Science loves
consistency. You might even say that science is the study of finding
consistency in the universe via physical and mathematical models. By extension,
any truth seeker who wants understanding needs to find consistent facts,
explanations, and principles. Truth should always agree with truth.
Spiritual truths are
no different. Truths of a spiritual nature can only be true if they uphold the
other truths and facts of the universe. However, in the quest for spiritual
truths, it is nearly impossible to avoid seeming inconsistencies and conflicts.
Examples of apparent conflicts include questions such as:
- How does the notion that God
created the world align with a scientific evolutionary model?
- Why does a loving God allow
bad things to happen to good people?
- Why do spiritual experiences
of other people not always align with my experiences or the experiences of
those I trust?
- Why do spiritual writings
attributed to or inspired by God (who cannot lie and who knows all) seem
to conflict each other?
- Why are there different
interpretations or applications of the same truths?
- How can there be the
existence of a spiritual world with no detectable evidence in the physical
sciences of such a world?
The list could go
on. Like any good scientist, I have my hypotheses and explanations for many of
these conflicting truths, but I can't pretend that I have the definitive
answers. And I'm not going to address any of these particular ideas in this
post. However, I have learned that it is OK to live with a certain amount of
conflicting thought and inconsistency. I've learned to be comfortable with
this, not from faith or spiritual experiences, but from my knowledge of
scientific history.
Example 1: Light and
relativity
In the 19th century,
James Clerk Maxwell presented some well-defined laws on electromagnetism
(think, light and electricity, and magnetism). One of the
derivations of his laws concluded that light has a certain defined speed, namely, ~300,000 km/s. However,
Isaac Newton's laws of physics offered a slightly different perspective on the
speed of light. This conflicting viewpoint created some consternation in the
scientific world. Let me paint a more detailed picture of the conflict.
Here's how it goes
in Newtonian physics. Imagine you are riding in a train going 100 miles per
hour, and a professional baseball pitcher is on a stationary platform next to
the train. As the train passes the pitcher, he throws a fastball going the same
direction that the train is going. When you look out the train window, you see
the ball going 100 mph right next to the window of the train. Because you are
viewing the ball from the frame of reference of the train going 100 mph, you
will see a ball that is apparently holding still next to you in the window.
Eventually the ball slows down due to air resistance and falls to the ground
from gravity, but for a moment, it appears to be hovering next to your window.
Both train and ball are whizzing by the surrounding scenery at 100 mph, but
relative to each other they are holding still.
Now imagine a
related scenario. You are now standing outside the train on the stationary
platform, and the pitcher is riding on the inside of the train. He's somewhat
anxious to practice his pitch, and decides to practice his fastball on the
train. Watching from the outside you see the train going by at 100 mph. Looking
through the window, you see the pitcher blast a pitch off from inside the
train. From the pitcher's perspective, he's sent off the ball at 100 mph. From
your perspective on the ground, the ball is going an amazingly fast 200 mph
(100 mph from train + 100 mph from pitch). This is all basic Newtonian physics.
You could then
imagine a similar experiment with a light beam. You climb in a rocket ship and
blast off near the speed of light. At the same time, a friend on the ground
turns on a flashlight and sends out a beam of light. Based on the baseball
analogy, you would expect to look out of your rocket ship window and see an
apparently still, or at least slower moving, beam of light.
In the related
scenario, you are outside on the ground and your friend with the flashlight is
on the rocket ship. When your friend turns on the flashlight, you would expect
to see the beam of light shoot off at a speed almost twice that of the speed of
light (speed of rocket + speed of light from flashlight).
However, back to our
contradiction, neither of these outcomes
are what Maxwell's equations would predict! The equations don't specify the
speed of light relative to a certain object. They indicate the speed of light
is always the same (~300,000 km/s). But
how could that be? One person is on a rocket ship going near the speed of light
and sees the light going at 300,000 km/s, and another person on the stationary
ground sees the same light going at 300,000 km/s. Conflict!
It turns out, this
conflict ultimately led to some of the greatest revolutionary truths about
space and time. Some careful experiments in the late 1800s (see, for example,
the
Michelson-Morley
experiments) showed that the speed of light is always the same, no matter from
what vantage point you're observing or how fast the object that's shooting out
the light is already moving. So Maxwell was right, and Newton was wrong?! Or
was something more complicated going on?
Albert Einstein and
others took to this contradiction and re-worked Newtonian physics for when
objects are moving near the speed of light and discovered some new physics. In
Einstein's special theory of relativity, incredibly odd things start to happen
near the speed of light. Depending on your vantage point, objects going near
the speed of light shrink, become more massive, and time slows down. Even
stranger, things that occur simultaneously in one vantage point happen at
different times in another vantage point. It turns out the misconception was
that time is always constant,
when the
reality is that it becomes malleable when things are moving near the speed of
light. Einstein's later work in his theory of general relativity made some
further extensions showing that time and space are interconnected with mass and
gravity and acceleration. This theory has explained behaviors of
planets,
stars,
galaxies,
black
holes, and other secrets of the cosmos with remarkable accuracy.
This is cool
science, and an important discovery of the 20th century. However, it's
important to point out that while Maxwell and Newton did not paint the full
scientific picture, neither is it correct to characterize one of them as
"wrong" or "right", or to say that all of physics was
overturned. Newton's and Maxwell's theories are in full use today as they were
originally formulated. Newtonian physics works well enough for
NASA to direct
spaceflight within the solar system. The conflict didn't mean everything that
was known in the past was wrong; it meant that there were additional truths
that needed to be understood. The new truth refined the old understanding and
provided a more universal model of the laws of physics.
Example 2: Quantum
mechanics
While the
understanding of the physics of the cosmos was being revolutionized, another
smaller revolution was going on in parallel at the atomic level. The elementary
nature of light had been studied for thousands of years, and in the past few
hundred years it had begun to be understood as a wave. Like ocean waves and
sound waves, it could bend and diffract, interfere with itself, and it
possessed an amplitude (intensity) and frequency (wavelength). Back to
James Clerk Maxwell,
his equations and subsequent experiments revealed that light could
mathematically be described as self-propagating waves of electric and magnetic
fields, giving light the new title of electromagnetic radiation.
One of the
well-known properties of waves was that you could have a continuous range of
frequencies and amplitudes. However, some strange things started to happen as
scientists began investigating light's interaction with atoms. It had been
observed that ultraviolet light hitting a metal plate would cause ejection of
electrons, also known as the
photoelectric
effect. Based on the wave theory of light, the energy of the light was
transferring energy to the electrons of the metal and ejecting some of the
electrons off the surface. Because the energy of a wave is based on the
frequency and amplitude, you should be able to use either of those levers to
increase the energy of the wave and the subsequent velocity at which the
electrons were ejected. As an analogy, you can increase the energy of waves
hitting a ship in the ocean by increasing the frequency with which the waves
hit the ship. Or you could keep the frequency constant and instead increase the
amplitude of the waves to make some giant waves that would really slam the
ship. (As an interesting side read, check out the Wikipedia article on
Rogue Waves).
To the dismay of
scientists who thought they had things figured out, light in the photoelectric
experiments didn't work exactly like other known waves. Increasing the
frequency of light would increase the energy with which individual electrons
could be ejected from the metal. But turning down the frequency and increasing
the amplitude did not create a similar result. Re-enter Albert Einstein.
Einstein, building on the work of Max Planck, suggested that light was
subdivided at a basic level into particle-like packets of energy called
photons, and the energy of a given photon is entirely based on the frequency of
light. Amplitude is simply the number of photons in a given light ray. So at
the atomic level, you could have many, many low-energy photons knocking into
electrons on the surface of a metal plate, but unless the frequency of the
individual photons was high enough, none of those low-energy photons could
eject an electron with the same velocity (i.e. energy) as a high-frequency
photon. And if the frequency was low enough, the light wouldn't be able to
eject electrons at all. This seemed to prove conclusively that light had
properties of a particle, and wasn't strictly a wave. Contradiction!
Furthermore, some
later experiments showed that electrons, which were known to be discrete
particles,
could
behave in a wave-like matter. They could be diffracted and form
interference patterns and be described by amplitude and frequency. So a known
particle was behaving like a wave in certain circumstances, and a known wave
was behaving like a particle in certain circumstances. Double contradiction!
Other experiments
and theories on these and other atomic scale quantities ultimately led to the
development of quantum mechanics. If you study quantum mechanics, you'll find
it chock full of
behaviors
that seem to contradict known physical phenomenon. The
particle-wave duality of
microscopic objects is just one of such odd behaviors. It took many experiments
and hair-pulling theoretical calculations to fully develop quantum mechanics as
a mature physical and mathematical theory. However, this work has paid off in
the development of chemistry, optics (think lasers), semiconductors, and many
other areas of science that impact our lives today.
Example 3: Quantum
Mechanics and General Relativity—unsolved!
Examples 1 and 2
exhibited scientific breakthroughs that led to a revolution in understanding
nature during the 20th century. General relativity opened the doors to
understanding the cosmos in ways that shifted the paradigm of science. Quantum
mechanics opened the doors to chemistry and physics at the small scale.
Despite these major
achievements, all the mysteries of the universe are not yet resolved. When
applying the gravitational laws of general relativity on the small scale of
quantum mechanics, there are some equations that break down. Unlike other
forces in nature, there is no fundamental quantum mechanical understanding of
how gravity works. Physicists today are working on resolving that problem
experimentally and theoretically. See for example the article
Relativity
versus quantum mechanics: the battle for the universe.
Does this conflict
distress scientists? Perhaps a bit
—it would be nice if we could just
understand all the basic laws of the universe and then get around to using them
to our advantage. But in the spirit of learning and discovery, the conflicts
indicate there is new knowledge out there waiting to be uncovered. Quoting
John H.
Schwarz at Caltech:
"Major advances
in understanding of the physical world have been achieved during the past
century by focusing on apparent contradictions between well-established
theoretical structures. In each case the reconciliation required a better
theory, often involving radical new concepts and striking experimental
predictions."
While we don't know
how this will all turn out, we do know that within certain defined parameters,
general relativity and quantum mechanics are incredibly useful and accurate
theories. And despite some conflicts, scientists have faith that there is a better
theory that will reveal even more about the universe.
Conclusion: The
spiritual world
I began this post
addressing spiritual questions and contradictions. How do quantum mechanics and
general relativity relate to spiritual things? Like the examples given above,
some profound spiritual truths may appear, even to the brightest minds, to have
unresolvable or untenable conflicts and contradictions. Unfortunately, it seems
to be a common pattern that when individuals run into unresolvable conflicts in
the spiritual world, they feel that they have to choose one idea and abandon
another.
What the examples
above have taught me is that you can always hold onto the truths you know and
wait for further light and knowledge. In the meantime, you don't need to throw
the baby out with the bath water. You can typically accept the major tenets of the
competing truths, understanding and accepting the assumptions and limitations
of each side. You don't have to choose
whether God made man or whether man evolved from various hominid species. Learn
all you can from the spiritual world about God's creative processes. Learn all
you can about what scientists have learned about the evolution and origins of
man. Embrace the truth and acknowledge the assumptions and limitations of
knowledge from both sources. Then get excited about the conflict—you can know
there is more to learn!
So the next time you
run into a conflict or contradiction, remember Einstein, Maxwell, Planck,
Newton, and other scientists who struggled to find new meaning with the
revelation of new scientific knowledge. Think of the quantum mechanical
microelectronics in satellites whizzing around the earth using the theory of
relativity to correct for distortions in time and space that allow your smart
phone to give you
exact
GPS coordinates. Amazing!
Embrace the
uncertainty along with the certainty. As a scientist who believes in learning
and progress beyond this life, I'm excited about all the things I have yet to
learn while I'm alive and all the things I will have yet to learn in the world
to come.
