ABSTRACT
In a faculty meeting at a college where I once taught, there was a heated discussion of the curriculum. The college’s motto was “Truth Sets Free,” and the discussion had turned to the nature of truth. A colleague in the chemistry department bluntly announced, “I know science is truth because bridges don’t fall down,” to which a colleague in the history department retorted, “But Tom, they do fall down.” I had to ask myself the questions: Do the forces of gravity hold bridges up, or do angels? How can I know? My answer to the latter was that I really can’t. I had faith in the reality of gravity, but both science and religion are built on faith-faith in clearly different things, but faith nonetheless. Gravity, it seemed to me, is nothing more than a vectored angel, a computational seraphim we use to explain how the world works. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that gravity is really quite different from an angel, because we have devised ways to measure its presence. No one has ever seen gravity itself, but we can see-and measure-its effects. In the same way, archaeologists can never go back to see past events, but they can measure the effects of those events in the archaeological record and, from those measurements, see the past.
