A Fundamental Disconnect in What is Important

I spend a lot of time reading a variety of views on the Church and Mormonism in general. Every so often some online community of saints or former saints who are critical of the Church whip themselves into a moral panic. They talk about all the problems with the Church and bring out a laundry list of things that must be talked about or things that every Church member should know. Whenever I spend too much time listening to the tinkling cymbals and sounding brass I listen to what the Church leaders are actually concerned about and what they are talking about I notice a fundamental disconnect between what the Church critics think is important and what Church leaders think is important.

I was reminded of this when a visiting General Authority spoke in my ward a few months ago, and again last General Conference, and again today.

Brigham Young and the Aliens on the Sun

The title for this post is something you would expect from a cheap pulp science fiction novel rather than a serious discussion about religion. But it was a topic that I was reminded of recently. While by no means is this a common criticism against Brigham Young, or the Church in general, but it is something that is occasionally brought up in mocking comments online.

Usually these comments take the form, "Brigham Young believed people lived on the sun! That's ridiculous! It's proof he was an idiot/fool/ignorant and we can't trust anything he said."

Did Brigham Young actually believe that people lived on the sun? And if he did what are we to think of that based on our current understanding of the universe?

So did Brigham Young believe that people lived on the sun? On July 24th, 1869 Brigham Young was speaking at a Church conference and as part of his un-prepared remarks he made the following statement:

"So it is with regard to the inhabitants of the sun. Do you think it is inhabited? I rather think it is. Do you think there is any life there? No question of it; it was not made in vain."

That seem to make the case very straight forward. It's unambiguous. He said he believes it. We know from modern science that people do not live on the sun. Brigham Young was mistaken. Case closed.

Well that was a short blog post.

Except, as my favorite comedy troupe once said, context is everything.

If we are to consider the context we must first look at the general scientific context in which Brigham Young made that statement, and second consider the context within the rest of his discourse. Both contexts are very illuminating.

So what was the scientific context at the time? If you went to an "expert" or and "authority" during the mid 1800's and asked them if the sun, moon, and all the planets were inhabited what answer would you get?

The idea that the planets of the solar system are inhabited, referred to as the "plurality of worlds", is an idea that suddenly gained wide spread attention among astronomers and philosophers in the early 1700's. It had been discussed before then but it was only considered a theological question before then. But with the spread of Newtonian ideas, questions about the exact nature of other worlds suddenly became very important.

Previously the realm of the sun, moon, and stars was considered to be entirely distinct form that of the earth. The laws of nature were different "up there". The stuff that made up the heavens was just different from the stuff that made up the sphere of the earth. But the Newtonian revolution introduced the idea that the same laws that governed the earth also governed the heavens. That radically altered the way people perceived the sun, moon, planets, and stars.

New and improved telescopes helped us understand that the planets were spheres just like the earth. This precipitated the idea that not only were the sun, moon, and planets governed by the same laws, but in many ways they were just like the earth. This meant that they had oceans, seas, continents, plants, animals, intelligent beings, just like the earth.

These ideas were speculative and did not appear in any major textbook on astronomy of the time, but they were discussed and mentioned among scholars and other well read men, much in the same way the idea of wormholes and parallel universes are viewed today. They are not strictly scientific, and they do not appear in major textbooks on astronomy. But while some scholars think they do not exist, others speculate that they are possible, and they do pop up in popular literature and news.

While the concept of plurality of worlds (i.e. the sun, moon, and planets inhabited by intelligent beings) was never a major point of scientific inquiry it did show up in the writings of some influential individuals.

On April 25, 1756 John Adams wrote in his diary,

"Astronomers tell us, with good Reason, that not only all the Planets and Satellites in our Solar System, but all the unnumbered Worlds that revolve round the fixt Starrs are inhabited, as well as this Globe of Earth."

In the late 1700's the idea of the plurality of worlds was considered to be so well established by reason that Thomas Paine writing in The Age of Reason used the idea to criticize Christianity saying,

"to believe that God created a plurality of worlds, at least as numerous as what we call stars, renders the Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air."

By the early 1800's famous astronomer William Herschel wrote:

"The sun, viewed in this light appears to be nothing else than a very eminent, large, and lucid planet, evidently the first, or in strictness of speaking, the only primary one of our system.... Its similarity to the other globes of the solar system with regard to its solidity, its atmosphere, and its diversified surface; the rotation upon its axis, and the fall of heavy bodies, leads us on to suppose that it is most probably also inhabited, like the rest of the planets, by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe. Whatever fanciful poets might say, in making the sun the abode of blessed spirits, or angry moralists devise, in pointing it out as a fit place for the punishment of the wicked, it does not appear that they had any other foundation for their assertions than mere opinion and vague surmise; but now I think myself authorized, upon astronomical principles, to propose the sun as an inhabitable world, and am persuaded that the foregoing observations, with the conclusions I have drawn from them, are fully sufficient to answer every objection that may be made against it." (Emphasis in original.)

Here we see an interesting argument from Herschel. He states that because the sun behaves just like the other planets, it must be inhabited just like the other planets. This argument, he believes, is so obvious that it is "fully sufficient to answer every objection that may be made against it." This is a good example of a logical conclusion stemming from the Newtonian revolution.

A central assumption of the new wave of science was that the same things we observe on earth can be observed in the heavens. Because the sun had many of the same characteristics as the earth it was natural to assume that the sun was inhabited just like the earth.

This idea was taken a step further in 1837 by a popularizer of science named Thomas Dick who used the population density of England to estimate the population of the Earth, the moon, the planets along with all of their moons including Saturn's rings, along with the sun. His calculations assumed that all the sun, planets and moons, including Saturn's rings, had continents and oceans. Again this was based on the assumption that because the heavens were like the earth, all things we observe on earth were in the heavens.

But how could these learned men think this? Didn't they know that the sun was a giant ball of hot gas and quite impossible of supporting life? Didn't they know that the moon had no atmosphere?

It is easy for us to look back with hundreds of years of scientific observations and incredible advancements in telescope technology and say, "Obviously...." But back then it was not so obvious. It had only been a few hundred years since astronomers realized that there were mountains on the moon. And the discovery of mountains on the moon confirmed the growing assumption that the heavens were just like the Earth. Hence the "seas" (Mare) on the moon. It was not until the end of the 1800's that telescopes were advanced enough to cast serious doubt about the existence of oceans and even atmosphere on the moon.

But what about the sun? Why would astronomers think that the sun could be inhabited?

While astronomers certainly worked out that any life on the sun would be subject to intense bright light, this was right when the modern study of spectroscopy was just beginning. Absorption lines were first discovered in 1814, but it was not until 1859 that these absorption lines were first associated with specific chemical elements. That is, it wasn't until 1859 that scientists could even discuss, scientifically, the composition of the sun. It was at the same time, and mostly by the same scientists, that we began to understand the concept of black body radiation. This allowed us to measure the temperature of the sun, and is to this day the exact same method we use to measure the temperature of all stars.

The Newtonian idea that the heavens were just like the Earth had only been confirmed up until then. And while this added even more evidence to the list of reasons why the heavens were just like the Earth, it was the beginning of the end for that assumption. Unfortunately for Herschel, his argument was not the final word, and his reasoning could not "answer every objection that may be made against it."

Over the next 100 years we made many more discoveries that greatly undermined the idea of the plurality of worlds. The first to go was the idea that the sun and moon were inhabited and then later the dream of men from Jupiter and Saturn. The Martians and Venusians were the last to go. But before they did they inspired a generation of science fiction writers.

While we look back on science fiction from the very late 1800's and the 1900's as quaint, simplistic, and "Obviously they got it wrong." We forget that they were not writing fantasy. They were writing science in a fictional setting. They were dealing with the possible, and not with the imaginary.

In 1952 the scientist and author Isaac Asimov began a series of books about a character named David Starr who had many adventures all over the solar system. In the books he travels to Mars and meets Martians, and travels to the oceans of Venus. Later when the books were collected into an anthology in the 1970's Asimov wrote an introduction in which he apologized for getting the science wrong. It was only after our probes to Mars, Venus, and the other planets that the idea of (current) life on the other planets of the solar system died out as a matter of science.

That these old conceptions of life on the moon, the planets and the sun were wrong is only obvious now, and as such are frequently put on the same shelf as fantasy. But they were once a matter of science.

While these ideas never rose to the level of "settled science" they were a matter of discussion and debate, and at the end of the 1800's they captured the imagination of a generation of authors. But with more knowledge a great portion of the speculation passed from science into fantasy.

So how does this affect our view of the past? What about those who thought that the sun, moon, and planets were inhabited just like the Earth? Does this misconception invalidate everything else they said and did?

Does Uranus some how cease to exist and do telescopes cease to function because William Herschel thought the sun was inhabited? Is all past and future work of the Royal Astronomical Society invalidated because their first president once had an idea that he thought was sound, and later was shown to be implausible? Are the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution invalid because John Adams thought the moon was inhabited? Is Washington DC somehow not the capital of the US because John Adams heard the arguments of the astronomers of his day and was convinced by them? Just because someone though something was common sense, and it later turned out not to be so, does that upend all things that we know?

A similar set of questions can be asked about Brigham Young. Was he somehow ignorant to accept the statements of astronomers of his day? Does the fact that he did not know everything somehow invalidate his work to lead the Church? Does God cease to exist because a prophet was free to exercise his own mind in trying to understand the universe? Do we expect God to remove the agency of His servants just to spare the bruised egos of a few doubting critics 150 years after the fact?

In our approach to what we know and what we do not, and how we grow in our knowledge and understanding, we must remain humble. There were certain things, the Constitution, the science of astronomy, that were not invalidated because someone connected to them once thought something that later proved to be wrong, nor are the organizations they helped found called into question because they operated on incomplete knowledge.

This realization, that men of science can be mistaken, is especially relevant because it was precisely the point of Brigham Young's talk back in 1869 when he mentioned the men in the sun. If you read it and consider the context you will find very little to criticize and perhaps more to think about.