A Return to the Dark Ages?

During a 1961 lecture entitled “The Impact of Science on Myth”, Joseph Campbell relayed a puzzling, yet all too common conversation he overheard years earlier regarding faith and science. While sitting in his favorite diner in New York City having lunch, a mother entered with her two children. The oldest of the two, perhaps 12, sat down next to Campbell, followed by the others. After ordering, the boy next to Campbell told his mother that, “Jimmy wrote a paper on the evolution of man, and teacher said he was wrong, that Adam and Eve were our first parents”, to which the boy’s mother indignantly agreed, saying, “Teacher was right, Adam and Eve WERE our first parents”.

But the boy was undeterred and countered, “Yes, I know, but this was a scientific paper”. At hearing this, his mother, as one would expect, dug in her dogmatic heels with an indignant retort, “Oh, those scientists! Those are only theories”. Yet again the impressive young man proved up to the challenge by replying, “yes, but they found the bones”.

During the same lecture, Campbell described another tortured conversation that he recalled with an Indian gentleman who, after learning that Campbell was a scholar of religious history, asked how far back the Vedas were currently being dated; the Vedas being the sacred texts for Hindus. Campbell casually answered that new evidence suggested they were written around 1500 BC and possibly as recently as 1000 BC, far more recent than originally believed. Campbell then explained that new evidence has emerged of an even older civilization existed in India prior to the Vedas being written.

Campbell stated that the gentleman acknowledged his reply without argument, but then added, “Yes, I know, but as an orthodox Hindu, I cannot believe there is anything in the universe earlier than the Vedas.”

Obviously, both examples expose the unavoidable collision that occurs when scholarship, reason, and the pursuit of empirical truth faces its historical nemesis…. dogmatic faith. And it is that binding, as well as blinding, impulse that this note aims to reject.

It is not my intent here to argue that faith doesn’t contribute positive and even life affirming values, or that faith must be antithetical to personal curiosity. Not at all. My intent here is to challenge the egregious notion in our culture that ‘faith’ and ‘fact’ are somehow on equal footing. I have spent far too many hours with my bum planted on a pew, hearing to the same apologetics from a variety of preachers and denominations to misread the dialectic ‘bait and switch’ that is deployed there. “Faith”, as I’ve heard countless times in church, as well as among most every believer I know, is absolutely indistinguishable from “fact”, regardless of the contortions of evidence and reason that are violated along the way. There is not an empirically proven physical law of nature that cannot be casually swept aside by a mere few words written from a book dating from the Iron Age.

Perhaps it’s more prevalent here in the “Bible Belt” than in other parts of the country, but I know a many devout people, seemingly without troubling their intellect in the slightest, who believe the earth to be only 6000 years old, or that a star moved across the sky and hovered over a house, or that Peter, through faith, was able to suspend the laws of gravity to walk on water, or that Paul cured a grown man crippled since birth, by a command, or that Lazareth was brought back to life after being dead for four days in a desert tomb no worse for wear.

Incredibly, even now, during these early morning hours of the 21^st century, we still struggle to shed the soothing comfort of doctrine, the intellectual salve protecting believers against the prickly implications of inconvenient truths. What we don’t yet understand can create an uncomfortable gap in our view of things, and for some, like the two believers noted at the outset, that gap is often filled with easily digestible dogma.

I’m quite serious that my issue is not with faith as a personal choice, but rather when faith is allowed to shut down, dissuade or otherwise condemn our innate curiosity to learn about the empirical (real) world that we find ourselves in. The title to this entry, in fact, “A Return to the Dark Ages”, was chosen precisely to illustrate that point, because it offers up a clear example of what can happen when dogma is taught as fact.

Just to be reminded, from roughly the 7^th century, through to the 17^th, a full millennia, intellectual and scientific inquiry in Europe came to a near halt due to the Roman Catholic Church’s fight against blasphemy. This absurdity found its diabolical stride between the early 12^th to early 18th centuries, when the church showed its utter contempt for freedom of thought by instituting decrees to “purify” the faith. As a result, professing a belief contrary to church orthodoxy, like the heliocentric view of the cosmos, would get you a quick invitation before the Office of the Inquisition. And once in their hands, you would likely feel the ‘heat’ of their disapproval. If anyone has doubts to how the Catholic Church responded to inquisitive free thinkers, or how those proceedings very often played out, research the fate of Giordano Bruno to get a fiery glimpse.

And Christianity certainly wasn’t alone in this implication, for while Europe was trudging along in its dreary middle age, the Middle East flourished with advancements in medicine and mathematics, particularly during the 9^th and 10^th centuries as they far outpaced the rest of the world. For several centuries, Bagdad was the epicenter of scientific thought. That was until religious clerics determined that mathematics went against the teachings of God, presumably because it could describe natural phenomena without the need of a deity. Unsurprisingly, further advancements came to a halt, and their cultures have yet to recover from that edict to this day as they are still mired in their own dogma fueled Middle Age.

To drag this argument closer to relatively modern times, I recall watching a lecture by Neil deGrasse Tyson in which he addressed the moment when one of the West’s greatest minds was complicit in adopting the same flawed reasoning as today’s ‘Intelligent Design’ lobby. He did this by explaining a surprising ‘bug’ in Isaac Newton’s intellectual software, at least with regards to his Theory of Gravity, specifically with the complexity of planetary motions.

Newton, it must be stated before going any further, was perhaps the greatest scientific genius to walk the earth; a man who at 23 created from scratch the agility of Calculus in order to work out his theory of gravity, and with it explained a phenomenon that no man had imagined before him. Yet even with his immense scientific intellect, he was not immune to the crutch of dogma.

Tyson explained that after Newton had proven the physics of gravitational attraction, it was soon discovered that his calculations didn’t fully address a phenomenon that occurs when planetary orbits experience simultaneous gravitational tugs from different sources. For instance, as earth orbits the sun, it will occasionally experience an additional gravitational tug from Mars as it passes nearby, causing a slight change in our own orbit. Newton, who few know was as adept at theology as he was with mathematics, responded by stating that he didn’t need to look any further because, “it was in the province of God”, even though the solution was within his ability to deduce. Years later, the great French mathematician, Pierre-Simon Laplace, who was not thrown off course by religiosity, worked out the math and discovered the answer that Newton had piously abandoned, thereby providing a prophetic lesson that we should all be very mindful of.

Over the past decade or so, America has experienced its own gravitational tug of sorts from the religious right on this very topic. The idea has been around under various monikers for centuries, but its current rebranding is called ‘Intelligent Design’, which is anything but, and is being marketed to the public as a legitimate alternative to science, with the insidious aim of changing the narrative in our public discourse (and school curriculums) concerning the origins of life, with an ancillary agenda to obscure and undermine the true purpose and value of science. Their reasoning, echoing Newton’s pious fallacy, is that some things just aren’t knowable and are therefore in the realm of God….so just accept our Iron Age book, which already explained it all.

I do not intend to debate the relative strengths and weaknesses of either position here, because frankly, the two cannot be compared because they are completely different things. One is science and one is theology; or as Tyson once quipped, “unless you have an experiment, get out of the Science class.”

The core impetus that drives science reminds me of the opening scene from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 – A Space Odyssey”, for it captures quite poetically THE issue that should always keep in mind. The movie opens with some entertaining views of a group of manlike apes, perhaps a million years ago; early hominids who are known by science today as Australopithecines. There we find them acting as we would easily imagine; snarling and fighting with one another, concerning themselves only with the immediate concerns of the moment.

However, there was among them one who had in his dawning soul the potential of something more and that potential was evident in his awe before the unknown, his fascinated curiosity, and courage to approach and to explore. This was symbolically depicted when a mysterious monolith suddenly appeared standing upright within their small community. The others were terrified by its presence but could only think to throw sticks and stones at it, before growing bored and eventually returning to their daily routine. But this particular individual, apart and alone, contemplated the panel, and found the courage to reach out and cautiously touch it. At that instant, the viewer is immediately transported to a space station orbiting above the Earth; symbolically showing the audience that first courageous step toward our march to this present moment.

Which brings me to the inspiration for this post in the first place; the “Higgs Boson.” I recently stumbled across a collection of photographs (below) and believe they provide a powerful rebuttal to anyone who doubts the character and purity of scientific inquiry. The photos were taken from inside the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider, located at the border of France and Switzerland. The facility was designed and built by CERN, and consists of two perfectly round tunnels, some 17 miles in length, with the main chamber, as you’ll see in the photos, reaching an astounding five stories high…. which was carved through solid rock 300 feet underground.

If the construction of the tunnel wasn’t daunting enough, inside it scientists have designed and constructed the most sophisticated equipment ever dreamed of, all with a single goal in mind…to discover a theoretical subatomic particle called the “Higgs Boson”, or as the media likes to call it, “the God particle”. What makes the search so awe inspiring is that the particle may not even exist. Its existence has only been intuited from mathematical models. Yet with only the thinnest of certainties, CERN launched a project incorporating thousands of scientists and engineers from around the world and spent 10 billion dollars building this incredible facility…simply to get a step closer to knowing how this drama all got started. Again, this is nowhere in the vicinity of Intelligent Design, which can only offer the public theological talking points that have no evidentiary support whatever.

Here I want to remind ourselves that science is a discipline, a wonderfully conceived process (thank you Francis Bacon) where a any scientist can imagine and provide experimental evidence for their hypothesis and then have their peers either validate or disprove that hypothesis through their own independent experimentation. If it passes that crucible, only then does it become a theory. If the theory can make successful predictions from previously unknown data, then it becomes an ‘accepted theory’, like evolution and gravity. So, whenever “scientific theory” is used in the pejorative, don’t be thrown off.

After stumbling across these photos, I read up on some of the particulars of the project and could hardly believe what the scientists and engineers were up against. The Higgs-Boson, for instance, is theoretically created only under incredibly extreme pressures….like that of the Big Bang. To make the search even more daunting, the particle itself has an unfathomably small life span. How small you ask? Try a billionth of a second. Incredibly, none of that dissuaded the scientists. They simply got busy figuring out a way to test the hypothesis. Their solution was to build the world’s largest particle accelerator, a colossal laboratory that will smash atoms into each other in order to create a mini–Big Bang.

Take a moment to truly consider the mechanics of what that implies. It takes 50,000 atoms lying side by side to equal the width of a human hair — and scientist have devised a way to power those atoms at 99.9% the speed of light, along that 17-mile course to be crashed into each other. Then to find the answer, they then designed impossibly sensitive sensors that will detect the various subatomic particles of matter that are released from the collision. The sheer logistics alone boggles the imagination.

By the way, scientists did find the Higgs-Boson, and true to the scientific process, CERN shutdown the facility for two years in order to upgrade its systems so they can look even deeper into the mystery….so the next step for the scientist, as always, is forward.

In the end I guess this turf battle between science and religion will always be a part of our lives since both have stitched their presence deeply into our cultural fabric. Science will forever push, prod and when necessary, drag us along on its insatiable thirst for answers, while faith will keep believers safe and secure from the inconvenient truths of each new discovery. Years ago, I used to believe the two could co-exist together in an awkward, if imperfect harmony, which is the point made by Stephen Jay Gould with his ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ assertion, but since religion makes quite specific claims that violate the laws of physics and can present no evidentiary support for those claims, his point is mute.

Yet I do empathize with those who side with faith over science, because we all have such a short time here and the ride can be discouraging and often heartbreaking, so the impulse for a soothing faith is not difficult to understand. Each of us, after all, will laugh, love, and cry our way through this life, regardless of what we believe in. For myself though, I will forever stand on the side of evidence and reason, regardless of my feelings, for it comes down to a simple imperative expressed by Nietzsche.

 “If you want happiness and peace of soul, Believe. But if you want to be a disciple of truth, Search.”