He glanced momentarily at his colleague, who was doodling, apparently idly, on a yellow legal pad, his collar unbuttoned and his necktie loosened.
“I was struck by one or two things you said this morning. You called yourself a Christian. May I ask? In what sense are you a Christian?”
“You know, this wasn't the job description when I accepted the directorship of the Argus Project.” She said this lightly. “I'm a Christian in the sense that I find Jesus Christ to be an admirable historical figure.
I think the Sermon on the Mount is one of the greatest ethical statements and one of the best speeches in history. I think that “Love your enemy” might even be the long-shot solution to the problem of nuclear war. I wish he was alive today. It would benefit everybody on the planet. But I think Jesus was only a man. A great man, a brave man, a man with insight into unpopular truths. But I don't think he was God or the son of God or the grandnephew of God.”
“You don't want to believe in God.” Joss said it as a simple statement. “You figure you can be a Christian and not believe in God. Let me ask you straight out: Do you believe in God?”
“The question has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I'm convinced God doesn't exist, or do I mean I'm not convinced he does exist? Those are two very different statements.”
“Let's see if they are so different, Dr. Arroway. May I call you “Doctor'? You believe in Occam's Razor, isn't that right? If you have two different, equally good explanations of the same experience, you pick the simplest. The whole history of science supports it, you say. Now, if you have serious doubts about whether there is a God—enough doubts so you're unwilling to commit yourself to the Faith—then you must be able to imagine a world without God: a world that comes into being without God, a world where people die without God. No punishment. No reward. All the saints and prophets, all the faithful who have ever lived—why, you'd have to believe they were foolish. Deceived themselves, you'd probably say. That would be a world in which we weren't here on Earth for any good reason—I mean for any purpose. It would all be just complicated collisions of atoms—is that right? Including the atoms that are inside human beings.
“To me, that would be a hateful and inhuman world. I wouldn't want to live in it. But if you can imagine that world, why straddle? Why occupy some middle ground? If you believe all that already, isn't it much simpler to say there's on God? You're not being true to Occam's Razor. I think you're waffling. How can a thoroughgoing conscientious scientist be an agnostic if you can even imagine a world without God?
Wouldn't you just have to be an atheist?”
“I thought you were going to argue that God is the simpler hypothesis,” Ellie said, “but this is a much better point. If it were only a matter of scientific discussion, I'd agree with you, Reverend Joss.
Science is essentially concerned with examining and correcting hypotheses. If the laws of nature explain all the available facts without supernatural intervention, or even do only as well as the God hypothesis, then for the time being I'd call myself an atheist. Then, if a single piece of evidence was discovered that doesn't fit, Id back off from atheism. We're fully able to detect some breakdown in the laws of nature. The reason I don't call myself an atheist is because this isn't mainly a scientific issue. It's a religious issue and a political issue. The tentative nature of scientific hypothesis doesn't extend into these fields. You don't talk about God as a hypothesis. You think you've cornered the truth, so I point out that you may have missed a thing or two. But if you ask, I'm happy to tell you: I can't be sure I'm right.”
“I've always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.”
“You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility. When I say I'm an agnostic, I only mean that the evidence isn't in. There isn't compelling evidence that God exists—at least your kind of god—and there isn't compelling evidence that he doesn't. Since more than half the people on the Earth aren't Jews or Christian or Muslims, I'd say that there aren't any compelling arguments for your kind of god. Otherwise, everybody on Earth would have been converted. I say again, if you God wanted to convince us, he could have done a much better job.
“Look at how clearly authentic the Message is. It's being picked up all over the world. Radio telescopes are humming away in countries with different histories, different languages, different politics, different religions. Everybody's getting the same kind of data from the same place in the sky, at the same frequencies with the same polarization modulation. The Muslims, the Hindus, the Christians, and the atheists are all getting the same message. Any skeptic can hook up a radio telescope—it doesn't have to be very big—and get the identical data.”
“You're not suggesting that your radio message is from God,” Rankin offered.
“Not at all. Just that the civilization on Vega—with powers infinitely less than what you attribute to your God—was able to make things very clear. If your God wanted to talk to us through the unlikely means of word-of-mouth transmission and ancient writings over thousands of years, he could have done it so there was no room left for debate about its existence.”
She paused, but neither Joss nor Rankin spoke, so she tried again to steer the conversation to the data.
“Why don't we just withhold judgment for a while until we make some more progress on decrypting the Message? Would you like to see some of the data?”
This time they assented, readily enough it seemed. But she could produce only reams of zeros and ones, neither edifying nor inspirational. she carefully explained about the presumed pagination of the Message and the hoped-for primer. By unspoken agreement, she and der Heer said nothing about the Soviet view that the Message was the blueprint for a machine. It was at best a guess, and had not yet been publicly discussed by the Soviets. As an afterthought, she described something about Vega itself—its mass, surface temperature, color, distance from the Earth, lifetime, and the ring of orbiting debris around it that had been discovered by the Infrared Astronomy Satellite in 1983.
“But beyond its being one of the brightest stars in the sky, is there anything special about it?” Joss wanted to know. “Or anything that connects it up with Earth?”
“Well, in terms of stellar properties, anything like that, I can't think of a thing. But there is one incidental fact: Vega was the Pole Star about twelve thousand years ago, and it will be again about fourteen thousand years from now.”
“I though the polestar was the Pole Star.” Rankin, still doodling, said this to the pad of paper.
“It is, for a few thousand years. But not forever. The Earth is like a spinning top. Its axis is slowly precessing in a circle.” She demonstrated, using her pencil as the Earth's axis. “It's called the precession of the equinoxes.”
“Discovered by Hipparchus of Rhodes,” added Joss. “Second century B. C.” This seemed a surprising piece of information for him to have at his fingertips.
“Exactly. So right now,” she continued, “an arrow from the center of the Earth to the North Pole points to the star we call Polaris, in the constellation of the Little Dipper, or the Little Bear. I believe you were referring to this constellation just before lunch, Mr. Rankin. As the Earth's axis slowly precesses, it points in some different direction in the sky, not toward Polaris, and over 26,000 years the place in the sky to which the North Pole points makes a complete circle. The North Pole points right now very near Polaris, close enough to be useful in navigation. Twelve thousand years ago, by accident, it pointed to Vega. But there's no physical connection. How the stars are distributed in the Milky Way has nothing to do with the Earth's axis of rotation being tipped twenty-three and a half degrees.”