"THE WAY OF DISCOVERY"

"THE WAY OF DISCOVERY"

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, February 3, 2002

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

Each week we repeat in our Covenant our aspiration to "seek the truth in love." This seems to me to be one of life's great imperatives. This morning I wish to look at this idea as the human task of discovery, and I suggest in doing so that this process is not only one of the most important things we can do, it is also one of the most rewarding of human enterprises. It is also, as I'll try to show, often something quite different from what most of us first assume it to be.

It is a common perception that the way of discovery is mostly gathering information - that it is the accumulation of facts that we know to be true, or ultimately confirm to be true. In many ways, this understanding of the "search for truth" is mistaken. I want to look closely at the process of discovery, and in doing so I hope to point out what seem to me to be some of the mistaken ideas about discovering truth, and identify some other ideas that we normally wouldn't consider to be part of this process.

I propose to offer my thoughts this morning in the form of axioms about what makes up human discovery. Surely you remember axioms from high school geometry. These are propositions that teachers told us were self-evidently true, but it was our job to prove anyway.

Here is Axiom #1: If you want to live a life of discovery, you must be attracted to, not afraid of, life's great mysteries. The way of discovery is welcoming mystery and life's great unknowns.

Discovery is perhaps one of the most common human experiences. It begins with our earliest consciousness when we look around and try to make sense out of the world. Everything an infant encounters is new and puzzling, and the task of infancy is to make sense out of these things: fingers, sounds, colors, and flavors. Each new one is a surprise, a mystery, but there is joy in discovering their role in life.

This process, if we are lucky, never comes to completion. Life continuously grants us the gift of mystery - experiences and circumstances we can't easily explain or understand. Those who follow the way of discovery are alert, throughout life, to questions that have not been answered, or have no specific answer, for discoveries end when mysteries get solved.

Mystery is what motivates both science and religion. If a question about nature has a settled answer, there is no reason for scientific discovery. But if there are layers of questions about how things work, it is the job of scientific discovery to investigate.

Albert Einstein put it this way: "the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. ... (And this) is also at the center of religiousness."

The biologist Erwin Chargaff made a similar observation, but explained the scientific encounter with mystery in terms that sound almost spiritual:

"It is the ... sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same blind force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If {the scientist} has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist."

So it is mystery that makes both science and religion possible. Neither would exist if we had answers to our curiosities. They are both possible only because there are discoveries yet to be made. More importantly, science and religion can make more discoveries about ourselves and our world only if they are both open to new insights, new ways of viewing reality.

It is a commonly held view that science deals with fact and religion with superstition; that science is completely rational and religion is largely, if not completely, irrational; that science asks and answers completely different questions from those asked by religion. While there may be some truth to this under certain definitions of "science" or "religion," there are certain areas in which this claim is false.

Science and religion are two tools which are used for the same purpose: for discovery. Both ask questions about things we don't understand, and try to find answers we can live with. It is true that religion has been filled in history with its share of superstition and irrationality. But at its best, religion seeks the same goal as science: that is, to help us cope with those aspects of life which we don't fully understand. Science and religion are both, though, tools for discovery about the world in which we live.

This Axiom #1 has a corollary. You remember corollaries, too, from high school. As if axioms weren't frustrating enough, those self-evidently true propositions that you nevertheless were required to prove, then along come corollaries, the step-children of axioms that appear to be even simpler to understand, but just as frustrating to prove. Corollaries exist to make you feel like a fool when you think you have figured out axioms.

Anyway, the corollary to this axiom #1 is that the more comfortable you are with mystery, the more open you are to discovery. If mystery and doubt and unanswered questions make you uncomfortable, you will probably not like to go the way of discovery.

Richard Feynman, the physicist I cited in our earlier reading, had this to say about living in a world of mystery:

"You see, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the questions might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me."

So here is my first axiom, with its corollary: If you want to live a life of discovery, you must be attracted to, not afraid of, life's great mysteries. The more comfortable you are with mystery, the more available you are to discovery. The way of discovery is welcoming mystery and life's great unknowns.

We're ready now for Axiom #2 concerning the way of discovery. Here it is: If you want to live a life of discovery, you need to have room in your life for faith. By faith I do not mean holding to some kind of creed that is handed down by some divine source. That is not at all what discovery is about. In some ways it is the antithesis of discovery. It is about approaching life with a fundamental trust - which is the essential element of faith.

Another common view of discovery, as understood through science, is that it happens through what is sometimes called "the method of doubt," otherwise called "the critical method." It is held that we cannot accept as true anything that might possibly be false. This is the way of science and the way of discovery, we are sometimes told. But it is not.

The most important step of any scientific testing is forming a hypothesis that can be tested. Forming a hypothesis is, in fact, the stage of discovery. A hypothesis is, by definition, an idea which is not proven true, but in fact might be false. There is no point in testing any hypothesis unless there is some level of belief that it might be true. To make the effort to test an hypothesis is to put some trust in its potential truth. Therefore, it is every bit as important, and perhaps more important, to believe in something that hasn't been proven true, than it is not to believe.

But is the word "faith" justified here? The popular conception of faith is that it represents a belief that is unproven. In many cases, we speak of a person's faith as their belief system. We say that he is of the "Catholic" faith or she is of the "Buddhist" faith, and so on.

That meaning, I think, is a superficial understanding of faith. Deeper than the beliefs a person has is the level of trust that a person feels. The universal meaning of faith is "trust," and the specific types of trust are the various religious creeds we can identify.

Matthew Fox, the contemporary renegade priest, tells us that the biblical talk of faith is more properly understood as trust. He says it this way:

"The New Testament word most often used by Jesus for 'faith' ... in fact means 'trust' (pisteuein) in the original Greek. Jesus time and again assures people that 'your trust has healed you' [not 'your faith has healed you']. He recognizes the salvific power of trust. And he also laments of how little trust he finds in people. 'O ye of little trust' he says [rather than 'O ye of little faith].

Faith is trust. When we say someone is of the "Lutheran" faith, we mean by that the person has trust in the tenets of Lutheranism. When we say someone is of the "Jewish" faith, we mean that person trusts the teachings of the Hebrew religion.

In saying that the process of discovery requires an element of faith, I am suggesting that the discoverer has trust in what is to be discovered. The great discoverer Columbus was guided by such a faith - the solid trust that he could circumnavigate a round world. Any scientist who develops a theory to be tested has some faith, some trust - and usually a great deal of faith and trust - in the potential soundness of that theory, knowling all along that it might possibly be wrong.

Those who wish to live the way of discovery cannot demand that ideas must be proven true in order to be acceptable. Rather, we should find ways to give trust to ideas that are worthy of commitment even before proof can be made.

Here is Axiom #3: The way of discovery has a close resemblance to art. This axiom arises in part simply by observing the great discoverers. In scientific discovery, for example, groundbreaking work is done not by those who have new information, but rather by those who are able to perceive old information that everyone else has in new ways. Einstein created his theory of relativity, for example, not by finding out some new data that others didn't know. His theory was based on data available to any other astronomer or cosmologist. What was new was the way he thought about it. In fact, in his autobiography, he claims he first developed (or one could say "discovered") the theory when he was a teenager, long before he made careful studies of how the universe works.

Likewise, Darwin's theory of evolution did not arise from new information, resulting from experiments, than no one else had. Rather, his discovery came first in his mind, his imagination, his intuition, and that idea led to the experiments designed to confirm the perspective that already was in his mind.

The way of discovery has a close resemblance to art. Good art is felt to be an interpretation, with the artist offering a perspective on the world that communicates something meaningful to others. This is also the function of religion, whichever ones you may wish to examine. Each religious view is a different perspective of the same world, the same reality, the same collection of mysteries. Each seeks to communicate something meaningful through its own interpretation of the world we all experience.

It is not the case that Christians live in a different world than Jews, or that Hindus live in a different world than Buddhists. The world, having so much mystery in its make up, must be interpreted, and that is the role of religion. And when it is done effectively, it is done with the flair of art.

Even in something as solid and seemingly unambiguous as mathematics, the process of discovery carries with it an artistic kind of beauty. Listen to these words from the great English mathematician G.H. Hardy:

"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. ... The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful: the ideas, like the colours of words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no place for ugly mathematics. ... It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but ... that does not prevent us from recognizing [it]...."

Here is Axiom #4: There is are infinite layers of understanding to any real mystery. By this I suggest that in science or religion or art, we never complete our discoveries. There is always something more there.

The physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a book entitled, "Infinite in All Directions," in which he explores first the findings of astronomy about the universe, and then the findings of physics in atoms and other subatomic phenomena. He observes that we just as we continue to discover more and more parts to the macro universe, we continue to find more and more elements to the invisible world of atoms. Could it be, he wondered, that just as we think of the universe as being infinite, so also there are no boundaries to the reaches of atoms, electrons, superstrings and all that makes up the micro world? Could reality be "infinite in all directions?"

So it is, I believe, in religion. The way of discovery leads us to believe that there are ever new ways of looking at life and finding meaning in it. We no more finish our search for understanding the meaning of our own lives than we would finish the task of exploring the infinite universe. A person open to the way of discovery should be ready for infinite layers of mystery.

The famous scholar of animal behavior, Jane Goodall, said this:

"There are many windows through which we can look out into the world, searching for meaning. ... Most of us, when we ponder on the meaning of our existence, peer through but one of these windows onto the world. And even that one is often misted over by the breath of our finite humanity. We clear a tiny peephole and stare through. No wonder we are confused by the tiny fraction of a whole that we see. It is, after all, like trying to comprehend the panorama of a desert or the sea through a rolled-up newspaper."

In the reading from Richard Feynman, he speaks of trying to understand the rules of nature in a way that an observer would look for patterns to understand the rules of chess. In the example he gave, every time the observer begins to think he or she has a grasp on the rules, something new appears in which that rule must be perceived and interpreted differently. Each learning brings understanding to a deeper level, but there is always more to be learned.

I have now covered most of ways in which I understand the way of discovery to work. I summarize the axioms I've identified this way:

If you want to live a life of discovery, you must be attracted to, not afraid of, life's great mysteries. The way of discovery is welcoming mystery and life's great unknowns.

If you want to live a life of discovery, you need to have room in your life for faith - "faith" as trust in your own insights.

The way of discovery has a close resemblance to art.

There is are infinite layers of understanding to any real mystery.

Michael Polanyi was a philosopher of science whose work, more than most, bridged the fields of science and religion, and his primary work was on the topic of discovery. He was interested in how discoveries are made, and suggested that the method of science is not all that different from the method of religion.

In both cases we begin with our own experiences, some of which we don't fully understand. For example, we experience the vastness and mystery of the universe, or we experience a mysterious sense of responsibility for our fellow human beings. Based upon such experiences that puzzle us, we begin to wonder about the nature of the universe and our place in it. We use our imagination and formulate theories or hypotheses that help explain the mysteries. Our imaginations and observations and intuitions combine to give us tentative answers. We trust those answers, we believe in those answer strongly enough to want to test them.

They may or may not test true, but whether they do is really beyond the stage of discovery. Discovery is when we encounter and revel in the wonder around us. It is based on wonder, on imagination, on faith, on trust.

A cogent summary was provided by Einstein with these words:

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day."

READING by Richard Feynman, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out"

One way of trying to get some idea of what we're doing in trying to understand nature is to imagine that the gods are playing some great game like chess, let's say, and you don't know the rules of the game, but you're allowed to look at the board, at least from time to time, in a little corner, perhaps, and from these observations you try to figure out the rules of the game - what rules govern the movement of the pieces.

You might discover, after a bit, that when there's only one bishop around on the board that the bishop stays on the same color. Later on you might discover the law for the bishop as it moves on the diagonal, which would explain the law that you understood before - that it must stay on the same color - and that would be analagous to discovering one law, and then later finding a deeper understanding of it.

Then things can happen, everything's going well, you've got all the laws, it looks very good, and then all of a sudden some strange phenomenon occurs in some corner, so you begin to investigate it. It's castling, something you didn't expect. We're always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don't understand the conclusions. After we've checked them enough, we're okay.

The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting, the part that doesn't go according to what you expected. Also, we could have revolutions in physics: after you've noticed that the bishops stay on the same color, and they go along the diagonal and so on for such a long time, and everybody knows that's true, then ou suddenly discover one day in some chess game that the bishop doesn't stay on its color. Only later do you discover a new possibility, that a bishop is captured and that a pawn went all the way down to the queen's end to produce a new bishop. That can happen but you didn't know it, and so it's very analogous to the way our scientific laws are: they sometimes look positive, they keep on working, and all of a sudden some little gimmick shows that they're wrong and then we have to investigate the conditions under which this bishop change or color happened and so forth. You gradually learn the new rule that explains it more deeply.

Unlike the chess game, though, in which the rules become more complicated as you go along, in physics, when you discover new things, it looks more simple. It appears on the whole to be more complicated because, but ... every once in a while we have these integrations when everything's pulled together into a univication, in which it turns our to be simpler than it looked before.

Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out :

"You see, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much moe interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many tings I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the questions might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me. (Pp.24-5)

Mathematician G.H. Hardy (quoted from the Harvard thesis on Polanyi)

"I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our 'creations', are simply our notes of our observations. This view has been held, in one form or another, by many philosophers of high reputation, from Plato onwards. ..."

Erwin Chargaff, biologist:

"It is the same sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same blind force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If {the scientist} has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist."

Oscar Wilde (in De Profundis): The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "The highest [human] happiness ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable."

The physicist Lord Kelvin once paid a visit to an extensive electrical plant. He was given a tour by a young foreman who did not know who he was, and the worker gave him painstakingly detailed explanations of the basics of electrical science as manifested in the factory.

When the tour ended, Kelvin quietly asked his tour guide, "what then is electricity?" His guide, for all the technical explanations he had learned, could not answer.

"No matter," said Lord Kelvin kindly. "That is the only thing about electricity which you and I do not know."

Einstein: "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

Einstein: "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day."

Einstein: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

The story is told of, an possibly by, Alfred Einstein, who was asked by his hostess at a social gathering to explain his theory of relativity. Said the great mathematician, "Madam, I was once walking in the country on a hot day with a blind friend, and said that I would like a drink of cold milk."

"'Milk?" Said my friend, '"Drink I know, but what is milk?'

"'A white liquid,' I replied.

"'Liquid I know, but what is white?'

"'The color of a swan's feathers.'

"'I know what feathers are, but what a swan?'

"'A bird with a crooked neck.'

"'Neck I know, but what is crooked?'

""Thereupon I lost patience. I seized his arm a straightened it. 'That is strait,' I said; and then I bent it at the elbow. 'That is crooked.'

"'Aha!' said the blind man, 'Now I know what you mean by 'milk.!'"

Thoreau: "With all your science, can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?"

Steven Hawking {in Black Holes and Baby Universes}: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to govern? ...Although science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it cannot answer the question: Why does the universe bother to exist? I don't know the answer to that question."

James Martineau (in a sermon, "Help Thou My Unbelief"):

"Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctitites into the far spaces we cannot reach."

Jane Goodall {in Through a Window}: