April 8, 2002

• Faith Vs. Superstition

  
  

  My neighbor and I had a very interesting conversation the other day.  Her husband was encouraging her to mail a check for $1800.  At the time he said this they had about $300 in the bank.  He's an over-the-road truck driver and its not inconceivable that he could get a load that would pay that amount.  It's unlikely that he would get such a load on a Friday afternoon.  But, he kept telling her that her unwilingness to put the check in the mail showed a lack of "faith."

  
  

  This is a definition of faith that drives me up a wall.  It actually isn't faith at all.  It's superstition.  A superstition is "belief in spite of the evidence."  Faith is "belief based on evidence."  There is a huge difference between these two concepts.

  
  

  I used to live in Minnesota, but I didn't grow up there.  I grew up in the south where only drunken idiots tried to drive on water.  The first week that I was in Minnesota there was a tragic incident where a group of men drove their truck onto a frozen lake, fell through the ice, and died.  (You don't actually drown in water that cold, hypothermia stops your heart while you are trying to hold your breath.)

  
  

  I didn't get why everyone was so upset about this.  That was because I had a completely different frame of reference.  I had no experience with Minnesota lakes in late December.  I didn't know that the ice on these lakes reaches a thickness of 2-3 feet.  In the years that I lived in Minnesota, I got used to seeing the road signs that were erected on area lakes in December and used as shortcuts until March.  Before I left the state nine years later, I understood the surprise and shock when the ice gave way beneath something as inconsequential as a pick-up truck.

  
  

  As a transplant from the south, belief that the ice would support the weight of a vehicle seemed gross and negligent supersition to me.  After I had experienced a Minnesota winter with actual air temperatures dropping to -40 for the daily high, I had a different perspective.  I recognized that driving on the ice was a matter of faith.  Belief based on experiential evidence is faith.

  
  

  Sometimes faith is misplaced.  The year that I moved North, there was a horrible blizzard on Halloween.  So much snow fell that it "quick-froze" in brittle layers on the water.  Even though the ice appeared to be solid, it wasn't.  The 2.5 foot thickness gave way under weights far less than it was reasonable to expect that it would support.  We all learned something about the nature of ice that winter.  The general rule doesn't always tell the whole story.

  
  

  A scientist may have faith in a particular theory.  Under testable circumstances the theory has been shown to offer a consistent explanation of the anticipated and confirmed result.  Quantum physics has shown over the past century that even the theories of hard sciences, physics and chemistry, are subject to an uncomfortable truth.  They are subject to a principle of Indeterminancy, which means that in any given set of experimental circumstances we can only say that there is a set probability of getting a particular result.  We may know that 95% of all atoms will behave in a particular way, but we also know that 5% of them will go off in a different direction, and the really uncomfortable part of the whole Indeterminancy Theory is that we cannot know in advance which atoms will go in which direction.

  
  

  In the old world of Newtonian physics, we had reason to believe that under 100% of circumstances known variables plugged into the equation would give us a 100% predictable result.  No physicist making such a claim today would make it through the Doctoral review process.  Today, physicists talk about the difference between a closed system in which it is possible to know all the variables and open systems in which the variables cannot be known because there is always another variable.  (This is a different concept from cosmological discussion of an open vs. closed universe which refers to the debate over whether the universe continues to expand, or is in a steady state.)  They recognize that there are no truly closed systems outside very elaborate laboratory experiments.

  
  

  In faith, the scientist can say that given the equations of quantum physics we will get predicted results 95% of the time.  It is superstition to say that the hard sciences offer us a way of comprehending absolutes.  Newtontian physics cover the general rules of cause and effect, but they don't tell the whole story.

  
  

  Steven Weinberg is a brilliant man of science.  He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979 and the National Medal of Science in 1991.  Dr. Weinberg won his aclaim for unifying two of the four basic physical forces in one theory.  Since then he has been the leading proponent of work toward a theory that would unify all four basic physical forces - the Theory of Supersymmetry - sometimes called the Theory of Everything. 

  
  

  There exists no experimental basis for belief that the Theory of Everything refers to anything real.  There is a lot of speculation about superstrings and either 10 or 11 dimensions of reality (six or seven of which collapsed in the first 10 to the -32 part of the first minute of the universe.)  But, there is no proof.  There is no evidence.  The amount of energy required for their existence has not been available since the very early moments of the Big Bang.  There is nothing other than a baseless hope that there might be other dimensions out there on which to build such a theory.  This is not faith.  Because there is a lot of evidence that points to the existence of only 4 dimensions in our reality, it is superstitious to hold a theory which counters that evidence.

  
  

  Yet, on the basis of Weinberg's superstitious beliefs about the nature of the universe, he has made a number of statements regarding the purpose and meaning of life.  He wrote in 1977 that humanity is alone in an "overwhelmingly hostile universe."  He holds that scientific activity is the only source of consolation in a meaningless world.  "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."  In a recent book he qualifies that earlier statement.  "I did not mean that science teaches us that the universe if pointless, but only that the universe itself suggests no point."

  
  

  Evidence does not rule out meaning as a real element of the universe.  Weinberg's belief in the pointlessness of reality exceeds the evidence.  I criticize my optimistic neighbor's willingness to hold to a superstitious belief that "everything will work out" under immensely improbable circumstances.  I cannot applaud a pessimistic scientist who makes the same mistake.

  
  

  Weinberg, Steven, The First Three Minutes, (New York, New York) Basic Books, 1977

  
  

  Weinberg, Steven, Dreams of a Final Theory, (New York) Pantheon, 1992

  
  

  Weinberg, Steven, Facing Up, (Cambridge, Mass) Harvard University Press, 2001

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