Unbeliever's Quest

""And I said, "Can you prove love exists?'

""And at first he said, "Well, certainly,' but eventually he agreed that love, like faith, has something unprovable at its core, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.''

But that was still a long way from accepting the claims of organized religion. Sagan reserved particular scorn for petitionary prayer, which by its very utterance renders God's qualities of omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence mutually contradictory. Does God need to be reminded that someone is sick, Sagan asked. Or does he know, but he won't do anything about it unless someone else asks him to?

Of course, many believers have wrestled with these same questions. Morton began praying for Sagan after he was diagnosed with myelodysplasia, a disease related to leukemia, in the winter of 1995. ""That prayer works is very clear,'' Morton says, ""although how, I don't have a clue.'' If God had actually cured Sagan with a visible miracle, as in the Bible, Morton would have been only a little less astonished than the patient himself. ""Look at it psychologically,'' he says. ""It helped keep his spirits going. If your spirits are up, your body works better. Any kind of mechanistic notion of changing the molecules, that's nonsense.''

But Seiple, from a very different religious tradition, had a more direct appreciation of the power of prayer. In a letter shortly before Sagan was to undergo a marrow transplant, he asked about his condition so he could ""pray more intelligently'' for a cure. ""I have already begun to pray,'' he reassured Sagan, ""and, as I have tried to persuade you, prayer has been the most necessary part of bridging the gap between the divine and our humanity.''

Sagan was eventually to have three bone-marrow transplants, and by last summer seemed to be recovering. Campbell had dinner with him in the fall and said, ""I think you're going to make it,'' to which he replied, smiling, ""I'm praying I'm going to make it.'' Then he contracted pneumonia, a side effect of his radiation treatment. His friends prayed harder, but Sagan never wavered in his agnosticism.