not, to you, suggest that He was caused. The idea that an uncaused cosmos of finite capabilities is more in need of an explanation than an infinite-personal Creator is not obvious at all.
I note an additional point: there are doubtless things in Sagan's garage that are not immediately apparent or easily seeable (air-borne bacteria, perhaps). To point at these is not to establish that they are in fact the fire-breathing dragon. Even conceding the need for a Cause, or even a Creator, of the universe does not establish that this is the God you worship and preach.
Critics are welcome to suggest natural causes for the miracles. They're welcome to suggest the history of Bible is somehow not as trustworthy as other books of antiquity. However, they cannot credibly say the Bible cannot be considered by Christians to be evidence for God.
Note that strictly speaking, we need explanations for miracle accounts: these include mistaken observations, exaggerations in the retelling, and straightforward fabrication, as well as accurate reports of events that had undetected natural causes. And books in antiquity varied greatly in reliability, not merely between books, but within them (not everything recorded by Livy in his Natural History is wrong, but quite a few things are).
The Bible is evidence, but it is evidence open to a variety of interpretations, and it is not proof of its own assertions. A Bible verse does not weigh, in the scale of evidence, so much as a shared pseudodgene or the redshifted light from distant colliding galaxies.
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