New Unknowns for Old
On Scientific Mystery and Religious Mystery
After the days of large budgets for NASA during the height of the Cold War, when the human space program was a key component of national prestige, NASA reconfigured itself to focus on space science that could be performed within the budgets it could expect. Human spaceflight continued to sputter along with the Space Shuttle, which turned out to be extremely expensive to fly, and then the International Space Station, but these projects were the fragments of a once-grand vision than had been abandoned. No Congress was prepared to vote to approve funding for the Integrated Program Plan after the Space Race had been won.
NASA’s space science missions — Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, Hubble, Galileo, Huygens, WMAP, Kepler, New Horizons, and many more — have transformed our understanding of the solar system and of the cosmos entire. We now know much more about the large scale structure of the visible universe — its structure in space, in time, and in the distribution of matter — than we did before space science had the resources of the space program to extend its reach. We can be philosophical about the loss of a robust human space program when our compensation is expanded knowledge of the universe.
Black holes, for example, have gone from being a theoretical possibility to being one of the cornerstones of cosmology (largely, though not exclusively, a result of Uhuru observations of the Cygnus X-1 X-ray source). If big bang cosmology is roughly true, then the universe began with an initial singularity, and a singularity lies at the heart of every black hole, including the supermassive black holes that anchor spiral galaxies. However, the role of black holes in cosmology should give us pause, for these are nearly intractable unknowns for contemporary science.
The laws of physics and cosmology as we know them today can describe what goes on outside black holes, but they cannot guide us as to as what goes on inside a black hole, nor tell us about the structure of a singularity. So the universe is more-or-less anchored by singularities, but we cannot today produce a theory of singularities, other than how they were formed, and the theories that describe the formation of singularities in the visible universe are of limited utility in describing the initial big bang singularity.
Our inability today to formulate a scientific theory to describe singularities is a function of our inability to bring quantum theory and general relativity together as a single fundamental theory, which is, in turn, another of the great unknowns that modern science has bestowed upon us. These two disciplines have made it possible for us to plumb the depths of the universe to unprecedented levels of precision, and in so doing they have materially contributed to the unprecedented growth of scientific knowledge, but at the cost of introducing an unknown that was previously unknown to us. Our consolation here is that this is now a known unknown, and we can at least work toward bringing it within the scope of scientific knowledge.
Even in the brief history of scientific knowledge since the scientific revolution, we have been here before. Newton was able to formulate gravity in terms of mathematical laws, but he could not provide a theory of what gravity was. It took several hundred years of scientific development before Einstein could not only improve upon Newton’s formulations, but also offer a theory that not only predicted gravitation, but also explained gravitation. It would not surprise me if we had to wait some hundreds of years more until human beings can produce a theory that not only predicts the behavior of the universe better than quantum theory, but which also explains how quantum theory works. In the meantime, we are left with the mystery of singularities.
It is the distinctive character of scientific mystery that the solution of one set of unknowns delivers us over into yet greater unknowns, and implicit in this process of one mystery succeeding another is the possibility of scientific mysteries being infinitely iterated, which means, in turn, that the scientific project may be infinite. Depending on how one formulated this distinctive character of scientific mystery, it could be shown to be at odds with the distinctive character of religious mystery, or it could be shown to be a natural outgrowth of the west’s approach to religious mystery. For example, the dialectic of mystery and certainty that characterizes religious faith is mirrored by the contemporary dialectic of mystery and certainty in science.
I began to discuss this difficult problem of religious mystery in relation to scientific mystery in Folk Concepts of Scientific Civilization. A more detailed analysis of this dichotomy is needed in so far as the primarily religious central projects of past civilizations (mostly, of agricultural civilizations) are gradually reconstructed as secular central projects of industrialized civilizations, which may someday become the nucleus of a properly scientific civilization. In so far as the development of science as the conceptual framework of industrialized civilization mirrors the development of religion as the conceptual framework of agricultural civilization, the former has much to learn from the experience of the latter, which has a history running to thousands of years.
Arguably, western civilization had the advantage in this transition from a religious to a secular central project because, as I discussed in Perverse Rationality and Science and the Hero’s Journey, western Christianity was more a rational faith than a mystical faith, while those civilizations tangentially related to western civilization (i.e., those civilizations with which western civilization was engaged in an ongoing struggle), tended toward a mystical faith. Islam passed through a period of rationalistic faith during its Golden Age, but the legalism of Islam eventually gained the upper hand over philosophical speculation, the Golden Age came to an end, and orthodoxy reigned nearly unchallenged. The Sufi tradition in Islam is thoroughly mystical in character, so that even if it came to rival the predominant legalism of Islam, Islam would not thereby become a primarily rationalistic faith.
The Byzantine tradition was a mixture of east and west, and consequently its Christianity was a mixture of the rational and the mystical, but after the Byzantine Empire fell to an expansionist Islam, Byzantine Christianity became Eastern Orthodoxy, and mystical theology became dominant in the tradition.
Like the western tradition, the Jewish tradition was a rationalistic faith, but at the same time it was also a legalistic faith, which is less true of western Christianity. The shared rationalism of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions partially explains the symbiotic relationship between Jewish civilization and western civilization since the Middle Ages. The legalistic side of Judaism partially explains the symbiotic relationship between Jewish civilization and Islamic civilization, especially in the Iberian Peninsula but also in other domains of Islamic civilization.
Beyond the civilizations on the periphery of western civilization, there is a similar complexity in other traditions. Hinduism has both rationalistic and mystical elements in abundance. Islam, then, found itself bordered on both east and west by civilizations with a fundamentally different religious character than that which developed after the Islamic Golden Age. Chinese civilization has been rationalistic and legalistic, and those religious traditions that have come to the far east from India have been primarily mystical in character; India does not seem to have exported much of its rationalistic religious thought. The mixed fortunes of the adoption of science in these regions has been the mixed fortunes of western philosophical assumptions placed as template over indigenous philosophical assumptions (as I described in Perverse Rationality and Science and the Hero’s Journey).
If we take the theme of new unknowns for old as applying not only to individual mysteries (such as the religious mystery of the incarnation, or the scientific mystery of singularities), but to the whole structure of mysteries, we can understand how western civilization could pivot from religious mysteries as its object of ultimate concern (to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich) to scientific mysteries as its object of ultimate concern. It is this pivot that made the modern world possible. Western civilization sought explanations, first through religion and now through science. The quest remains as a constant motivating factor, regardless of the method of explanation or the mysteries approached by these methods.
