Sometimes We Don’t Know As Much As We Think We Do

Gary Pollard

As recently as 1942, some medical textbooks still recommended bloodletting as a potential treatment for pneumonia.¹ One hundred years earlier, the prevailing scientific wisdom was that disease spread through “bad air”, called miasma. This had real world consequences, with one in five women dying after childbirth because their doctors didn’t wash their hands. Ignaz Semmelweis recommended that doctors wash their hands with a chlorinated lime solution, and the mortality rate dropped from 20% to less than 1%. Semmelweis was ridiculed by the scientific mainstream because he couldn’t demonstrate why his method worked. He was fired from his job and was eventually beaten to death by guards in an asylum. In 1901, Rear Admiral George Melville wrote in The North American Review, “A calm surveying of the field of science…forces the conclusion that the unassisted navigation of the air is an impossibility.”² Two months before the Wright brothers successfully flew their plane, the New York Times said that a flying machine might be built if mathematicians and engineers worked together continuously for one to ten million years. Until very recently, mainstream astrophysicists asserted that it was impossible for charge separation to exist at scale in space. Hannes Alfvén, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics (1970), argued that large-scale electrical currents could still flow and create localized structures (double layers). He was dismissed entirely, but was later vindicated.³

There are many other examples of prevailing wisdom attacking revolutionary ideas and their proponents, only to be later found flatly wrong.⁴ Since new discoveries have ousted erroneous ways of thinking so many times historically, why have we not learned from the blunders of our predecessors? History views the blindly skeptical — the dogmatic naysayers — as narrow-minded and foolish for good reason. The skeptics at the time had, in their view, good reason for being skeptical. They had meticulously observed phenomena, performed experiments, created mathematical proofs, and had, to some degree or another, reached consensus. They were still wrong! So why does humanity still not learn from the past? I believe there are a few reasons. 

1. Consensus can be a powerful tool for intellectual enslavement when inflexible. If everyone agrees, it must be true. I remember being told in school, “If you come up with an interpretation that no one else has put forward, you’re probably wrong.” Theologians are not immune to the blindness consensus can cause. 
2. Pride. Our ideas are our intellectual offspring. Acceptance of an idea that one may have dedicated their entire career to developing is, rightly so, a point of pride. To have an idea disproved is both painful and devaluing. Also in this category is the fact that many breakthroughs happen outside of their respective fields.⁵ Revolutionary breakthroughs in a specific field should come from that field. They’re the experts, after all. But 1 and 2 can and do stagnate progress. Humility is critical to preventing stagnation in any field. 
3. Interpretation. We bring our own experiences and biases to every problem. So much of reality is invisible to our eyes, and we have to rely on proxy data and technological assistance. For example, scripture often uses symbolism to bring ineffable things down to a level we can process. Symbolism is designed to speak to our intuition, not necessarily to our analytical mind, but we have to start somewhere to make sense of the symbols. Exegesis can be helpful, but is only step one. We must interpret what we see, and our interpretation is influenced heavily by our priors. This is true both in religion and in science (which are not truly separate, but do have different objectives) — we bring some kind of framework to the problem, and our interpretations can only be as good as the assumptions they’re built on. This category probably affects us more than any other because it is immune to motive. A heart of gold, tireless work ethic, and intellectual humility can still lead to an erroneous interpretation. 
4. Worldview. This probably should be a subcategory under 3. What we aim at and what we believe fundamentally affects our interpretation. A catastrophist and gradualist looking at the same problem come away with radically different results. Our worldview is the sum total of our assumptions, experiences, and beliefs. In many ways, our worldview is what we think we know. 

These obstacles all have something in common (with a provision): they can be easily kept in check by adopting the teachings of Christ. For 1, we understand that the wisdom of an age is far from infallible. For 2, we believe that pride is incompatible with godliness. The provision falls under 3: some things are not up for interpretation (like the deity and humanity of Jesus, his resurrection, the existence of God), but dogmatism can be deadly.⁶ We must be open to the possibility that anything not overtly incompatible with the fundamental, transparent truths of scripture is potentially valid. Finally, for 4, our worldview is ideally built around an acknowledgement of a divine creator, our own fallibility, the supremacy of truth, and genuine love for other people. Putting others above self may not advance our own aims in the short term, but certainly avoids stagnating a field for centuries. There is so much left to solve, cure, fix, discover, and improve — and nothing will improve the human condition more than adopting the mind of Christ in everything we attempt. 

¹ Thomas, D.P. (2014) The demise of bloodletting. The journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edingburgh, 44(1), 72-77. https://doi.org/10.4997/JRCPE.2014.117
² Melville, George W. (1901) The engineer and the problem of aërial navigation. The North American Review, 173(541), 820. He also said, “The successful flying machine, to spring full-fledged from the ashes of present failure, would have to be a Phoenix.”
³ Data from Transit 5E-11 (1966), Triad (1973), ESA’s Swarm fleet, Sweden’s Viking (1986) and Freja (1992), NASA’s Fast Auroral Snapshot satellite (1996), and NASA’s Juno (2016-) flew through Jupiter’s polar magnetosphere. If charge systems in space are impossible, they should only exist near Earth; they were found to be universal.
⁴ Meteorites originating from space was considered impossible by the mainstream (including the French Academy of Sciences and famous figures like Thomas Jefferson); only “uneducated peasants” believed that rocks could fall from space. In 1803, thousands of meteorites fell over L’Aigle, France in broad daylight. Fusion was considered impossible by the scientific establishment — Einstein himself said in 1932, “…[T]here is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. That would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” Even more examples can be found in soft science fields like archaeology and geology.
⁵ e.g. The laws of heredity and genetics were discovered by Augustinian friar and monk Gregor Mendel; Uranus was discovered by a professional musician (William Herschel) whose hobby was astronomy; Microbiology/microscopy was pioneered by a fabric merchant (Antonie van Leeuwenhoek); The longitude problem — which science at the time said could only be solved with advanced math and astronomy — was solved by uneducated carpenter and self-taught clockmaker John Harrison. There are many, many other examples of this, both modern and historic.
⁶ I highly recommend reading the contents of the Edict of Thessalonica (AD 380), its consequences, its targets, and its outcomes. It signaled the death of primitive Christianity, and we still strongly feel its effects today.