How Do We Know The Christmas Story Is Really True?

A couple of weeks ago I was working on a story in Kyoto, Japan, and the person I was interviewing had just received an international award for discovering the existence of exoplanets.

You know what those are, of course.

Photo Credit: Leo Hidalgo, Creative Commons

They’re planets that exist outside our solar system and orbit a star that’s a lot like our sun. I had done some reading about the topic and hoped I wouldn’t make a fool out of myself in this interview.

Astrophysics isn’t my strong suit.

It’s not the subject I lead with at cocktail parties.

In my reading about this, though, it became clear to me that the discovery of these planets was based on something other than actually seeing the planets. I had envisioned a guy peering through a telescope saying “Aha! There it is!” Instead, the focus was on the sun-like star, and the periodic changes in that star.

Something was obviously orbiting that star on a regular, predictable basis, and it was causing those changes to occur.

After the scientist and I greeted one another, the first question I asked him was, “Your discovery of this exoplanet didn’t come from your actually seeing the planet, did it?” He was very open in his response, as if I had asked him the most obvious question in the world.

“No—all of the evidence is indirect,” he said.

It reminded me of what I heard another physicist say many years ago when I watched a debate online between the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg and the physicist/priest John Polkinghorne as they discussed quarks and gluons, the smallest known particles.

I was working on a book about Polkinghorne at the time.

“We don’t believe that quarks exist because anyone has seen one,” Weinberg told the audience. “We believe that quarks exist because the theories that include them work.”

Again, indirect evidence.

Exoplanets and particles. No one has seen them. But we see their impact and conclude that they must exist.

Unseen realities. When we include them in our theories, things make more sense.

We don’t really know if God exists. We don’t really know if this Christmas story is true. We choose to put our faith in unseen realities because, when we do, things make more sense.