The Challenge of Uncertainty
Lay Speaker John L. Menke
Sunday, August 13, 2006

I want to thank Jeff Ingle for his wonderful choice of readings and hymns, and Marguerite Wilson for her choice and playing of the music.

When I spoke from this pulpit some 18 months ago, my subject was why we UUCF members, supposedly dedicated to the search for truth in a caring community, why were we so hesitant to talk about our religious beliefs to one another? Surely, I said, in a community like this, we should be willing to do so. Indeed, we should feel an obligation to do so: after all, if we committed to the "free and responsible search for truth", and responsibility surely includes making every effort to be honest and accurate.

Over the past 18 months we have seen an increasing willingness of our members and friends to talk the talk! This summer we have had a wonderful series sermons by members of the congregation that were directly or indirectly statements of their religious beliefs--including our wonderful poetry service. We have listened to beliefs ranging from the mystical (or at least, what I would call the mystical) “everything happens for a purpose” to persons who are convinced that there is no personal god or higher purpose in the Universe.

I know these have generated interest and discussion, and even some controversy. I think that's great! Maybe today I can add a little more fuel to the fire of discussion as I share my own approach to searching for truth about the world!

As many of you know, I am a physicist (as well as a former Catholic, the most popular training ground for UUs). I do value highly the concept that we should strive for truth, and that there is a "truth" out there to be ever more closely approached. And we should not be afraid to question the truth that we think we see.

As many of you also know, I am strongly convinced that rigorous testing of ideas is vital to finding truth—testing by critical thinking, by skeptical observation, by subjecting our ideas to the test of the marketplace of ideas—in short, the scientific method as practiced both by scientists and non-scientists. Scientific Method is not a genuflection to some dogma. Dogma is following of someone else’s ideas, vs developing and verifying your own. Scientific Method, or even what we call "science", is not a body of supposed knowledge, but is rather a time tested and proven method or process of weeding out incorrect ideas.

As some of you know, I enjoy opening ideas to debate and to question. Sometimes, when a discussion is just too tame, I will act as the devil’s advocate (interesting, why do we say Devil’s advocate, when we might well be arguing for God’s truth). At a recent staff meeting, I made a skeptical comment, and Brandee Carrigan said she was going to get me some devil’s horns for the next meeting! I guess that tendency does get noticed! Why do I do this: because it generates debate and questioning, and because it engages the other person so that I can find out what they really think. And what they think about what I think.

So, if you were expecting that my discussion today would be my version of a feel-good, answer-all-the-questions, here is an easy way out type of sermon--you should not be surprised, that's not going to happen! Our recent survey showed an interest in a variety of types of sermon, so here is another one as I share with you how I see uncertainty in our lives, and how I try to think about and deal with uncertainty.

So, consider "The Challenge of Uncertainty". Doesn't that have a sort of negative ring about it? Why is it that we tend to see uncertainty as a challenge, especially since we often use the word challenge as a feel-good word that really means, a "problem"? Why don’t we see uncertainty as an opportunity?

But most of us don't really think much about what uncertainty IS, but instead do think about those subjects about which we are uncertain--that's part of why uncertainty is a challenge, ie., we don't understand it clearly, we are uncertain about uncertainty!

So today, I'd like to explore what uncertainty is, why it is such a big deal, a bit about how we deal with it, and even how it is a fundamental part of modern physics. And interwoven with issues of uncertainty is the whole issue of what is "truth", how do we find it, and how do we know we have achieved some measure of it? You may feel at the end that I have talked more about Scientific Method than about dealing with uncertainty--but that's because I think the two are inextricably connected: uncertainty is a measure of our lack of knowledge, or our limited understanding of truth, and the Scientific Method is the most powerful tool we have for gaining knowledge.

So let's take uncertainty itself, as a term, as a concept. When we talk about uncertainty, what probably comes to mind first is the FEELING of uncertainty, the emotional condition. Uncertainty is often mixed with other feelings: anxiety, fear, confusion, lack of control. Uncertainty is a powerful emotion--the negative sense of uncertainty can be so strong as to paralyze all action and thought. Feelings of anxiety, of doubt, a literal shaking of our psychic foundation can overwhelm us. Think of your reaction to the first images of the Twin Towers falling, or of being informed that a loved one had died unexpectedly. The feeling of Uncertainty is strong stuff.

But the feeling of uncertainty does not just exist all by itself. Rather, it is an emotional "in the gut" feeling triggered by being unsure that some outcome will or will not occur. It is a feeling inside of us that is related to the outside world, to objective uncertainty. We have the internal feelings, or perception, and we have the objective or external truth or knowledge. And they may or may not match:

• We may be uncertain about our job future, and this may be realistic: global markets do threaten our jobs, even in Frederick!.
• Or we may be uncertain or fearful about something that really does not merit the strength of our conviction. For example, today, many people are uncertain of their safety, they are fearful of being subject to a terrorist act. But there is little objective evidence or reason for such a high level of uncertainty, so that fear is not realistic.
• Or ironically, we not feel sure of ourselves when we logically should be uncertain: most of us feel pretty certain about surviving the day when we get into the car to go to work--yet that survival is arguably more problematic than many other things we worry about, like terrorism as a personal threat in Frederick.

When there is a big disconnect between our feelings or convictions on the one hand, and the "real" world on the other, we may feel unnecessarily fearful and even take actions that are not in our real best interest. In response, we might choose a course that ignores this disconnect: we do things that just make ourselves feel better, while ignoring or rejecting the more objective evidence.

For example

• One strategy is to engage in ritual behavior, or ritual belief, or put ourselves into circumstances that feel "safe", to overlay or cover up or displace our feelings of uncertainty, to create a mood or a sense of certainty. We sing a song, we eat, we go to church, we do yoga, or we read the bible. We feel better, and the practice may well be good for us, but we probably didn’t change our objective causes of uncertainty. Of course, if the objective situation cannot be changed, then these kinds of approaches may make sense--at least we FEEL better. If we have an incurable disease, anything that makes us feel better makes sense!
• Another strategy is to attack the messenger. We might identify the outside forces or persons that make us feel uncertain, and then attack them. Think of the whites in the south during the early civil rights movement. Their way of life was being threatened, and they reacted to the uncertainty of their future by attacking - literally--the messengers, the "outside agitators".
• We might simply refuse to recognize or analyze our own uncertainty. We hesitate to seek in ourselves why we feel uncertain. We might have a fear of learning too much about of our own lack of strength or power, of looking bad, being weak, or we don't want to deal with bad news.? Do we tend to avoid reading challenges to our beliefs, whether it is criticism of global warming science or a conservative columnist in the Post (or Roy Meacham)?

These are all apparently logical ways to reduce our feelings of uncertainty that do not depend on new outside information. However, we can go another way in reducing our uncertainty. We can seek out information. We can seek more objective truth that will at least clarify the real uncertainty.

I have been using terms like "objective reality". Now, we probably don't want to spend the next hour debating "What is reality?", though that would be fun! But we do need to be a bit careful of our terminology. When I speak of objective reality, or objective truth, I am talking about information or understandings that can be duplicated and debated and tested and verified by multiple people with differing sources of information and methods. This is in contrast to subjective reality or truth, which is your own solo perception of something.

Interestingly, a mystical or subjective experience or sense of truth is the lonely one-it is internal, and we can only do it a person at a time. The objective "experience" is inherently a communal activity.

A satirist on TV, Steven Colbert, pokes fun at lots of things, including our tendency to fool ourselves and stretch and spin truth. So he invented the term "truthiness" to refer to subjective truth, ie., a person's perception or feeling of truth that is not supported by logic or valid evidence. So, I thought of coining my own word for objective truth: "Ice-T-Truth". The Ice-T-Truth would be the cold, hard, objective, vetted, debated, truth--or at least, our best approximation to it.

In May, I was diagnosed with cancer. What does one do when this happens? Being an objective oriented kind of guy, I promptly started googling, which I did till I was blue in the face. Doing this generates a flood of information that can cause panic, confusion, or tempt one to seize upon some simple piece of information and ignore the rest. But the more constructive way is to do the logical work to evaluate the information in a rational way to come up with as balanced a judgment as we can. We can then try to test this more or less objective judgment against our FEELINGS. We can actually modify our feelings, reduce our sense of uncertainty by tapping into external knowledge. We may not like the knowledge we find, but at least, we are less uncertain.

So whether it is seeking information about disease, or the basis of religion, or the risk of job loss or any other knowledge about the real world, I would urge that we seek objective truth, the Ice-T-Truth--or as close to it as we can get.. If we do it well, we are in essence used the scientific method. It's really not so hard, is it?

I know this emphasis on objective truth, objective reality, really does rub many people the wrong way. Maybe this is because even the best Ice-T-Truth always will have some uncertainty in it: whereas a person's strong conviction -even one that is wrong-may feel totally certain.

But it seems to me that if we are seeking information about the world outside of us, we now know from 500 years of experience that feelings, however, strong, however real-feeling, however mystical, however certain our feeling or sense of conviction of the truth, these are poor sources of objective information about how the universe works. This is NOT to deny the reality of the feelings; however, your having a mystical experience that the Virgin Mary just descended from the rafter or that the flashing light you saw in the sky last night was an alien UFO does not make it true. You may perceive it so, I cannot argue that. But the subjective, maybe mystical experience was yours, not mine, and I was excluded from it. The mystical experience is based on feeling, and feeling vs objective evidence is a very poor test of information about the real, external world. We know that to be true.

We've been talking about seeking information from the outside world to deal with uncertainty of feeling and/or knowledge. We've been emphasizing the use of Scientific Method in that process as being the most powerful method ever developed for finding objective information. Well, interestingly, the Scientific Method has also lead directly to a more subtle understanding of uncertainty itself. It's what you've been waiting for: Lets learn Quantum Physics--just the thing for Sunday morning!

Uncertainty in the usual scientific use of the word means the degree to which we do not know something. When I drive to New York, I measure the distance to be 253 miles, I estimate an uncertainty of perhaps a few miles in that measurement. But if I want to, II can refine the measurement using really high tech methods, and measure it to about a millimeter.

We think we can always measure something more accurately, or get an answer to a logical question, if we only work hard enough. Or so we think.

But now we know differently. In the 1920s and 30s, as physicists probed ever deeper and more accurately into the behavior of matter, especially inside the atom, they made ever more accurate measurements of ever more tiny phenomena. But when they tried to make sense of the observations of how these parts of atoms behaved, they were driven to a completely new conclusion. They found that in certain circumstances, there was an irreducible amount of uncertainty in measurements NOT related to deficiencies in our instruments. No one expected this, it is counter to our intuition and everything we know.

Specifically, they found that if you try to measure the position of an electron in an atom, the better you measure the position, the more uncertainty there is in its speed –even though we humans have always considered the speed of an object and its position as separate and independent ideas. You know where your car is and how fast it is going, and you assume that with a huge effort, you could do an ever better job of measuring its location and its speed. But it turns out you are wrong: the observations show that that the laws of the universe do not allow you to be as accurate as you wish if you try to do both measurements at the same time.

But even though a small effect that does not show up much in day to day life, it is the principle of the Uncertainty Principle that is so important: the Uncertainty Principle shows there are fundamental limits on human knowledge. Uncertainty Principle means that we have proved there are questions we can ask, for which the universe says "there is no answer". Doesn't this sound like one of "God's mysteries"? That we cannot know something, that it is outside human knowledgability? The Uncertainty Principle may not matter much for our day to day decisions, but it completely undercuts the idea that there always is an answer to every question. Like the discovery that the universe is so huge and the earth is not its center, the Uncertainty Principle has upset the core ideas of our time.

The Uncertainty Principle, this principle about knowledge, was not thought of out of the blue, it did not come out of a mystical experience, it was not thought of as the result of a totally theoretical, logical process. It came out of the Scientific Method. When it was proposed, the Uncertainty Principle was argued, vilified, debated, and challenged. Almost no one liked it, because it runs contrary to how we feel the universe works, or should work. As Sir Arthur Eddington said, "Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can imagine". Einstein had the famous words of doubt "God does not play dice". But he had to admit the evidence and the interpretation.

The Uncertainty Principle injects a sense of inescapable uncertainty into the universe. Ironically, many people extend the Uncertainty Principle too far, using it to imply some subtle "mystery" aspect of science. For example, take the movie many of us saw "What the Bleep Do We Know". The movie uses their interpretation of the Uncertainty Principle along with pseudo-scientific method to make it appear (among other things) that water can respond to loving thoughts and that thinking peaceful thoughts can reduce crime. But the Uncertainty Principle does not apply as used in the movie, and when I examined the very data they claim supports their case, I found that their conclusions don't even fit their data. But what is clear, is that the Uncertainty Principle and its metaphorical richness is incredibly fascinating to anyone who hears about it. It just doesn't justify every flight of fancy!

So where are we? I advocate the use of Scientific Method to reduce uncertainty, even though Scientific Method has even led to finding some areas in which uncertainty can't be reduced. But I never said truth-finding was not messy--it is. Even when you do Scientific Method rigorously, there is always some uncertainty in the truth you find, but it is uncertainty that we can analyze and understand and reduce by working together. But that makes all the difference.

So, in the end we can choose to be "intuitive", ie., operate primarily from subjective feelings, or we can choose to be more "objective". While all the positions in between the extremes are "relative", they are not equal. Each of us decides where we want to be. We decide which source of truth makes more sense on which to base life decisions--decisions that bump you against reality? Do you want to feel certain but perhaps be totally wrong? Or maybe feel only "pretty certain", but have high objective certainty of being pretty much right? Our free will does give us the choice and the responsibility as to how we answer that question.

So where are YOU with uncertainty? Is it a challenge, or an opportunity? Does uncertainty drive you to grow and understand and learn? Or does uncertainty lead you to ritual or behaviors or beliefs that are comfortable, but may not be sources of stimulation and growth? Most of us, of course, do some of each.

Maybe I should have named this sermon "Uncertainty and the Scientific Method" (but then maybe nobody would have come!), or "Uncertainty is the Best Policy" (but then nobody would agree!). As we look out over the hyper-competitive world out there, we may feel fear, we may have uncertainty that we can cope with challenge. But the tools are there to do it. Anyone can choose to do it, anyone can choose to take their own future into their own hands using the power of our brains and google and our very congregational community to grow toward a rich and exciting mix of feeling and rationality, a mix of truthiness and Ice-T-Truth. For me, finding that balance is my spiritual growth.

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Some of the books read while working on this sermon:

"Physics and Philosophy" by Werner Heisenberg, one of the physicists who discovered the Uncertainty Principle
"Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James, a wonderful analysis of how our perceptual experience, and the limits of our ability to share that experience
"The End of Faith"