SO, WHAT DO WE KNOW?

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

August 8, 2007

READINGS

From The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough, pp. 9-12

I’ve had a lot of trouble with the universe. It began soon after I was told about it in physics class. I was perhaps 20, and I went on a camping trip, where I found myself in a sleeping bag looking up into the crisp Colorado night. Before I could look around for Orion and the Big Dipper, I was overwhelmed with terror. The panic became so acute that I had to roll over and bury my face in my pillow.

All the stars that I saw were part of but one galaxy.

There are some 100 billion galaxies in the universe, with perhaps 100 billion stars in each one, occupying magnitudes of space that I would not begin to imagine.

Each star was dying, exploding, accreting, exploding again, splitting atoms and fusing nuclei under enormous temperatures and pressures.

Our Sun, too, will die, frying the Earth to a crisp during its heat-death, spewing its bits and pieces out into the frigid nothingness of curve spacetime.

The night sky was ruined. I would never be able to look at it again. I wept into my pillow, the long slow tears of adolescent despair. . . . But since then I have found a way to defeat the nihilism that lurks in the infinite and the infinitesimal. I have come to understand that I can deflect the apparent pointlessness of it all by realizing that I don’t have to seek a point. In any of it. Instead, I can see it as the locus of Mystery.

The mystery of why there is anything at all, rather than nothing.

The mystery of where the laws of physics came from.

The mystery of why the universe seems to strange. . . .

The realization that I needn’t have answers to the Big Questions has served as an epiphany. I lie on my back under the stars and the unseen galaxies and I let their enormity wash over me. I assimilate the vastness of the distances, the impermanence, the fact of it all. I go all the way out and then I go all the way down, to the fact of photons without mass and gauge bosons that become massless at high temperatures. I take in the abstractions about forces and symmetries and they caress me. . . . And mystery generates wonder

SERMON

I want to begin today with a little bit of background. Many of you know that before entering the ministry I was a journalist, and the position I enjoyed the most at the newspaper where I worked was that of science writer. When anyone asks if I ever miss my previous line of work, I tell them, only once in a while, when a big science story is breaking, and I wish I could sink my teeth into it.

What never ceased to delight me about the science beat was that I had a front-row view of the breaking edge of what we as humans know about the world around us. To be honest, hardly a week went by that I didn’t hear about some discovery or advance that, if I hadn’t read it in the source I did, I would have sworn was fiction. And what I found interesting is that this was often true of scientists as well in fields outside the area of discovery.

A physicist, for example, would scratch her head over the biologist’s latest discovery about cell structure, just as the biologist might throw up his hands at the physicist’s announcement about subatomic particles.

Needless to say, the disconnect was even wider for ordinary folks, like you and me, whose understanding of science is grounded in high school or college textbooks often at least several decades out of date. The complexity and sophistication of even the most routine work of science today has outstripped our abilities to stay on top of it.

So, the question, what do we know, can be a source of some real anxiety. We want to feel that we are in touch with things as they are, awake, alert, oriented. And yet some of what we hear makes us wonder. Is the world crazy, or is it just me?

Some of you may have seen the film “What the Bleep do we know?” The film features interviews with scientists and thinkers of various stripes woven around the story of a young woman struggling to come to terms with a life that seems out of control. It plunges into some of the strangest and most counterintuitive ideas in contemporary physics as well as current approaches to spirituality to come up with some lessons for life. I’ll come back to the movie later, but for now I offer it as an example of the kind of struggle that living in this age presents us: What do we know, and what are we to make of that?

Now, I should say that while I introduce this struggle as peculiar to our contemporary age, in many respects it is not new at all. Western culture first experienced the disorienting influence of science about five centuries ago when Copernicus and Galileo unseated the Earth as the center of the universe. But it wasn’t until the 19th century with the coming of the Industrial Age and Darwin’s proposal of the evolution of species that science began to seriously test the most fundamental understanding of who we are and our place in the universe.

That understanding, of course, was enfolded in the stories of the Christian Bible, of Genesis and God’s creation of the world. The discoveries and the theories that followed them called into question not just the grand myth of our origins but also our sense of ourselves as humans as special, the pinnacle of creation, occupying a hallowed place in the order of things.

For some, though, these discoveries were not dispiriting but liberating. Among those were our forebears in liberal religion. While it was true that accepting what scientists held as so forced them to rethink their religious understanding – how they conceived of God, if they saw a place for God at all, how they saw humankind’s place in the universe – but it also opened a new, exciting possibility. Maybe we as humans really did have the power to unlock the secrets of the universe. Perhaps through our brains and our senses and the tools of science we could answer all the ancient mysteries.

The seemingly simple equations on relativity by Albert Einstein shortly after the turn of the century symbolized the power of the human mind. Edwin Hubble’s discovery in the 1920s that what had seemed vague clouds beyond the Milky Way were in fact other galaxies exploded our sense of the size of the Universe and gave a sense of the grandeur awaiting us.

Yet not all discoveries were so encouraging. Scientists studying the nature of the atom discovered some seemingly odd things. For example, the model had been that atoms were like miniature solar systems – with electrons buzzing around a central nucleus. Yet, when they went looking for the electron in an atom’s orbit they could never be sure where to find it. Certain qualities, such its position or momentum, could never be known at the same time. It wasn’t that they were too difficult to measure: It was fundamentally impossible to know. One could calculate the probability of an electron’s location but never know for certain. What’s more, it’s not even clear what electrons are. In some experiments they appear as particles; in others they appear is waves. Neither is wrong; both are right.

It’s little wonder that in cogitating over such things we can come to feel, to use the metaphor favored in “What the Bleep,” that we have jumped down the rabbit hole. As counterintuitive as it may seem, quantum physics, which posits the electron’s odd traits and behavior, is still the most successful theory at the level of the tiny. The main problem with it is that in fundamental ways it contradicts physics at the cosmic scale.

Within the next year scientists may receive the first results of a new generation of particle accelerator in Europe that they hope will provide answers to help close the gap between the two theories. They may even get the first hints to confirm string theory, a bold, creative idea that would pull together the disparate strands of physics into a Theory of Everything that imagines the universe composed ultimately of tiny vibrating filaments that move across many dimensions.

Scientists acknowledge, though, that it is possible that the new machine will bring them only incremental gains that the bright shiny fruit of string theory will die on the vine for lack of evidence. Some even wonder if they are approaching a fundamental limit in our ability to know, if we have reached a point beyond which our mighty capacities of observation and reason celebrated by our 19th century forebears cannot go.

A similar, though different conundrum is facing scientists working at the cosmic level. The last century of astronomy has pushed the margins of our knowledge to within the first few moments of the universe’s origin – the Big Bang. We know much about the large scale structure of the observable universe as well as many of its oddball inhabitants and events such as black holes, quasars and supernovas. Where things have suddenly gotten a little hazy is in our understanding of the universe’s future.

Ever since the Big Bang theory was confirmed in the 1960s by the discovery of its pervasive hum scientists have worked to calculate its future direction: Will it expand forever, or will it stop and contract back into a big crunch? Once again, their data have delivered imponderables.

For one thing, they say, the only way they can explain the movement of galaxies is to posit something they call dark matter at work.What is it? How does it work? No one knows. Even worse, studying the movement of distant objects they have observed what appears to be some sort of cosmic repulsion force at work pushing galaxies apart at an increasing speed. What is it? How does it work? Nobody knows. Scientists aren’t even sure how to find out.

But it does have consequences. Astronomers have recently calculated that if this pace of expansion continues, the time will come when most of the distant objects in space will move beyond our horizon. The electromagnetic energy they radiate – light, x-rays, radio waves – will no longer reach us. We will not know they exist.

It will take a while, to be sure: some 100 billion years. But the time will come when we will be left within an island of only about six galaxies that will comprise our entire observable universe. Our sky today, of course, is full, in comparison, But all of this can’t help but make me wonder how much in the universe today lies below our horizon, not simply unobserved but inherently unobservable. Triumphant as we are today with all we’ve learned we are left to consider that there may be limits beyond which we cannot go. There may be secrets of the universe that will forever elude us.

There are some who see in this emerging possibility a comeuppance for what they consider a haughty pride in our human abilities, who would have us turn to other sources, other “ways of knowing” to bridge that gap. Human history, of course, is strewn with folks claiming to have come upon sources of divination or revealed truth. And, as clever or interesting as their ideas might be things have not gone especially well for their claims.

No, what we can truly claim to know needs a firmer foundation.

That’s why I’m skeptical of much some of what is offered up in “What the Bleep?” to solve the main character’s quandaries in life. As appealing as it might be to think that our thoughts can somehow affect the structure of water or influence the sea of quantum possibilities blinking continually in and out of existence the science behind those ideas is pretty sketchy. And yet there is some wisdom to believing that how we think about the world around us will affect how we experience it. But we hardly need quantum physics to discover that.

On reflection, disappointment with the limits of science and what we can know may have mostly to do with misplaced expectations. Science makes no claim to complete knowledge now or ever. It is and always will be provisional. If, in asking “What the Bleep Can We Know?” we are seeking fixed and final certainty, we will be endlessly frustrated. As the astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we come from, we will have failed.”

What we know changes as we develop more and more subtle instruments to measure it and more and more sophisticated understanding to frame it Yet, it is true that it now seems clear that our forebears were presumptuous in assuming that the onward march of science would unravel all our stickiest problems.

As science marches on, we have discovered that humankind faces an even greater need than finding out how the world works: that is discovering the wisdom to assimilate what we know into our lives. Conundrums of quantum mechanics and cosmology pale in the face of the task of devising ways for humans to live together in some sort of harmony. And that is work beyond science, requiring a vision of human hope and possibility created in communities of courageous people.

I must admit to having had nights such as those Ursula Goodenough writes of, when the immensity of what was before me made me fear the night sky, when the meager span of my life seemed pointless against a sky full of stars light-years away. What I came to decide was not so much that there is no point in life but that the point is not to be found in the stars. It is to be found instead in how I live my life, what I love and what I serve.

Thinking that way puts the stars in perspective and opens the way

to new appreciation of the world around me,this extraordinary existence that I share with stars and starlings, microbes and marsh marigolds. I don’t need a solution to the world’s puzzles to go on. If physicists can live with quantum uncertainty, so can I. With Ursula Goodenough I am content to live in a universe that is the locus of mystery. Some of that mystery we undoubtedly will erase in time, and some may ever escape us.

Meanwhile, as the poet Mary Oliver* puts it:

The sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

*(from “Wild Geese” in New and Selected Poems, Mary Oliver)