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When Assured Results Aren’t So Sure

We used to know that the planet Mercury always keeps the same side to the sun. All the books said so. It rotated on its axis in the same time that it revolved around the sun.

That belief was based primarily on observations in the late nineteenth century by the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli. Observations of the closest planet to the sun are difficult, and astronomers of the time noted the uncertainty of this result, but by the 1950s doubts had disappeared from textbooks. Science fiction writers exploited the extremes of temperatures resulting from the fact that one side of Mercury always faced the sun and the other never saw it.

Then it became possible to measure the planet’s period of rotation with radar. It doesn’t keep the same face to the sun. Mercury rotates on its axis in about two-thirds the time it takes to go around the sun.

Scientists like to think that they maintain a healthy skepticism of claims based on authority, but sometimes they do not. One cannot repeat every observation that other scientists make, but astronomers could have remembered the tentative character of the original observations and not become so dogmatic.

Theologians need to learn a similar lesson: “The assured results of New Testament scholarship” sometimes aren’t so assured.

There are reasons deeper than mere carelessness that we succumb to such errors. Theory suggests that friction due to tidal stresses in a rotating planet will slow it down until it always keeps the same side toward the body it orbits (as Earth’s moon does). Since theory suggested that the planet should behave that way, it was easy to believe that it did. Mercury seemed to illustrate a general truth about the universe.

The world is more complicated than that, however. The basic laws of physics that astronomers were using were correct, but they do not determine a unique planetary history.

This is a minor example, but it illustrates a major tendency among thinkers to believe that there is only one way that the world could be. The extreme version is the idea of some philosophers and a few scientists that the world can be understood by pure thought, without having to observe how the world actually is. Such ideas hindered the development of Greek science. It wasn’t until Bacon, Galileo, and others realized that observations — including the controlled observations we call experiments —  are essential for an understanding of nature that science really took off.

Contingency
The nature of the universe is not a necessary truth but is contingent: It could have been different. The geometry of the world does not have to be that of Euclid, as Kant thought. Einstein found that one non-Euclidean version provides a better description.

Nevertheless, the belief that there is only one way for the world to be keeps resurfacing in different forms. The steady-state cosmology of the mid-twentieth century (then a serious competitor of Big Bang theories) and the bootstrap theory of particle physics (popularized in Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics [Shambhala, 1975], which argued for similarities between modern physics and Eastern religions) displayed this tendency. Both of these theories had attractive features, and both have since bitten the dust.

String theories are a recent manifestation of the same idea. Their basic concept is that the fundamental constituents of the world are not point particles but tiny string-like entities that can oscillate in various ways. The expectation of some proponents has been that such theories would provide a way of combining Einstein’s theory of gravitation with quantum theory in a consistent way and describe all the basic forces of nature as different aspects of one fundamental interaction.

Some theorists hope that there will be a version of the theory whose equations have a unique solution, so that only one world is possible. The resulting “theory of everything” would describe not only the way the world is but the way it must be.

But are string theories correct? It is difficult to subject them to observational tests, which would have to probe length phenomena on a scale much smaller than present-day experiments. The fact that the theory remains untested after some twenty-five years of intensive theoretical work has led some physicists to wonder whether it may be more of a hindrance than a help. This interesting area of investigation is certainly not dead yet, but it may turn out to be one more failed attempt to find a unique universe.

Physics is not the only science in which we encounter the belief that the world must be as it is. Biological evolution is often described as if it involved a kind of “manifest destiny” in which one superior species — of course our own! — was bound to develop. The late Stephen Jay Gould was a remorseless critic of this idea and argued especially in his book Wonderful Life (W.W. Norton, 1989) for the contingency of the evolutionary process. The title of the book is from the Robert Capra film that most of us have seen at Christmas time. The alternate reality which George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) experiences in the movie illustrates the belief that life could have been different, and Gould argues that in an analogous way evolution could have produced a different population of species on our planet.

Implications for Christians
Christians may have problems with the suggestion that evolutionary processes need not have produced Homo sapiens, for the idea that we were the real purpose of creation is deeply seated. If that is so, and if God creates through these processes, they must have been directed toward our emergence. But texts such as Deuteronomy 8:6–8 indicate that God’s election does not depend on any innate superiority of the elect. And while Ephesians 1:10 speaks of God’s plan to unite all things in Christ, the Word might have become incarnate in a species quite different from us.

Christians do not have to accept contingency grudgingly, however.

Traditional belief in divine freedom means that God could have created other types of universes. The world is contingently rational: It is created through the divine Logos and can be described by rational laws, but the Logos could have made a world that was rational in a different way. (Thomas F. Torrance’s Divine and Contingent Order [Oxford, 1981] deals with this.)

Contingency may seem an abstract concept, but we see its theological importance when we realize that it includes the contingency of history. Some biblical scholars are too prone to think that they know what must have happened in particular situations because they know how things usually happen in such situations. Pilate or the Sanhedrin “must have” behaved in certain ways in dealing with Jesus because we know how Roman or Jewish officials generally acted. But besides the fact that we may not know those things as well as we think, Pilate and the Sanhedrin’s members were individual people at a specific time and place, faced with specific circumstances, not Roman or Jewish authority in general. It may be that the best we can do is to surmise what happened from general principles as well as available evidence, but, as in the case of Mercury, it’s good to say “We’re not completely sure” rather than make claims about “assured results.”

George L. Murphy, an ELCA pastor and physicist living in Tallmadge, Ohio, is an adjunct faculty member at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus and a pastoral associate at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron. His e-mail address is gmurphy@raex.com.