“THE LURE OF THE UNKNOWN”

 

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Bruce Clear

September 16, 2003

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

 

I’ve always enjoyed watching magicians.  As a child or as an adult, to see someone do something that seems impossible, yet you know there is a reasonable explanation, is not only entertainment, it is something that stretches the mind.  The universal question is, “How did they do that?”  Perhaps the only discomforting part of watching a magic act is knowing that you’ll leave without having the question entirely answered.  “How did they do that?” 

In the reading, the noted economist John Maynard Keynes described Isaac Newton as a “magician.”  Isaac Newton, we all know, was a scientist and philosopher.  He was, in fact considered the very first of scientist of the modern world.  Isaac Newton gave birth to the scientific age that we have lived now for over three hundred years.  He earned the tribute granted him by the poet Alexander Pope who wrote these famous lines: 

 

Nature and Nature’s laws

Lay hid in night;

God said, “Let Newton be,”

And all was light. 

 

Newton’s name is virtually synonymous with scientific pursuit.  On what grounds, then, could he be considered a “magician?” 

According to Keynes, Newton solved riddles.  Before Newton’s mind shaped our thinking about the world, the ways of nature were one big mystery.  For thousands of years, people were content to live in that mystery, without understanding the world around them.  Newton was not content with mystery, and was determined to show that nature operated by strict laws:  gravity, motion, cause and effect.  Nature, to him, was not so much a mystery as it is a riddle to be solved.  The whole universe is a collection of riddles, and the answers are there to be discovered by looking more closely.  Just as you watch a magician, letting your imagination run wild to discover how the magician does it, Newton looked at the grand mysteries of Nature and answered, “Here is how this trick works.” 

 

God said, “Let Newton be,”

And all was light. 

 

The world has never been the same.  The history of civilization since Newton is marked by the human quest to understand the mystery and riddles of the universe.  So much of that riddle wasn’t uncovered until generations – even centuries – after Newton’s time: the theory of evolution, the motion of sub-atomic particles, the structure of human DNA.  More riddles are still before us. 

 

Riddles, it turns out, may be the strongest motivators of human achievement.  What we don’t know about life draws our interest more than what we do know.  It is true in almost every area, but especially in science and religion. 

 

In his book, The Discoverers, historian Daniel Boostin began his epic chronicle of the human history of discovery with these words: 

 

"The most promising words ever written on the map of human knowledge are terra incognita -- unknown territory." 

 

This is the story of our efforts to explore things we don't know.  That story includes the human search of nature -- from the distant galaxies to the tiniest elements within the atom.  It includes our exploration of the human organism, from the mysteries of genetic inheritance to the slippery complexities of the psyche.  The search for the riddle of the Unknown takes us into the territory of human meaning -- where we came from, why we are here, where we are headed. 

Over ages of human life, nothing has so engaged our minds and our passions as this quest to discover what we don't know.  

 

It is humbling to realize that there is far more that we don’t know than that we do know.  We know many of the rules of nature that govern the actions of stars and planets.  We know many of the rules of nature that govern how atoms and molecules work.  We know that the rules of the macro-universe of stars and planets are quite different from the rules of the micro-universe of subatomic particles.  We don’t know why the rules are different.   Most importantly, we don’t know how they coexist following different laws.  We don’t have a theory that unifies our understanding of nature. 

It is humbling to realize that there is far more that we don't know than that we do know.  And there are some things we thought we knew, but we don’t.  In fact, we don't even really know how the world began.  We've had some fairly good theories about this over the years, though those theories change.  For at least a genera­tion, we have had a very good theory called "the Big Bang."  The theory has worked very well, but some reputable cosmologists are raising serious questions about it, and we are left with the dilemma that while we think we have a pretty good idea about how the world began, we don't know for sure.

There is far more that we don't know than that we do know.  In fact, most of our knowledge, our personal knowledge, is based not upon experience, but upon hearsay.  If I am asked whether the earth orbits the sun or the sun orbits the earth, I would choose the first answer.  I choose the first answer not because of, but rather in spite of, my personal experience.  In fact, my personal experience demonstrates the opposite.  Day after day I watch the sun move across the sky above me.  But the reason I would say that the earth actually moves around the sun is because people who have looked into the matter more carefully than I have agree that it does.  And I believe them more than I believe my own observation. 

There is far more that we don't know than that we do know.  Probably what we know least about is our­selves.  Love, for example.  Why do we love and care for others?  Why is it so important to us.  Or, courage.  What is it that accounts for that inner strength that we all feel from time to time, to stand up for causes we believe in, to take risks in facing challenges that life offers?  Or hope.  What is the source of our hope?  What permits us to continue from day to day in expec­tation that in the end, all will be well?

Love, courage, and hope are three among many qualities about ourselves that are ultimately Unknown, perhaps Unknowable.  There is far more about ourseves that we don't know than that we do know.  We can have theories, as we have about the rest of the world, but so far poetry seems to tell us as much about our being human as any textbook does.

Oscar Wilde put it this way: 

 

“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?” 

 

Or, Thoreau said it this way:  “With all your science, can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?” 

 

There is far more that we don’t know than that we do know.  Since the beginning of human civilization, people have speculated about why we are here in the first place and, since we are here, how should we live?  Elaborate belief systems have been constructed about deities and miracles and afterlife.  In the end, though, no one knows for certain about such things. 

 

It is the lure of the Unknown, it seems, that does moti­vate the great achievements and deeds of human beings, both as cultures and as individuals.  This is true whether we are seeking answers to questions about the world around us, or answers to questions about our own inner life and soul and psyche.  

And yet exploring the Unknown sometimes seems threatening to some people.  They find comfort in the knowledge they have, and feel threatened by new ways of thinking.  In his time, Newton heard criticism that science would take away the passion of living because it would eliminate the mystery that exists in the world.  Once the magician shows how the trick is done, the show is over.  You might as well go home.  It is no longer entertaining, or alluring.  One phrase that was used is that “knowledge drives out wonder from the world.” 

Newton replied to that charge with these words: 

 

“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding some smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.  “

 

“The great ocean of truth,” he called it.  It is an apt metaphor.  He honestly felt that his discoveries represented only a tiny pebble of truth.  In the many generations since his time, more pebbles of truth have been gathered.  But there is still a vast ocean of pebbles still undiscovered. 

 

In the history of the human exploration of the Unknown, there have been two major paths we have most often trod:  religion and science.  Both exist to assist us in the quest of discovery -- to inquire into the Unknown.  The crowning characteristic of both is their attempt to explain the unex­plained.  If the Unknown were not so alluring, there would be no science and no religion.

 

And yet, it important, I think, to understand there to be at least two kinds of “knowledge,” one in the scientific sense, and the other in the religious or philosophical one.  Both fields lure us toward solving riddles of the Unknown, but each lures us down a different path, and it is a mistake to confuse the two. 

 

The path called “science” gives us knowledge that might be thought of as “empirical.”  It is knowledge that can be experienced by the senses and everyone can agree if they are shown all the evidence.  Test tubes, microscopes, telescopes, and other tools can validate that kind of knowledge.  For example, it can be demonstrated, even to me, why the earth must orbit the sun rather than the sun orbiting the earth.  Show me the charts and the models and show my why the other option just won’t work.  Knowledge of science is knowledge that can be tested and verified and confirmed

 

Knowledge outside of science is of a far different kind.  It is more experiential, existential, and perhaps intuitive.  The ways we experience life teach us lessons about life.  There are so many areas of the Unknown that can’t be demonstrated by scientific knowledge.  The whole area of human feelings, even if feelings could be explained by neurology or brain chemistry, still are personally experienced as mystery.  We don’t understand them well, or what to do about them.  How do I show my love to someone?   How can I heal my grief from tragedy?   What does it take to be happy? 

Another area of this non-scientific knowledge is ethics.  What do I believe to be right and wrong, and why?   Is morality simply what society teaches me, or is there such a thing as ethical truth.  Even social ethics is outside of the reach of scientific knowledge.  Is it right that millions of people have no health insurance?  Should same-sex couples be allowed to marry?  Was it right for us to have invaded Iraq in the first place? 

And of course the field of religion is almost entirely filled with non-scientific Unknowns.  Beginning with the existence of God continuing through the sacredness of certain texts, and on to the existence of some afterlife, there can be no scientific knowledge about any of it.  None.  And yet there is some level of feeling like we have knowledge here.  A devout theist’s belief in God feels like knowledge just as much as the belief of devout atheists feels to them like they know there is no God. 

 

Isaac Newton, the great magician and solver of riddles, was not able to see the different kinds of knowledge that science and religion offer.  He believed deeply that the same kind of study that would open up the secrets of nature would also reveal the secrets of the divine.  John Maynard Keynes continued is metaphor of Newton the riddle-solver, saying: 

 

“He did read the riddle of the heavens.  And he believed that by the same powers of his introspective imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely fore-ordained, the riddle of the elements and their constitution from an original undifferentiated first matter, the riddle of health and of immortality.  All would be revealed to him if only he could persevere to the end. . . .”

 

Newton was not able to realize how scientific knowledge could be different from religious or philosophical knowledge.  Scientific knowledge has grown by huge leaps since his time, but religious or philosophical knowledge, while some progress has been made, still leaves us with so many unanswered questions. 

 

The picture I have painted this morning of the two paths we use to explore the Unknown is not, I admit, all that reassuring.  The religious path provides some very profound answers about the Unknown, answers that can shape our lives and inform our passions and guide our values.  The problem is that religion's answers aren't very reliable.  They are far from certain.  Science, on the other hand, can give us some strongly reliable answers to questions about the Unknown.  The trouble is that they are not the questions that trouble us most: about how we should live, about how we should love, about how we struggle with right and wrong.

The lure of the Unknown, it seems to me, should guide us down both paths, and there is no reason that we should abstain from the lessons of each.  It is, I think, a false notion to suppose that science and religion can answer each other's questions.  If we want to explore origins of life, for example, look to science.  Those religions which insist on a mythical answer to a scientific question about how the world began are exploring the wrong path.  On the other hand, if we want to explore not the origins of life but the purposes of living, we should be asking questions of values.  If we are looking to create an ethical society, science is not designed to be a guide for our values.  The two great totalitarian experiments of the last century -- fascism and communism -- were both heralded by their creators as scientific ways of structuring society.

The Unknown continues to attract us, and we are fortunate that it does.  Our history as a species is enriched by its lure.  The paths of science and religion are both acceptable, as long as we keep clear the different questions being asked.  If there is any overlap, and sometimes there is, it is in our aspiration for discovery, our faith that we can learn more, that we can venture into the unknown; that we are willing to take that risk.

 

  The Unknown is often a scary place in which to venture, especially in questions of faith. 

Albert Einstein spoke of that venture into the Unknown, as experienced in science, but used the religious term "faith" to identify the way in which scientists approach it.   He wrote:

 

“Without the faith that it is possible to render reality understandable, without the faith in an inner harmony of the world, there could be no science.  This faith is and will always be the basic motivation behind every creative scientific idea.  All our endeavors, all the dramatic conflicts between old and new ideas are supported by the eternal desire for knowledge, the unshakable faith in cosmic harmony which becomes stronger the more difficulties loom before us.”  

 

Do we lament that the answers of both science and religion are insufficient?  Is it a dilemma that science is reliable but not particularly germane to human values, and religion is quite appropriate to values, but not particularly reliable?  It is a dilemma, it seems to me, that enriches life.  The lure of the Unknown has always been, and will always be, the greatest inspiration of the human story, and I affirm Boorstin's conclusion that:

 

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita -- Unknown territory.


 

READING

from The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eisley

 

Nature contains that which does not concern us, and has no intention of taking us into its confidence.  As we consider what appears to be the chance emergence of photosynthesis, which turns the light of a far star into green leaves, or the creation of the phenomenon of sex that causes the cards at the gaming of table of life to be shuffled with increasing frequency, and into ever more diverse combinations, it should be plain that nature contains the roiling unrest of a tornado.  It is not the self-contained stately palace of the eighteenth-century philosophers, a palace whose doorstep is always in precisely the same position. 

From the oscillating universe, beating like a gigantic heart, to the puzzling existence of antimatter, order, in a human sense, is at least partly an illusion....  This is why the unexpected will always confront us; this is why the endless frontier is really endless. 


 

READING

John Maynard Keynes

 

Why do I call him a magician?  Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood.  He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements, but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation of Babylonia.  He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty – just as he himself wrapped the discovery of the calculus when he communicated with Leibnitz.  By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.