Reforming Science

It seems to me that our current understanding of the word superstition requires some clarification. According to etymonline.com, the Latin root of the word superstitious means “standing over or above.” According to wikipedia.org (as you can see, I’ve done my research on this), it was originally used by medieval scholars to describe practices and beliefs outside of or in opposition to Christianity. The Protestants then made use of the word in rejecting what they saw as excessive Catholic practices. Today it is primarily defined as a belief or notion not based upon reason or an explanation in terms of natural laws. So in one sense it seems to perform a similar function to the word heresy - a means of demarcating the orthodox from the unorthodox. Notice how it has transitioned from being a label for those who don’t believe in Christ to those who do (since most modern scientist regard all religious belief as superstition). Profound, that, and probably a very interesting historical study (assuming wikipedia has got it right).

Clearly a Christian would reject the notion that if something is not established by the scientific method it is therefore superstition. And yet there is this strong tendency among Protestants in particular to reject anything that smacks of magic or mystery. How much of this is a holdover from the Protestant Reformation and how much of it is the influence of our modern scientific culture, I don’t know. But fundamentally everything is mystery and magic from a human perspective because God is at the foundation and we can never fully understand Him. In Him we live and move and have our being - do we really think there’s nothing mysterious or magical about gravity because we can write down equations for it?

For those who have followed the Federal Vision controversy, charges of superstition are commonly leveled against the FV theologians for their views of the sacraments. But what do those who make the charges really mean? Are they simply being faithful Protestants by continuing to reject Catholic excess? I would argue that they are not, and that as Protestants in general we have become clouded in our understanding of what really needs to be rejected. I don’t have much of a historical understanding of the issues involved, but the mere fact that Lutherans have a view of the Supper that many of my fellow Protestants would regard as superstitious as the Catholic view is a strong indication that they don’t either.

It seems to me that the primary error the medieval Church fell into with regard to the sacraments was thinking that they could manipulate God with them. The sacraments are a gift from God, and He has told us how to use them and promised to give us Himself through them. The temptation, as always, is to take God’s gifts and use them however we please - to manipulate them for our own ends. The danger does not lie in believing God’s promises and looking for Him in the sacraments - the danger lies in thinking we can control His world. As Aslan explained to Digory, the magic always works - it must work - but it can work to our destruction if we try to manipulate it (as in the case of the witch) or it can be a means of grace (as it was for Digory since he waited until Aslan gave him the apple to heal his mother rather than taking it unlawfully).

The primary response to this charge of superstition by the FV theologians has been to focus on the ritualistic nature of the sacraments: they have power primarily as ritual. While this is a good and valid response, it seems to me that by itself it does not sufficiently challenge the assumptions behind the charge. The sacraments are magical, just like everything else in God’s creation. Christ the head communes with Christ the body in the Supper - it doesn’t get much more mysterious or magical than that. Believing this without fully understanding it is not superstition any more than believing that the preaching of the Word makes things happen inside a person’s soul (how do you explain that?).

Forgetting this leaves us open to making the same mistake - we just try to manipulate God with something else. You can’t manipulate God with the sacraments, but neither can you manipulate Him with the Prayer of Jabez, altar calls, the sinner’s prayer, historical confessions, the five points of Calvinism, or even the Bible. Rejecting Catholic superstitions has not kept superstitious practices out of the Protestant church. As sinful humans we will always be tempted to be like God - we will try to manipulate His world with anything we can get our hands on. The antidote is not to reject His world and the gifts it contains, but to accept them in humility and gratitude and use them in the way He has prescribed.

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John Byl has written an excellent book on approaching cosmology under the assumption that the Biblical account of creation is accurate, time scales and all. Taking this view immediately brings one into conflict with much of modern astronomy; a helpful list of the difficulties can be found in some of the books by Hugh Ross. The most glaring difficulty is the light from distant stars. Not only do we see light from stars that we think are thousands or millions of light-years away (a light-year is simply the distance light can travel in one year), but we see things happening at those distances (there are variations in the light from distant stars or galaxies on observable time scales). The common creationist explanation that the transmitted light was created at the same time as the stars doesn’t apply to light that is changing at large distances.

As Byl points out, there are four possible explanations for this: 1) the distances are not what we think they are, 2) Earth time is different from astronomical time, 3) the speed of light is not a constant, or 4) the light that appears to be coming from the distant stars is actually being created at closer distances. While any one of these are possible, I would favor the explanation that light travels faster than we think it does. The primary difficulty I have with the final explanation is that it too easily avoids the conflict inherent in the antithesis - modern astronomy can proceed unhindered by this explanation. The other three explanations (which are not entirely unrelated, since we use light to measure distances and times) have more direct scientific implications.

A varying speed of light per se does not violate modern scientific theories. There are researchers (secular, and therefore unmotivated by biblical assumptions) who investigate such an idea from time to time, and it has even been demonstrated that the equations of general relativity can be derived by assuming a spatially-varying speed of light. The theory of special relativity includes the idea that light is a constant independent of the observer. It is a local theory, however, and says nothing about the relative speed of light at two distant points. One of the primary reasons for assuming that the locally-measured speed of light is a universal constant is the Copernican Principle - why should the speed of light be any different here than it is everywhere else?

Since we investigate light by its interaction with matter (it’s emitted from, say, the atmosphere of a distant star and absorbed by a telescope), there is no way to tell if its speed is changing during the transit from there to here. If light traveled faster in regions devoid of matter, there would be no way to measure it from Earth. Let’s assume for the moment that light has some dependence on density such that it is faster when density is lower, and vice versa; such a dependence is not necessary (it could just have a spatial variation independent of density), but what are its implications? The average density of the matter in voids (the lowest density regions in the universe) is on the order of one particle per cubic meter. The average density in our solar system is closer to a million particles in the same volume. Notice the ratio of these two densities is about the same as the ratio between the age of the universe based upon modern cosmology and the age based upon biblical chronology (13 billion/6000 = 2 million). If light traveled a million times faster in the voids (where the density is a million times smaller than regions where we’ve measured the speed of light), we could see things at the edge of the observable universe on the time scale of thousands of years.

There’s a catch in the above reasoning, however. We can measure the speed of light to an accuracy of one part in a billion, so a gradual change with density (which was implied in the above estimate) would be detectable and a sharper transition is therefore required (and could be made to accommodate any change in the speed of light). Sharp transitions at particular densities or temperatures occur in other contexts (with entirely new results), such as Bose-Einstein condensation, so it is not a priori unreasonable.

There are a couple of space craft currently in the outer reaches of the solar system called the Voyager probes, and they have enough power to last until at least 2020. They should be able to reach the heliopause by that time (a transition between the material in our solar system and the lower density material in between stars that’s a factor of about 100), and any change in the speed of light would affect the signals being sent back to us. The light travel time at that distance is about 13 hours, so our current accuracy on measuring the speed of light translates into a measurable discrepancy on the order of microseconds.

One way to test this would be with a low-density vacuum. You can create a vacuum (a low-pressure region) by lowering the density or the temperature of a fixed volume of gas; the latter is what is done to generate the lowest pressure vacuums in the laboratory since it’s easier to slow particles down than to get rid of them. Even the best artificially-created vacuums have a million more particles per unit volume than the material in our solar system. A typical gas has about 10^29 (that’s shorthand for 1 with 29 zeros after it) particles per cubic meter, so these vacuums do reduce the number of particles by a significant amount (10^17). There may be technical difficulties associated with doing this in space, but if a vacuum was created starting with solar system material, one could in principle get down to the density of voids and see if this had any effect on the speed of light.

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The Bible and modern science each have their own creation story. On the face of it, the stories are obviously not the same. Many Christians attempt to reconcile the two, under the assumption that the contradiction between them is only an apparent one, but I hold to the view that the contradiction between them is real. There are generally two approaches to making Genesis and Big Bang cosmology tell the same story: 1) maintain an essentially literal (perhaps there’s a better word) exegesis to line up the Genesis account with current scientific theory (e.g., Hugh Ross) or 2) interpret the Genesis account figuratively, so that the burden of scientific accuracy is removed (e.g., Meredith Kline). I won’t interact with these approaches in depth here, other than to say that I find the exegetical creativity employed by them difficult to believe.

The alternative to trying to get the Bible and the Big Bang to just get along is to reject one or the other. Rejecting the former is not an option for the Christian, so the only choice left is to reject the latter. It is important to reject it for the right reason, however. The Big Bang is wrong because it contradicts the Bible - period. It is not wrong because it contradicts the scientific evidence. Science is driven - not just influenced, but driven - by metaphysical assumptions. Interpreting evidence is impossible without assumptions, and different assumptions give rise to different interpretations of the data. The question of whether or not God was involved in creation will have a profound influence on our interpretation of the creation event - how could it not?

In my view this issue is the most glaring manifestation of the antithesis in modern science. If there is anywhere we should expect a Godless approach to natural philosophy to get it wrong, it is here. I would argue that the consistently Christian approach to cosmological questions is to take the creation story our God has revealed to us as the starting point, as a constraint upon our science. To put it a bit more bluntly, we should believe what He has told us about how He created the world. There is nothing unscientific about this, unless you define science as interpreting data without any assumptions (in which case I say to you, good luck). A good analogy in modern cosmology would be the Copernican Principle, which states that there is nothing special about Earth or mankind. This assumption has had and continues to have a profound influence on the development of modern cosmology, and scientists maintain it firmly because they believe it, not because they’ve been persuaded by evidence for it. This is not stubbornness or bad science - you simply can’t do science without faith in something.

None of this is to say that all interpretations of the data are equal, or that data cannot be used to evaluate  underlying assumptions. What I am really arguing for is that a consistently Christian approach to natural philosophy will do a better job of explaining the world around us. Scientific theories based upon biblical assumptions will fit the data better because they are true assumptions. Even more than that, science is ultimately incoherent without biblical assumptions, and only a return to them will keep science from becoming more of a dead end than it already is.

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