This story is purely fictional, but I hope it sheds some light on how I think the world handles contradictions in the religious space.
When I was in 9th grade, I took a physics class, and my life was forever changed. You see, this was the begging of my journey of discovery that led to me eventually losing faith in science. This is how I came to know that science was not true.
It all started in the first few weeks of class. We began our unit on light, and I was enthralled. I had always loved light, and found it rather fascinating. Light was all around us, but I really knew very little about it. I would soon learn that my teachers and other great prophets of science were just as clueless. They had been making things up for years.
One of the first experiments we conducted with light involved passing a light through two thin slits of paper. When I saw what happened I as amazed. The light passed through the slots, but rather than casting two slits of light on the other side, they produced dozens of thing bars of light. Those bars in the center were the brightest, those further out where increasingly dim. It was really cool. My teacher then explained that light is, in fact, a wave. All waves, it turns out, have this "diffraction" behavior. We spent the next few days exploring the wave-ness of light. One experiment after another proved, without any doubt, that light was a wave. My faith in light's wave-ness grew, as did my faith in science and in my teacher.
Then the ball dropped. One day, I was reading on the internet, and I found a website that declared they would uncover the hidden secrets of light wave believers. They claimed, and it seemed so absurd, that light was not a wave at all. It was actually a PARTICLE. My first reaction was to laugh. I'd just spent weeks proving that it was a wave. My second reaction was to congratulate myself on being more intelligent and pious than these fools. I, of course, disregarded them entirely. But, over the next few weeks, a few things happened which made me think more about the issue.
One afternoon, I found out that one of my good friends was a light particle believer. I couldn't believe it. He was smart, well rounded, and very scientific. How could he believe such an absurdity. Well, after talking for a few hours, and trying to bring him back to reality, I discovered that he had a lot of evidence too. So I went home and started reading. I found out that there were dozens of experiments you could do that would prove that light was actually a particle, and not a wave as I had been taught. For example, you could put a thin plate on a special piece of equipment that was very sensitive to contact forces. You would then point a bright light at that plate, and you could actually measure the light particles pushing on the plate. Not only that, but scientists had built a "sail" that had actually been used in space to push things around with light.
I was dumbfounded. Apparently, all the "real" scientists already knew that light was a particle. They'd proven it time and again, and they'd done real practical things with it. So I went to my teacher and told him what I'd found. His reaction surprised me. He said that it was all a big conspiracy. The particle scientists were just offended by something and had left the wave scientists in protest. "Notice," he said, "that all of their 'experiments' require special equipment that you could never get access too." They claim the science is very complex, because that ensures that simple minded persons can't question them.
Well, I was relieved for a time, but the more I thought about the issue, and the deeper I looked, the less comforted I was. I became increasingly convinced that the particle experiments were not fake. I didn't know where to turn. I had witnessed the wave experiments first hand. I couldn't find any real flaw in them. Yet the particle experiments were sound too. I was stuck in two parallel contradictory worlds. Both were correct, yet they fundamentally contradicted one another. What was I to do?
Eventually the answer was simple, I must abandon science. After all, both theories rested solidly on the scientific method. If both were "true" by this method, and both were contradictory, then science itself was flawed. It was so obvious and clear. Science was simply unreliable. No longer did I live in a split world. Of course, I still had no idea if light was a particle or wave. And I could no longer reason with things in a "scientific" way, but at least I was free of the lie that was the scientific method.
Now, I think we can all agree that this is INSANE. After all, there is no reason that light must be either a particle or a wave. There is no real contradiction, as one does not negate the other. That said, I do still find it funny that scientists have yet to really resolve the matter. They simply coined the term "wave-particle" to describe the phenomena. At least once per generation they come up with a new, but inadequate, explanation for the behavior. But I digress.
Why is it that this story seems so absurd, yet we see the same thing in religious contexts all the time. I see people lose faith when the learn that scientists "know" humans came from apes. Or that the world is older than "the Bible says". Seeming contradictions result in a loss of faith, rather than a deeper search for truth. Personally, I have found that most contradictions between the gospel and science (or even within the gospel itself), are the result of a lack of understanding of one, the other, or both. In most cases, there was never a contradiction at all. When there was, it was generally because I didn't understand one side well enough. In other words, the facts did not contradict, but my understanding of them did.
There are still many situations where I have not yet resolved contradictions. Things I do not understand. But they do not hurt my faith. I see no need to chose a side simply because two things I believe are in contradiction. When I can't find an explanation, I simply file the data away in a special part of my brain. I revisit from time to time, and see if new information helps, but I can't deny the huge quantity of data in favor of each side, simply because of contradictions in a tiny subset of that data.
No comments:
Post a Comment