Carl Sagan and the search for God

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, God is a "being who is omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, who created the universe, is responsive to prayer, intervenes in human affairs, and so on." The vision of God proposed by Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein is "the sum total of the physical laws of the universe." The two views are given their due in these essays, originally delivered by Carl Sagan in 1985 as the Gifford Lectures. In easy, layman's language, Sagan describes our puny place in the universe, speculates on the origin of life on earth and the age of earth, proposes theories on humankind's need to create a God and undergo the religious experience. He presents the scientific facts coolly . Nonetheless, long before he says that there is no evidence to support the belief in God as "an outsize male with a long white beard, sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow," a reader has reached this conclusion.

For me, Sagan's most moving remark about our Western theology is that it portrays God as too small: "It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe."

Room for Doubt

"I have always been remarkably inflexible. Even as a child, I had fixed ideas and fixed preferences," says critic Wendy Lesser of herself. The three seemingly unrelated essays that make up this small and idiosyncratic memoir focus on moments when the opinionated Lesser gave in to doubt .

The first essay focuses on her surprising delight in Berlin, a city that she, as an American and a Jew , had never wished to visit. In the second, she investigates how she came to want to write a biography of 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume and why she abandoned the project. In the third, she explores her difficult relationship with the writer Leonard Michaels, her teacher and friend , creating an affectionate portrait of a temperamental man and plotting the geometry of their pattern of annoying and forgiving each other. This essay is the most personal and palpable.

She scrupulously details her own prickly personality -- not only her rigidity, but also her intellectual strengths, artistic preferences, and personal weaknesses, her generous impulses and shabby motives. She is neither self-flattering nor self-flagellating. She seems hard and fair and is above all "interesting," her own word of high praise.

The Saffron Kitchen

Yasmin Crowther's novel begins with a bang -- a perplexing, brutal act at a London cafe that has unintended tragic consequences. To explain this action, the book moves back several decades to a small village in Iran.

Maryam, whose shockingly impulsive action begins the tale, refuse s to conform to her role in Iranian society. As a girl, she is expected to follow tradition, be respectful and obedient. She balk s at the marriage arranged for her and, when suspected of impropriety, is humiliated, ostracized, and cast out of her home by her cruel and correct father. When he feels humiliated by his daughter, he humiliate s her in return. Hardness begets hardness. After fleeing to London, Maryam finds a loving English husband and raise s an almost English daughter. But her life in England never feels completely real, and eventually she return s to her home, a tiny primitive village. Her daughter follow s her there to see for herself what she missed. The early part of this story -- Maryam's supposed crime and very real punishment -- is suspenseful . Her return and recovery are more predictable.

"Iran is like you," warns Maryam's aunt early in the novel, "a beautiful virgin in the world, surrounded by suitors." London, Moscow, and Washington are courting her. Maryam escapes the suitor chosen for her, but Iran continues to suffer.

Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.