The following two incidents demonstrate the principle that, if you are walking around with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Actually, the stories are about measuring, not hammering, but the point is the same. The first, told by a chemistry professor at Idaho State University, is supposedly true. It concerns an extra-credit question that appeared on an exam at Idaho State. The question read as follows. "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin, assuming that each angel requires an area in which to dance equal to a circle with a diameter the size of a gold atom, and that the head of the pin in question is a circular plane with a diameter of 0.5 mm? Make any other assumptions necessary to solve the problem, state those assumptions, then solve the problem." One student's answer received full credit. "I assume that angels do not exist," she wrote. "Therefore, the answer is zero."
The second concerns a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers have found that, other variables being constant, if you continually chew gum during all your waking hours for one year, your increased metabolic expenditure will bring about an 11-pound reduction in body weight. What the researchers fail to add is that all your friends will desert you and your dental bills will exceed your net worth, so you will have to celebrate your weight loss alone. With an extra stick of Trident. But there will be eleven fewer pounds of you.
The quest to measure things--that is, to quantify our world and our experience--has been around since the beginning of time. Most early standards of measurement were based not on the size of angel feet, but on parts of the human body, or what a person or beast could haul, or the volume of containers or area of fields in common use. Each culture developed its own standards, but the most widespread unit of measurement in the ancient world was the Egyptian cubit. It came into use in about 3,000 BCE and was based on the length of the arm from the elbow to the extended finger tips. Needless to say, the meaning of a cubit varied widely, as did the definition of the Babylonian mina, an early standard of weight. Of two surviving examples of the mina, one weighs fifty percent more than the other.
The welter of competing and confusing systems of measurement developed unabated until 1670, when a French clergyman named Gabriel Mouton, obviously weary of counting angels on pin heads, proposed a system of measurement based not on the human body, but on the size of the earth. His proposal eventually become what we know as the metric system. The standard linear measure in Mouton's system was the meter, defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from one of the Earth's poles to the Equator. The liter was the volume of a cube with each edge one-tenth of a meter long, and the kilogram was a mass equal in weight to one liter of water. Along with the second, a unit of time derived from the speed of the earth's rotation, these standards made up the early metric system.
Although they sufficed for many uses over the next two centuries, these standards were inherently inaccurate, because they were based on what scientists call a physical artifact. In theory, the artifact was the Earth, but in practice it was the distance between two scratches a meter apart on a metal bar housed in Paris. As scientific endeavors became more precise, the need for a less variable touchstone became acute. In the twentieth century, new standards were developed that are independent of all artifacts, and they are based not on distance but on time. The primary unit of measure is the second, which for the past 35 years has been defined as the period of time during which a cesium atom of a certain type vibrates 9,192,631,770 times. The meter, in turn, is defined as the distance a beam of laser light of a certain frequency will travel through a vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second. This almost inconceivably-high degree of precision made possible many of the landmark discoveries of 20th-century physics. And scientists everywhere regard precise measurement as the keystone of future discovery.
Lord Kelvin, the 19th-century English physicist who helped to formulate the second law of thermodynamics, put it this way: "When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind." Kelvin is certainly correct about scientific knowledge; precise measurement has made our lives better in so many ways. I'm glad for navigational satellites, MRIs, telecommunications, and laser surgery. All are made possible by our ability to measure precisely and quantify accurately. But our skill in measuring things has not made our lives better in all ways, and perhaps not even in the ways that matter most. In fact, sometimes the emphasis on accuracy sends us in precisely the wrong direction.
Several nights ago, Holly and I attended a performance of Dvorak's Violin Concerto in A minor. The violinist was a young woman in her early thirties who has been lauded as one of the foremost violin virtuosos of her generation. Her resume cites performances with most of the world's leading orchestras, an extensive catalog of recordings, and enough critical plaudits to last most musicians a lifetime. As I listened to the first two movements of the Dvorak--they are filled with flowing Brahms-like themes and subtle harmonic colorations--I was astonished by her musical finesse and technique.
But as the third and final movement unfolded, with its evocation and celebration of Czech folk dances, I found myself missing something essential. All the notes specified by Dvorak were there, but the dancing was not. One critic subsequently likened the effect to that of a bright flower stenciled upon a hard, flat surface. Not that there is anything wrong with a stenciled flower on a hard surface, but that's hardly the experience Dvorak was trying to capture. The notes he penned were musical signs pointing toward the experience of a peasant people, whose deep pain and momentary pleasure were expressed by in their dances. And the poignancy and exuberance of their dancing was anything but hard or flat or stenciled. I shared this story with Wally several days ago. He responded, "The notes on the page are the form of the music. The emotional content comes from within--from the deep places where the notes resonate with our experience." He added, "Getting the notes right is often not the hard part. What's difficult is using the notes to express what you feel within, which is where the substance of the music--its vitality--comes from."
The same principle hold true in matters of faith. The focus on things we can quantify often leads us astray. Religious traditions are carried along over the generations by complex forms: sacred texts and creedal statements, elaborate symbol systems and worship rituals, and sophisticated rules for interpreting experience and encouraging ethical behavior. Each of these formal elements plays a necessary role in preserving and renewing the faith, but none is the substance of the faith itself.
The poet and essayist Kathleen Norris, best known for Dakota and A Cloister Walk, illustrates this problem in her book titled Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. She describes how early Christian statements of faith, which began as simple stories told by new believers at their baptism, quickly became highly technical doctrinal statements. The reason for this change was the pervasive influence of Greek philosophy. Unlike the storytelling found in the Hebrew Bible, which includes a remarkable diversity of perspectives and experiences in its canon, Greek philosophy sought to define, distinguish, and specify ever more precisely. Obviously, as the Christian tradition developed, the emphasis on logic and speculative argument increased. But in faith as in music, the quest for precision can result in missing the point entirely.
Norris proposed a different strategy. "As a poet," she says, "I am devoted to imprecision. That is, while I try to use words accurately, I do not seek the precision of the philosopher or theologian, who tend to proceed by excluding any other definitions but their own." Norris makes the same point in another way in her poem titled Vision: A Note on Astrophysics:
Learned men
of the twentieth century, armed with large
finite numbers and radiotelescopes
as big as football fields to measure the pulse of light
from stars beyond the range
of human vision, conclude that this world,
as we call nature,
was once inside such a star.
Heisenberg shrugs
and says, "I am not sure what an electron is,
but it's something like a cloud of possibilities.
I think that's one reason why we gather here on Palm Sunday and recall once again the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth. The reason his life has had such a dramatic impact on human history is not that his ideas were more innovative or his theology more precisely catalogued or his followers better orchestrated. The reason Jesus of Nazareth came to be called the Christ was that he focused on things that are difficult to measure. Over the centuries, they have turned out to be the most important things. In the words of our reading, he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He looked around and saw people in need. They longed for relief from physical suffering and spiritual pain, they cried out for relief from the oppressive Roman military occupation, they prayed for the advent of a god who would who could offer them something more satisfying than conditions and commandments.
Unlike the religious leaders of his day, who mostly had embroiled themselves in obtuse discussions about technical theological issues, Jesus reached out to those in need and gave them hope. If the ironic spectacle of his entry into Jerusalem and subsequent crucifixion demonstrate anything, it is surely his openness to the frailty and brokenness of human experience. As the prophet says, "I will allot him a portion with the great... because he poured himself out, even unto death."
Jesus had graduated from the Heisenberg school: "I'm not sure precisely what belief is," he might have said, "but it's something like a cloud of possibilities." Possibilities for release from physical and spiritual bondage, possibilities for forgiving others and being forgiven, possibilities for being open to love and hope. The meaning of faith isn't derived from precisely-worded doctrines and well-stated arguments. We don't even have to get all the commandments right, Jesus said. Just love God and other people. We experience the realm of the divine not when we follow all the rules, but when we look within ourselves with kindness, and look at others with compassion.
It's as simple as that, and as difficult. You and I live in a culture built on Lord Kelvin's beliefs: when you can measure something and express it in numbers, you know something about it, and when you cannot, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind. There are two problems with Kelvin's theory. One problem is that knowledge can be accurate, but meaningless. Stick of gum, anyone? The other problem is that some knowledge may be meaningful precisely because it cannot be quantified. At its best, religion provides us with a different way of knowing, devoted to imprecision. It requires less courage for us to submit to conditions and commandments, but it's more exhilarating to encounter a cloud of possibilities.