A Question About Carl Sagan's Contact

[JLTucker]

I recently saw the film adaptation of Contact and I was with it until the end. As those of you who saw it knowt, the message is that science, just like religion, is based on faith. I was of course disgusted, especially since the ending of the film confirms Ellie's experience. But my question is this: does the book carry the same message? Does the book really equate science to religion and that its foundation is built on faith, that unexplained phenomenons have to rest on the concept of faith instead of just "I don't know" until it is observed? Am I interpreting the film in an odd way?

[madd0ct0r]

Did the film do that?

science was shown to to require faith to pursue a hypothesis, but accepted results.
Religion did suicide bombings.

[Darth Tedious]

science was shown to to require faith to pursue a hypothesis, but accepted results.

Isn't asking questions and persuing hypotheses the foundation upon which science is built?

[Guardsman Bass]

I think the "faith" element was supposed to be ironic, although I thought it was more apparent in the novel. The book describes Elle as a skeptic of religion because of the lack of proof, and she has a conversation with a conservative evangelical pastor at one point (the mentor of the guy in the film, Palmer Joss) where she says something like "Why isn't there a massive crucifix orbiting the Earth? Why isn't the surface of the Moon covered by the Ten Commandments? If God is all-powerful and real, why is the evidence only in subtle and debatable forms?"

But after her voyage, she's stuck in a situation where all the world saw of her was that she fell straight through the device with nothing happening. There's strong evidence for the Machine and Message being alien, and indirect evidence of her journey (like the crew members' watches in the book, and her recording device in the film), but ultimately she's stuck trying to convey a profound experience she's had which to almost everyone else looks like a lie or delusion . . . sort of like a "born again" experience that the Preacher Guy experienced.

[Borgholio]

I recently saw the film adaptation of Contact and I was with it until the end. As those of you who saw it knowt, the message is that science, just like religion, is based on faith. I was of course disgusted, especially since the ending of the film confirms Ellie's experience. But my question is this: does the book carry the same message? Does the book really equate science to religion and that its foundation is built on faith, that unexplained phenomenons have to rest on the concept of faith instead of just "I don't know" until it is observed? Am I interpreting the film in an odd way?

The book had some fundamental differences.
Spoiler

Ellie didn't go alone, she had a half dozen leading scientists / philosophers go with her. They all came away from the mission feeling much the same way as Ellie. No hard evidence other than first-hand testimony (well, there was some beach sand stuck to their shoes), and the video of course recorded only static for the time they were gone. However, each member went back to their respective fields with a newfound sense of hope. There is one major "gotcha" though.

The machine fails to work a second time due to reasons that are explained in the book by the aliens. Humans have to work together to overcome that hurdle if they want to be part of the intergalactic community. In the meantime, one of the aliens gives Ellie a puzzle. He suggests that there is a much higher power at work (bigger than God even) and that she has to look at Pi to find the answer. She does, by running Pi through a massive supercomputer for quite a long time. Finally, using base 11 math, she finds that deep within the number Pi, there is a pattern that forms the shape of a circle.

So in a nutshell, the aliens admit that they didn't build the wormholes, some billion-year old civilization did and then vanished. They know there is a "message" contained in Pi but they don't know who or what put it there. So the book explores ideas that are way bigger than just science vs faith vs religion.

[Ted C]

I recently saw the film adaptation of Contact and I was with it until the end. As those of you who saw it knowt, the message is that science, just like religion, is based on faith. I was of course disgusted, especially since the ending of the film confirms Ellie's experience. But my question is this: does the book carry the same message? Does the book really equate science to religion and that its foundation is built on faith, that unexplained phenomenons have to rest on the concept of faith instead of just "I don't know" until it is observed? Am I interpreting the film in an odd way?

I thought it was more like "Evidence that is sufficient for you won't necessarily be sufficient for someone else."

Ellie has a compelling reason to believe in extra-terrestrial intelligence. Unfortunately, she has no way to share it.

What's troubles me is what that message is supposed to mean about religious claims. It implies that they have valid reasons for their beliefs.

[Borgholio]

What's troubles me is what that message is supposed to mean about religious claims. It implies that they have valid reasons for their beliefs.

I'm athiest, but in defense of religion, they DO have valid reasons for their beliefs...even if the reasons can be misguided in some cases. I think Matthew Mcconaughey's character said it perfectly, that science and religion are the same...searches for the truth.

With that said, the truth seems to be leaning heavily towards science in this day and age, but still...

[Darth Tedious]

I'm athiest, but in defense of religion, they DO have valid reasons for their beliefs...even if the reasons can be misguided in some cases. I think Matthew Mcconaughey's character said it perfectly, that science and religion are the same...searches for the truth.

The major difference being the truths they search for-
religion asks "why?", a question that can never truly be answered or proven.
science asks "how?", and then investigates.

I thought it was more like "Evidence that is sufficient for you won't necessarily be sufficient for someone else."

Something anyone who's ever argued against religious types should be able to relate to!

It strikes me that the difference between religious faith and scientific 'faith' is thus:

Religious: "I cannot prove it, and I haven't seen it for myself, but I just know."
Scientific: "I cannot prove it, but I have seen it for myself, and I'm not bullshitting you here."

[Formless]

I recently saw the film adaptation of Contact and I was with it until the end. As those of you who saw it knowt, the message is that science, just like religion, is based on faith. I was of course disgusted, especially since the ending of the film confirms Ellie's experience. But my question is this: does the book carry the same message? Does the book really equate science to religion and that its foundation is built on faith, that unexplained phenomenons have to rest on the concept of faith instead of just "I don't know" until it is observed? Am I interpreting the film in an odd way?

I thought it was more like "Evidence that is sufficient for you won't necessarily be sufficient for someone else."

Ellie has a compelling reason to believe in extra-terrestrial intelligence. Unfortunately, she has no way to share it.

What's troubles me is what that message is supposed to mean about religious claims. It implies that they have valid reasons for their beliefs.

I don't think that's what Sagan was (or would have been, assuming the ending of the movie got his input before he died) getting at. If you have ever read "The Demon Haunted World", you might remember his analogy between faith and expecting people to believe you when you claim to have an invisible, heatless dragon living in your garage-- you know, his variation on Russell's teapot, but with the evasiveness of the claim dialed up to eleven so you can't miss it. He wasn't big on the idea of faith at all. At the same time, remember that Sagan self identified as an agnostic, and explicitly not as either an atheist or a religious person. And yeah, he was the kind of person who believed the distinction between atheism and agnosticism was meaningful; he was not Richard Dawkins.

So I think what he was trying to do with the character and her journey wasn't an attempt to validate religious faith-- none of the zealotry presented or questions and challenges he poses for religious people are answered or nullified in the story, after all. Rather, he was more likely trying to promote better mutual understanding between the religious and those who are not by presenting atheists and so on with a what-if scenario where you know something profound is true because you have seen it yourself, but no one is just going to take your word for it. How do you react? What value do you place on the experience if you can't prove it actually happened? How do you treat someone who claims to have had such an experience, but knows they can't share it with you? He isn't necessarily saying that the religious have valid experiences such as these, and the story itself is vague as to whether Ellie's really was real or some kind of Phillip K. Dick-esque dream sequence. I think its supposed to get people to think about the possibility and what it implies about their own behavior and beliefs.

Of course, the cynical part of me says this was more likely the producers' or director's idea because presenting an atheist as the protagonist is risky enough in Hollywood, to say nothing of doing it without also putting something in there that subtly comforts the mostly religious audience. After all, that would explain why in the book they do the smart thing and send a dozen people through the wormhole machine so that even if it fails they can't say the witnesses were biased, and in the movie they do the colossally stupid thing and send only the one person who pushed hard for the machine to be built and clearly wants to believe in alien life.

[Channel72]

From a certain perspective, science does require faith. Almost any human endeavor worth doing requires an element of "faith", if we define faith to mean something more nebulous like "confidence or intuition that this might actually work." Science also requires faith that the Universe follows rational, predictable laws, and that empiricism is a valid way to obtain knowledge.

But that's a very different sort of faith than religious faith, and I think Contact does the audience a major disservice by more or less juxtaposing the two, as if to say that religious faith might be equally valid.

The problem is that the situation at the end of Contact is so damn contrived. Yes, theoretically it's possible that there might be some amazing observable scientific phenomenom that only one person observes, and can't be repeated. In this case, we could say that science failed to find the truth, because science depends on measurement and repeatability to obtain truth. And 99.9999% of the time, most scientific truths in this Universe can be repeatedly observed and measured, either indirectly or directly. Contact is basically saying, "well yeah, but what if one day there's some phenomenom which is TRUE, but can't be repeatedly observed, and we only have one witness who even saw it? What then...huh???" Well, in that highly-contrived case the proper, scientific thing to do would be to reject the phenomenom as likely false, since it can't be repeated or confirmed independently.

So essentially, Contact is just showing us a highly contrived scenario where the scientific method would produce a false negative. But so what? Considering the success rate of the scientific method, it's hardly warranted to invent one highly contrived scenario where the scientific method produces a false negative, and then juxtapose that with religious faith as if the two are even remotely on the same intellectual grounding.

[Guardsman Bass]

It's not that the phenomena can't be observed repeatedly. It's just that each Machine costs north of a trillion dollars to produce, and can only be used once. That's the huge downside of the American Machine being bombed, and the Russian Machine failing to complete - they only have the Japanese Machine to go off of. If three sets of crews had had the same thing happen, and reported the same thing, then it would be pretty strong proof that something was happening despite the appearance of the crews going nowhere.

[Borgholio]

Well according to the book, the aliens have to send their end of the wormhole close to Earth for our machines to connect to. If the aliens only send one wormhole, only one machine would work anyways.