Scientists and Cognitive Dissonance
I read a lot of books about spirituality, science, and philosophy. I often come across accounts or anecdotes about how some scientists seem to think one thing in their professional career, but something completely different in their private lives. This is usually along the lines of their religious beliefs, or a belief in the paranormal, parapsychology. One theme is that there is a conference, the topic of which is a conventional scientific issue, presented as one would expect but, during the later informal socialising, after a couple of glasses of wine and the accompanying tongue loosening, all sorts of stories come out. The scientists keep quiet about these views, however, when at work with their colleagues.
Their motives for doing this are various. It may be embarrassment, simply not wanting to appear weird or cranky, standing out from the conformist crowd. In some areas, however, it can be more serious; a biologist who challenges Darwinian evolutionary theory might be abused by colleagues, threatened with dismissal, or actually lose their job.
On this theme, I recently came across an article on Medium by Giulio Prisco which discussed the late Carl Sagan, describing him as a “prisoner of bad philosophy”. That has always been my opinion of him, someone who passionately advocates the conventional scientific worldview, and who is closed to any suggestion of something beyond. I arrived at that conclusion on the basis of books like The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
Prisco says that “it’s easy to interpret his writings as a passionate defense of atheism”. We might say that this is Sagan doing his work as a professional. However, in his science fiction novel Contact, he says: “The universe was made on purpose… In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.”
We might call this cognitive dissonance, two irreconcilable viewpoints existing simultaneously in the same person. One would think that this, if conscious, would create an unbearable tension. Sagan found a way of avoiding this, however. His wife Ann Druyan, in her introduction to The Varieties of Scientific Experience, said: “He couldn’t live a compartmentalized life, operating on one set of assumptions in the laboratory and keeping another, conflicting set for the Sabbath. He took the idea of God so seriously that it had to pass the most rigorous standards of scrutiny.” He avoided the cognitive dissonance therefore by only letting his other side off the leash in his fiction.
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics, and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
