Through the Screen · Contact · 5 min
Testimony
Carl Sagan's Contact ends with a scientist asking the world to take her experience on trust: the way every faith has always passed on what it knows.
Through the Screen · Testimony
In Contact (1997), Ellie Arroway, a scientist, travels further than anyone and comes back with no evidence anyone else will accept. She is left asking people to believe her testimony. Carl Sagan's reputation as a “fire-breathing atheist” is mistaken, as one study of the film puts it; his heroine calls science and religion both “bound up” with a thirst for wonder.
Testimony is how all three faiths carry what they know: the chain of narrators (isnād) behind every hadith; the people at Sinai; the apostles. In the film the message takes decades of listening to arrive. al-Mujīb, the One who answers, “is near” (2:186).
