Learning Journal #25 (3/28)

Every now and then in the enormous notebook that holds all my notes for all my classes, I'll have a page that is covered in hasty, scrawling cursive that doesn't fit quite on the lines. It's almost always got a huge star next to it that says, "For Field Study!" Today, I thought I'd talk about one of them.

One of my favorite TED talks is by Brené Brown, and it's called "The Power of Vulnerability." Apparently I wasn't listening very well in class because I was reading the transcription of her talk, and copied the following quote:

... we make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up. That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable, the more afraid we are.

My first question written right after this quote is: were people during the Renaissance more uncertain before or after the Copernican Revolution?

To start off, I've seen how much people during the medieval period accepted mystery. The play cycles that depicted Biblical stories were called mystery plays, so the idea that some things remained unknown wasn't a problem. I think this was also built into their cosmology, which of course continued into the Renaissance. Sure, they built their universe system, but they didn't have much definite proof to back it up, or to prove it wrong.

Then, of course, Copernicus came along and crushed it.

One of the books that I've included as one of my annotated sources is a book by Jamie James called The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe. While this book primarily focuses on music, it contains some wonderful explanations about how the course of science was forever changed by scientific discoveries that started with Copernicus, and which I think gives a bit of an answer to my question. He writes:

Picture to yourself, if you can, a universe in which everything makes sense. A serene order presides over the earth around you, and the heavens above revolve in sublime harmony. Everything you can see and hear and know is an aspect of the ultimate truth ... It is not simply a matter of faith: the best philosophical and scientific minds have proved that it is so.

This is no New Age fantasy but our own world as scientists, philosophers, and artist knew it ... Those ideals are gone forever. After the revelations of modern scientific enquiry, educated people will never again be able to face the universe, now unimaginably complex, with anything like the serenity and certitude that existed for most of our history. ... 

The asking of ... questions was the intellectual breakthrough, and the answers were as poetic and expansive as the questions, for there existed no data with which they were expected to conform, aside from the perceived order and beauty of creation. "Doing things" was disdained as unworthy of science, whose true purpose was to elucidate the fundamental unities that explain the function and thus the meaning of the phenomenal world. 

As scientific observation accumulated information, ostensibly to make the answers to the questions more precise, the universe revealed itself to be far more complicated than anyone had ever imagined. The assumption throughout centuries of science had been that there was a logic underlying the apparent chaos of creation, but that the human perception was too clouded and fallacious to discern it. By the nineteenth century science had abandoned that position, and the search for the fundamental unities became more and more a theoretical goal. An abrupt conceptual turnabout had taken place: whereas Plato had taught that anything the eye could see was illusory, modern science teaches that the only things that do exist are those we can see and touch... (from p. 3-5)

I know that was an absolutely enormous quote, but isn't it great? There were some others that might have been better, but I returned the book to the library, and that's all I can pull from the Google Books preview. As I see it, the discoveries which started with Copernicus did a couple of things. First, they made some things more certain. By giving the science and mathematics behind his observations, Copernicus introduced a new level of certainty about the structure of the universe to the world. However, it did another thing: it opened a whole new can of uncertainty worms, and these uncertainties were not just about how the universe was built, but about what that meant for humanity.

Science, of course, has been forever changed. While as a discipline it once accepted mystery and uncertainty as still valuable, now we've gone so far as to do exactly what Brené Brown was talking about: we've pushed for certainty. We need to see numbers, facts, reality. And yet, with every new discovery, it seems that the certainty we seek gets even further out of our reach. I've been watching The Fabric of the Universe on Nova recently, and it seems to me that the deeper you get into science and the universe, the weirder it gets, the more questions there are to ask, the more answers remain elusive. It's that whole, "The more you know, the more you know you don't know" sort of thing.

I guess it just seems to me that the more we get into trying to make things certain, the further we get from understanding them. Maybe there's more truth in mystery than we realize. Because really, in terms of defining God, my own experience has told me that the more people try to find tangible proof, the more it eludes them. Finding proof of God comes through faith—through accepting mystery. Or, as Keats would put it, through negative capability, "that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." It's only then that tangible proof comes.

I don't have time to fully explore what I'm thinking right now because I've spent so much time writing this already. But I want to explore later (note to self!) the relationship between perceptions and definitions of God and the controversy between faith and proof. That is, did the response to the Copernican Revolution initially encourage more proving, or more faith in God's mystery? For myself, I totally reject the idea of an unknowable, unexplained, undefinable God; I think He means for us to know who He is. But at the same time, we can't expect to prove who God is—faith is absolutely necessary. So we have to accept, but we shouldn't blindly and blithely accept; we should think, but not so much that we lose the ability to have faith. It's the entire controversy that we're currently discussing in my Christian History class—faith vs. reason. (Goodness. No wonder Martin Luther made such a beef about it.) I understand the concept, it's just difficult to verbalize. And it's even more difficult to mesh with the whole concept of changing perceptions and definitions of God as a result of the Copernican Revolution. Add this to the stack of things to think about ...