Testimony

A woman lies in the desert in headphones, listening to static from the stars. In Contact (1997), directed by Robert Zemeckis from Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel, the astronomer Ellie Arroway finally hears a signal: prime numbers, pulsing from the star Vega. Decoded, the message holds plans for a machine. She rides it, travels further than anyone has ever travelled, and comes back with no evidence anyone else will accept. Her recorder caught eighteen hours of static. To everyone watching, she never left.

The scientist’s dilemma

At the hearing that follows, Ellie says she cannot prove it, cannot even explain it, but everything she is tells her it was real. It is a striking moment, because earlier in the film she has demanded proof from the believer Palmer Joss. He answers her with a question about her late father: did she love him? Prove it.

Sagan made the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” famous on television in Cosmos (1980). His heroine ends up on the other side of that rule. Sagan’s reputation as a “fire-breathing atheist” is mistaken, as one study of the film puts it; he called himself an agnostic, and his heroine calls science and religion both “bound up” with a thirst for wonder. The novel ends with a hidden pattern deep in the digits of pi, a signature in the fabric of mathematics, which the film leaves out.

How faiths carry what they know

Testimony is how every faith passes on what it holds. Philosophers have long argued about it: David Hume was sceptical of reports of miracles, while his Scottish contemporary Thomas Reid answered that we rely on other people’s word as naturally as on our own eyes. Most of what any of us knows, from history to medicine, we know because someone we trust told us.

In the film the message takes decades of listening to arrive. al-Mujīb, the One who answers, “is near”. The question Contact leaves is not whether Ellie was right. It is a harder one, for believers and sceptics alike: what would it take for you to trust someone else’s experience of the truth, and has anyone ever trusted yours?