Outdated Truths

How understanding changes

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." 
- George Bernard Shaw

The possibility of intellectual growth presumes that one’s understanding is not constant. Our understanding changes. And this change is not always a ‘building upon’ either; it involves deconstructing previous certainties. For millennia, we thought that objects were naturally at rest and they needed some force in order to move. Not only did we have to correct this understanding, we had to deconstruct the entire framework within which the questions were asked because ‘being in motion’ and ‘being at rest’ are not objectively distinct states. (I am at rest relative to my fellow passengers and in motion relative to the city we are flying over.) This is just one of a million examples of course.

When seen in this way (from a collective, historical perspective), does every truth become outdated at some point? Absolutely not. When we highlight those aspects that we got wrong in the past, we are merely taking for granted all that we got right.

The point is that understanding does not develop like building blocks stacked on top of each other because understanding envisages the whole from the outset. Therefore every step after that is partly corrective. Primitive man didn’t just understand some tiny aspect of the universe. The scope of his understanding spanned the entire universe (e.g. as formed through the mating of waters - Abzu and Tiamat) no more or less than ours does today.

Why does understanding envisage the whole? Because the primary thing we are interested in is meaning, to make sense of the reality that we find ourselves in. When I get a glimpse of the whole, I ultimately find greater existential security and direction. And in searching for the whole, I find more and more of it, like a loading image that gets less and less blurry. The search for meaning is the primary motivation for understanding particular things. We didn’t discover nuclear energy because we were searching for more energy but because we were searching for the fundamental structures of reality. Why were we searching for these structures? Because we were trying to make sense of the reality we find ourselves in.

Which truths will become outdated?

Suppose a Christian asked himself a few questions but first decided that he would be completely honest with himself. There would be no one there to judge him. This would be a moment of raw honesty.

Imagine the world ten thousand years from now. Recall that ten thousand years ago, we were just starting to leave behind millennia of nomadic life to settle in agrarian communities where civilization (poetry, literature, geometry, laws, etc.) could develop for the first time. The questions then would be something like this: What is my level of certainty that:

1. ‘Ten thousand years from now, people will continue to believe that Jesus is God’?

In comparison, what is my level of certainty that ‘Ten thousand years from now, people will continue to believe that:’

1. ‘…an even number squared is even.’?
2. ‘… the earth is not flat but (approximately) spherical.’?
3. ‘…the sun is one of innumerable stars in the universe.’?
4. ‘…gravity and velocity dilate time.’?

If the Christian had to choose, in all honesty, which of these statements he was most certain about, which would we choose?

For myself, I can say that I am most certain about #1. I do not say that lightly or flippantly. I say it for very specific reasons.

The evolution of understanding

In the evolution of animals, we recognize adaptive traits and maladaptive traits. We imagine that some genes are better than others. In reality, there is no “better” or “worse” gene in any absolute sense. We merely regard the genes that have replicated their way through history as the best because they have replicated their way through history. This is a circular definition of “better.” It would be like two Romans in the first century saying:

• Person 1: How do you know that the Empire represents a better form of government than the Republic?
• Person 2: Because otherwise we would still be in the Republic and not in the Empire

So too in the evolution of understanding, how are we to know if some better understanding of past generations has fallen by the wayside while some inferior understanding has gained greater popularity? One way to resolve this is to agree upon what “better” means.

For argument’s sake, say we establish that “better” means “experimentally verified” (i.e. no known experiment disproves it). This is fine, but how does such truth connect to the very purpose of understanding, which is to find meaning? Without this connection, it may be deemed trivial even while it is accurate. If people in a future generation have countless volumes of experimentally verified truths available to their brains instantaneously, these too may be considered “outdated” if they do not provide existential security and direction. Therefore, even if we cannot precisely define it, we must admit that “better,” in any enduring and universal sense, means more meaningful.

Even today, a person may be ecstatic at discovering something about the universe in one phase of life but then find all of it dull and wearisome in another. Having found the answers to innumerable questions about the physical world, they may find themselves speechless before the deeper questions that undoubtedly surface: “Why does it matter?” Questions like that can undermine one’s entire life. Often, we find these existential questions surface precisely when we feel the world moving on without us (i.e. when confronted with the weight of our mortality). Sadly, this was seemingly the case with the great mathematician and physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who penned this letter a year before his death:

My dear friends: Bohr, Einstein, Franck, Herglotz, Joffé, Kohnstamm, and Tolman!

… In recent years it has become ever more difficult for me to follow the developments in physics with understanding. After trying, ever more enervated and torn, I have finally given up in desperation. This made me completely weary of life .. I did feel condemned to live on mainly because of the economic cares for the children. I tried other things but that helps only briefly. Therefore I concentrate more and more on the precise details of suicide. I have no other practical possibility than suicide, and that after having first killed Wassik. Forgive me …

– Paul Ehrenfest (committed suicide at age 53)¹

Timeless truths

So long as there are human beings, the search for meaning will continue. This search has been there as far back as we look in human history, not by chance, but because it is constitutive to being human (homo sapiens is an apt name). There is no reason to believe that the search will abruptly cease. I have found in my own life and in that of many others that in the encounter with Jesus people find meaning that transcends the limits of the physical universe and even the threat of nonexistence. Such meaning does not pull them away from the world. On the contrary, they find that the structure of reality - mathematics, the physical universe, life, and all that we uncover through patient labor - is part of a meaningful whole. This assures us that it does matter and that we do matter despite our mortality.

As the picture gets less and less blurry, there is a focal point to the meaningful whole, which is not some “thing” or a simplistic interaction of forces but Person. Person and Meaning come together here as one so that the quest for meaning is now a dialogue with meaning itself, one in which I need not pretend to be unconcerned with the questions of my own life’s meaning. This Person and Meaning is the Christ of mankind, the one who leads us forward and walks with each person as brother and friend and who gives us hope beyond the grave.

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1. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Ehrenfest/ ↩

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