Light in Conflict

Engraving of Newton using a prism
to split white light into different colors.

One of the topics in my Light, Color and Vision course is the historical development of our understanding of light, color and vision, from early Greek philosophers to Albert Einstein. A critical and somewhat tragic chapter is that of the Englishmen Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton, colleagues and rivals during the dawn of modern science.

Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703) was a highly skilled experimenter who contributed to the study of Mars and Jupiter, behavior of gasses, understanding of elastic media (e.g. mechanical springs), fossils, and early microbiology, having built the first compound microscope. He was a leading member of the Royal Society, the world’s first scientific organization, through which he had contacts—and sometimes disputes—with many of the leading Europeans in the field of natural philosophy. Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) was a first-rate mathematician, who invented calculus and gave a rigorous mathematical foundation to the study of motion of objects. Among other things, he had discovered that white light could be split into a rainbow through a prism, and developed the corpuscle theory of light, in which light was pictured as carried by miniscule, massless particles, with different colors corresponding to corpuscles of different sizes. Their relationship got off to a rough start when Hooke strongly criticized the first paper Newton submitted to the Royal Society discussing his discoveries and thoughts about light. It deteriorated further over Newton’s theory of gravitation, for which Hooke tried to claim partial credit and Newton went out of his way to deny.Newton then withheld publication of his book on optical phenomena until after Hooke’s death to deny him the opportunity to criticize it, and while Newton served as president of the Royal Society, the only known portrait of Hooke and a collection of his writings disappeared.

The two men’s theories of light were incompatible with each other.  Hooke pictured light as disturbances that propagate through a medium, like ripples on the surface of a pond, while Newton saw it as tiny balls passing through space and bouncing off surfaces. Waves are collective motions while particles are discrete things.  Which theory provided the best description of reality was an important question, but their disagreement went far beyond that to one of self exaltation and discrediting of the other, even to the point (at least in the case of Newton) using power and personal reputation to repress views with which he disagreed.  It worked for a while—for the next century most scientists held to Newton’s corpuscle theory, but then work by scientists including Thomas Young, Augustine Fresnel and James Clerk Maxwell increasingly supported its rival, and by the nineteenth century wave theory emerged victorious.

The victory was so complete that when a young, then unknown Albert Einstein published a paper seeking to explain a perplexing phenomena know as the photoelectric effect, he felt obliged to insist that his radical solution was a mere heuristic and shouldn’t be understood as a physical reality.  His idea was that light energy comes in discrete packets and different colors corresponded to different amounts of energy, a very particle-like behavior. Despite his claims of it being mere heuristic, the scientific community initially reacted quite negatively, and some historians believe that this idea delayed his receiving the Noble Prize.   Yet discoveries over the next couple decades showed that not only light, but also electrons, protons, and other subatomic entities are strictly neither waves nor particles in the classical sense.  They possess both particle-like properties and wave-like properties.  They are strange entities that are so different from everyday experience that even the best minds have a hard time explaining them conceptually, despite having mathematical equations that describe their behavior well allow allow us to design semiconductors and lasers.  In the end, Hooke and Newton were both partially right, and reality is stranger and more subtle than either imagined.

I look at the battles between Hooke and Newton, and it reminds me of the so-called debates on origins.  There are plenty of people on both sides that are so convinced that they possess the truth that they will attack the integrity and intelligence of their opponents, repress dissent in the classroom or the pew, and even undermine the idea that objective truth exists.  But I wonder if anyone really has the complete truth.  After all, both sides have persisted now for several generations, and it is rare for ideas and positions that contain no truth whatsoever to last that long.  I believe there are good reasons to believe that both sides are correct in some aspects.  When I consider the work of an infinite creator and how our universe and life came to be, I suspect that reality is stranger and more subtle than any of us can imagine.

Genesis in Context

It is easy to underestimate how much cultural context colors our understanding, particularly for those who have not had significant interactions with other cultures.  This can be seen in modern reactions to how Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn describes African Americans.  Although considered by many as a masterpiece of American literature, the book has from time to time been the target of efforts to remove it from libraries or school curriculum, in part for its use of the N word to describe African-Americans.  In twenty first century American society that word is widely understood to carry a lot of derogatory connotations and we rightly oppose its use in almost all circumstances.  But Huckleberry Finn is not a product of twenty first century American, but nineteenth century society, a time when the N word was widely used to describe African Americans, who were often viewed as inferior to whites, perhaps even sub-human.  The irony is that Huckleberry Finn takes a stand against that attitude.  Although a number of characters treat Jim, the runaway slave, as little more than an animal, an important theme of the book is Huckleberry’s growing realization that Jim is a person just like him and the growing bond between them.  The author portrays Jim having a more noble character than many of the white people who populate the story.  The book refutes the foundation on which were built the racist attitudes of his day.  To demand that Huckleberry Finn conform to modern ideas of politically correct language detracts from the more important message the author is making.

The importance of understanding the cultural context is even more important when it comes to Genesis.  Genesis is not a modern work.  It was written several millennia ago in a Middle Eastern society thoroughly surrounded by a pagan world view.  It shares a number of elements with the contemporary Egyptian, Sumerian and Chaldean creation myths.  These include the world starting in a dark, watery chaos, the sky is something like a dome (the “firmament”) placed above the earth, humans formed from mud/dust/clay, plants and animals created in current forms, and a time scale far shorter and more recent than modern understanding.  But there are also radical differences that would not have been missed by the original audience.  Rather than a pantheon of gods and goddesses, each with their own area of power, emerging from the primeval waters or (often incestuous) procreation, there is a single, all-powerful God who wills the world itself into being.  Creation of different parts of the world happens not through haphazard processes including rivalries, murder and sexual liaisons, but through an orderly, intentional, fundamentally good process.  Sun, moon, earth, sky and sea are portrayed as inanimate objects, not deities; the author of Genesis declines to even dignify the sun and moon with names.  Humans are not afterthoughts, a result of rivalry between different gods, or made to be slaves of the gods.  Rather they are created in God’s image as sub-rulers of the world in a special relationship with Him.  Genesis’s view of the natural world and humanity’s relationship with it—much closer to the modern understanding its contemporaries in many respects—is unprecedented in the ancient world.  In contrast to both contemporary and modern accounts of origins, Genesis offers very little information of the mechanisms through which things came to be; the description of God forming the man and breathing into his nostrils in Genesis 2:7 is about the most detail offered.  Compare that to pages after pages or even books of describing the activities of pagan gods or the formation of galaxies and geological formations.  This lack of detail about the mechanisms suggests to me shrewd planning by a divine author anticipating how understanding of the physical world would change with time; descriptions of the mechanisms by which we now believe the world came into being would have been incomprehensible to the original audience, and those which they would have found reasonable would be nonsense to the modern mind.  The way Genesis seems anticipate modern understanding of the inanimate, orderly nature of the physical world, workings of natural processes, and humanity’s power over the Earth, convinces me that Genesis is a result of divine revelation.  In its historical and literary context, Genesis serves as a powerful refutation of the pagan world view and a foundation for teaching God’s people how to live in covenant relationship with him and the world.  To demand that it serve as a scientific text teaching us how and when the world came into being detracts from the far more important message the author is making.

The Destruction of Mistruth

My hometown was shocked this past week by the horrendous murder of an expectant mother. Another woman had befriended her, was taking her to a doctor’s appointment, then apparently killed her and cut the child from the mother’s womb, trying to pass off the child as her own when she took it to the hospital. It is difficult to comprehend how someone could reach the point of carrying out such a barbaric act, though one pointer is claims she had been making. She had been (falsely) telling the young mother, neighbors and others that she was pregnant, even buying baby things, and it seems that efforts to maintain her “truth” led to the destruction of another family.

There is a disturbing trend in our society of being cavalier about truth and basing it more on what one’s group thinks than any external reality. At one end, it can be seen in prevalent academic theories that assert that the only “truth” is what the reader or the group decides there is in a text or history. At the other end, there are politicians making claims and crafting legislation based on “facts” generated by talk shows and related circles. Underlying all of this is a great arrogance, dismissing or demonizing those who disagree, where “being right” is more about winning the social battle than really understanding the world we live in. And now this attitude seems to even be creeping into what would seem to be the last defenders of Truth, which should make us all afraid.

As both a scientist and a Christian, I am connected to two groups that continue to claim their respective truths are not human inventions but based on an external reality—the physical world and God, respectively. Yet the clashes between the two groups over issues such as origins are legendary, and I am troubled by how quickly both sides are often to resort to strategies that cheapen Truth. For example one prominent radio preacher (John MacArthur) states that “evolution is not scientific. Evolution is not reasonable.” In other words, he claims greater expertise on what “science” is than thousands of scientists, who apparently suffer from limited reasoning capacity. On the other side, Richard Dawkins has called those who don’t believe in evolution “ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” What bothers me is not the passion—whether or not the world has a creator is an extremely important question. Rather it is how quick many on both sides are to dismiss arguments they disagree with by focusing on the motivation of the others, using double standards for evidence, or simply ignoring them rather than do the hard work of studying the opponent’s arguments to separate the truth from the error.

It is often much easier to employ arguments to undermine the integrity and truth claims of the opponent than to take them seriously and counter them. But the more we undermine the truth of the other, the more we tend to undermine truth itself. Truly seeking the truth requires humility where we are willing to admit we could be wrong about some things and may never know everything. I pray that we be a little less concerned about being right, and more on understanding truth, before we kill Truth and leave ourselves orphans.