Necessary Wrongness

We aren't always right. We need to lower the stakes of recognizing that basic fact.

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Galileo was one of the greatest scientists of his day, or any day. He showed that the Sun was the center of the solar system and not, as was assumed, the earth. This did not prove popular with the religious authorities of the day who were committed to the idea of the earth as the center because of a mistaken interpretation of the biblical texts. Galileo believed that the orbits of the planets were circular for reasons similar to those of the religious authorities. It was the way he thought it should be - the simplest way or the platonic ideal of planetary motion. But simple circular orbits don’t match the observed paths of the planets in the sky. So committed was Galileo to the assumption of circular orbits that he worked to create an impossibly complicated system of circles to make the observations of the orbits match what he believed must be right. Even when Johannes Kepler, also one of the greatest scientists of his day, or any day, presented Galileo with his theory of elliptical orbits, along with the corresponding observations and computational proofs - the theory we now know to be correct, Galileo did not change his position.

Galileo does not err because his calculations failed to explain, but because he never acknowledged either Kepler’s calculations or the celestial observations that controverted his own calculations. It was not that Galileo was without knowledge of the heavenlies, but that what he knew was truncated or out of sorts because he was unwilling to listen to the authoritative voice of Kepler … One of Galileo’s biographers concludes: ‘Although he preached open-mindedness, he never lent an ear to Kepler’s arguments about elliptical paths.’”

Dru Johnson - Biblical Knowing

Galileo, the model of open-minded discovery, failed to see what was in front of him and what is taught in high school physics classes as routine knowledge. He was wrong, but he never knew it.

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I hadn’t really considered the question: what does it feel like to be wrong? We, the seminary classroom full of us (I don’t remember exactly which class), were given a chance to think about what it feels like to hold the wrong position. My classmates gave predictable answers (I almost never answered such rhetorical questions out loud): a sense of shame in being wrong, or defensiveness, trying to protect your position until giving it up, or, more positively, a sense of recognition or discovery as the right position is revealed. But that isn’t what it feels like to be wrong, our professor told us. That is what it feels like to discover you are wrong - at the moment of the discovery of your wrongness. Before that, being wrong felt exactly like being right - because you thought you were right. That is the lesson. Being wrong feels exactly like being right. Galileo felt the same about his position that the Sun was the center of the solar system as he did that the orbits of the planets were circular. He was wrong, but it felt to him just the same as if he was right. Being wrong feels just like how you feel right now about any number of positions you may hold - some of which you will change, especially if you are curious about the world and keep your mind open, when you discover you are wrong. Which, however uncomfortable that may feel to us in the moment, it is much preferable to the alternative - a comfortable wrongness.

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It seems Galileo did not recognize his error because he had created larger philosophical stakes around the possibility of being wrong. He had tied circular orbits to his view of the universe, his narrative of the way things are - and he did not want to give up on this belief. So, despite all the evidence against it, he did not give it up. He was smart enough to see the evidence. He just did not let himself believe it. I don’t assume you are necessarily interested in the path of the planets. I hope we are all more interested in what keeps us from recognizing our wrongness.

I think it is fair to say that we tend to create larger philosophical stakes around the possibility of being wrong, possibly in ways more pernicious than Galileo’s. In many respects, our focus is more on our identity in terms of good or bad than it is on being right or wrong. Or, our sense of being right or wrong is determined by if we count ourselves among the good or bad. The unstated assumption is that the good people are right because they (we) are good. And the bad people are wrong because they (they) are bad. We would rather ignore contradictory facts or our own self-serving assumptions all day long in service of maintaining our membership among the good. The people we have determined to be good believe x. I want to be counted among the good. So I believe x.

It would be better if we actually said this out loud. But we tend to deceive ourselves about our motivations. In the process, we are like Galileo. We are respected by the people we want to be respected by - perhaps as daring, open-minded, brave … and right. All the while, we are (quite comfortably) wrong. The more open and out loud we are about our tribe, its goodness and rightness - the harder it is to recognize anything that may question it. We have committed ourselves, we have put our chips into the middle of the table - and it seems late to change our minds, or at least to admit that we have. And so we can work really hard not to. We can consider how people from different perspectives viewed the issue of President Biden’s age, for example. Most people now agree that President Biden was too old to run for president in 2024, now that the stakes around the question have changed so dramatically. Now that it doesn’t matter nearly as much to our agendas or identities, we are free to see what is there to see. What was always there to see.

The presence of impossibly high stakes around every political and cultural question that divides us keeps us in our camps. You may have heard of the phenomenon of being red-pilled or blue-pilled. The original reference is from The Matrix movie, where taking the red-pill moves you into the real of the real, while the blue-pill leaves you in the simulation - the ultimate comfortable wrongness. Now it means that one who has been on one side of an issue suddenly identifies with the other side. As a result, they now “see” all that they had not seen before. As it goes, changing our mind sometimes works like this. But it would be better if it did not. It would be better if we did not change our identity first, and only then be able to see what was there all along. Because once we change our identity, it seems as though we now see the truth - but we are only seeing what our newly chosen identity allows us to see, while we may be blind to a different set of truths. Meanwhile, we are comfortable, even proud of being in the right or finding the right. And it is this comfortable pride that keeps us from considering the possibility of error. Discovering you are wrong feels bad, but being wrong feels just like being right - it can be quite a comfortable place.

Then Jesus said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”

Mark 4:19

This is one of Jesus’ repeated sayings - often in the context of a parable. The meaning is there for those who are open to it. But for those who are not, they will be left where they already are, where they always have been. We, all of us, are wrong. In various areas, to varying degrees - some more than others. But all of us. It is necessary for us to maintain a humble curiosity about how that may play out in each of our lives - or we won’t see, won’t learn, won’t grow. We’ll stay in that comfortable place we know so well - except, it isn’t maybe as comfortable as we tell ourselves. After discovering our wrongness, however bad that may feel - we find ourselves in a better place - we don’t want to go back. We just don’t like it when it is happening.

Links

Biblical Knowing - A Scriptural Epistemology of Error, Dru Johnson, Cascade Books, 2013