Carl Sagan comments on Earth photographed from 4 billion miles away:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…
Sagan tellingly leaves out every scientist, every correct theory in physics, every brilliant insight into the nature of the universe, etc. We could push this further, since there is little to nothing in this litany of insignificance that Sagan would have taken as a description of himself. To be sure, the he’s included in the generalities at the beginning, but when he drills down to the details starting with “thousands of confident religions,” his own life and interests are left off the list.
But so what? Should we just update the paragraph to include a description of Sagan and his interests? Should we throw out the whole argument as his subconscious memoir of everything he deems unimportant or prone to overestimate itself?
No. Everything Sagan said is true as far as it goes, but it needs to be balanced against the truths he left out. Sagan’s silence arises from his own awareness that the summum bonum is intrinsically and infinitely meaningful, and human love participates in it, notwithstanding the evident insignificance of human life. When we preserve both the truths that he says and leaves unsaid, therefore, what we get is not Sagan but Pascal. Human life is the paradoxical union of utter insignificance and infinite meaning, and our basic stance to life is both abject humility grounded in a true awareness of our nothingness and confidence that we exist to possess a good greater than the common good of the whole physical and angelic natural order. This is all Christiany-stuff that Sagan would politely and confidently dismiss, but one would hope that to see himself in relation to Pascal would at least give him pause, since Pascal didn’t just think more deeply than Sagan about God and religion but was also a much better scientist. And what if we wanted to draw a theory about that?
Assume the pale blue dot gives one of Sagan’s fundamental beliefs about the universe. We’ve already seen the problem: while the speech locates an unmistakable perspective in which human life is insignificant and in need of profound humility, it leaves out his own life and everything he did in search of happiness. The center of Pascal’s beliefs about the universe, by contrast, is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, which provides a far clearer perspective into the insignificance of human life while simultaneously accounting for its infinite meaning. There is at least a proportion between the vast expanse of space and the extension of our planet, but there is no proportion at all between the divine nature and the human nature assumed; but that that this nature is assumed at all, of course, makes it divine. While it’s easier for us to see the pale blue dot against the cosmic backdrop than to see the Christ child in Bethlehem against the backdrop of the divine nature, the latter is far more insignificant against its backdrop than the former, even while the humanity being in the divinity gives it an infinite dignity that has no analogue when we shift to considering the pale blue dot being in the cosmos.
Just Thomism 