6

                                  A Pale Blue Dot . . .

. . .is our earth seen from the spacecraft, Voyager 1, some 3.7 million miles away at the time. A photograph of our faraway earth may be seen in a video in which Carl Sagan the astronomer beautifully comments on that ‘Pale Blue Dot’.  Sagan talks in a moving way about our human life on that Dot which is our only home. He explains that everything about us: our history, our philosophies, our cultures, our selves, everything, came about on that Dot. We have, says Sagan, nothing else. Therefore “it shows our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another . . . .”

Now there may be more to our universe than our little inhabited dot. There may be other inhabited dots, lots of them, who knows? And someday we may visit them and they may visit us. One dot or lots of dots inhabited by human-like or strange creatures.  Hollywood visions. And there may be more dots in more universes, but it’s all part of material reality. It’s all the same, all a part of one grand cosmos. All connected. All comprising—to us—one vast machine. All the basis for a philosophy which cannot provide moral responsibility, the ancient and modern philosophy of ‘materialism’.

That philosophy is the view that everything that is, is material, not necessarily measurable, not necessarily having physical dimension, but part of the material universe connected by space and time. There is nothing else: no spiritual dimension, no supernatural force or forces, no magic, nothing theistic; not anywhere now, never has been, never will be. There is much that is mysterious in our dot, much that we do not, perhaps never will understand, but it is all there is. Materialism can—and should—tell us as much as possible about what is, but, alas, it cannot tell us what should be. Materialists can tell us much, but what they cannot tell us is that our blue dot provides any moral direction. They cannot tell us because that blue dot, as such, astonishing as it is in all kinds of ways, has no moral compass. True materialists cannot give us moral direction. However earnest and sincere they may be, as Sagan doubtless is, honest materialists cannot tell us to be kind.

If, as honest materialists must us, the earth and all the universe is a big machine, parts spinning here and parts spinning there, parts close by leafy and green, pleasantly warm or fiercely cold, anything, parts far away, parts anywhere, then that is all there is. Parts. Bits of matter, waves of energy, something else, all cogs in the machine. There is no moral direction anywhere. No part shows any other part that it has any “responsibility to deal more kindly with one another.” You may think that is a good idea. Your neighbor may think it a waste of time. Doesn’t matter. What materialism cannot provide is any moral compass. It cannot point to better or worse, to right or wrong, to good or bad. It can only say what is.

But we want to be kind, and we should, but why? We are full of moral imperatives, but they are not provided by that pale blue dot. If some people on that dot hack other people on the dot with swords or guns or chemicals, the dot does not tell them to stop. From where, then, does “do this, don’t do that”, come from, and why should we pay attention? 

Ethical direction began to show up when the first civilizations began to show up. No one seems to be able to explain how or why, but it must have come from something other than dots. It may somehow emerge in the mystery of the mind. Perhaps—it is an option— there was some kind of revelation. What can be said is that it is not part of the cause and effect machinery of the material universe. A discussion may be found in The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. The appendix of that book has examples of moral imperatives drawn from ancient religions and cultures, and they are surprisingly up to date, for from the earliest thinking, people seemed to have the notion that there was a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, and that we ought to be right, not wrong, good but not bad, and that notion lived on through the rise and fall of those civilizations. There was, of course, still is, disagreement about what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was bad, but underneath it all was the belief that there were such things, that there was a moral ethic. There may not be agreement about the substance of ethics and morality (although there is much), but there was agreement that there is a transcendent reality*: the ‘good’ which is not found by examining the parts of the pale blue dot, individually or collectively, any more than you see a painting by examining specks of paint, or see the mind by examining brain cells. The idea is just there. Lewis calls it the Way or the Tao. 

I do not know whether Carl Sagan, now deceased, believed or did not believe in a moral ethic. We do know he wanted to be moral, to be kind, but neither he nor anyone else can draw moral imperatives out of a pale, blue dot.

* One of the three: the True, the Good, the Beautiful. See Whisper # 16, The Verities.