Science Corner: So When is an Eclipse not Just an Eclipse?

The past week brought a total solar eclipse and a magnitude 4.7 earthquake to the northeastern United States (among other places for the eclipse). For the folks who will seize any opportunity to invoke the rapture and possibly God’s judgment on specific subpopulations, it was a convergence too delicious to pass up. This in turn could not be overlooked by the folks who love to trot out a science fact. Don’t you know that eclipses and earthquakes have natural causes, and that the eclipse has been predictable for decades? Now, while I’m inclined to agree that ascribing guilt for natural events is dicey, and I am well aware that many predictions of the rapture have come and gone unfilled (including any associated with this eclipse), I also think invoking plate tectonics and celestial mechanics rather misses the point.

We are also just a few days removed from observing Good Friday. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all report darkness covering the land and the earth shaking. Given the limited descriptions, the shaking of the earth would likely have been experienced by people at the time as equivalent to an earthquake, regardless of whether plate tectonics were actually involved. The darkness could not have been an actual solar eclipse–the crucifixion is linked to the observance of Passover which coincides with a full moon, while a total solar eclipse coincides with a new moon–and Jesus’ contemporaries likely could identify such an event. Still, that doesn’t rule out some other physical mechanism playing a role in realizing that darkness. If we take the view that these were actual events with theological significance (some might read them in a more mythohistorical vein, for example), then we don’t want to completely rule out the possibility that phenomena like earthquakes and eclipses are connected to God’s activity.

At the same time, I want to keep in mind Jesus’ commentary on a disaster in Luke 13, which suggests that sometimes bad things happen that are not God’s punishment. And Matthew 5:45 reminds us that the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. God’s providential sustaining of the physical world includes dynamic regularities that do not necessary represent instantaneous intentions. Since this involves fewer conditions–God’s providence is a constant, but only sometimes does God also intervene with an agenda of punishment or reward or revelation–we might choose it as the null hypothesis, the default explanation in the absence of clear evidence for an alternative. If your understanding of God involves a greater degree of regular intervention, perhaps you might invert that relationship and take punishment/reward/revelation as the null hypothesis. That may be part of the disconnect.

But I think there was also a disconnect at the level of whether our identification of a physical process rules out the possibility of a message from God. I expect that everyone acknowledges the role of geological phenomena in earthquakes. And no doubt last week’s quake registered on seismographs and can be analyzed the same way as other earthquakes. But why would we expect a divinely motivated earthquake to appear any different? A God of miracles can either “poke” the relevant geological features on demand to trigger a quake, or arrange the starting conditions for a sequence of events leading up to a quake at the relevant time.

The eclipse is perhaps slightly trickier, but only if you suppose God only recently noticed the ______s were at it again and need to be taught a lesson. Sure, eclipses are predictable many years in advance, and this one has been on many folks’ travel calendars since at least 2017 (the last time an eclipse was visible from parts of the contiguous United States). But if one supposes that God has full knowledge of the future and full control over the physical world, the timing needn’t have been recently planned. Of course, the timing of eclipses are not independent of each other. So we have to consider two options. First, just one or a few eclipses are a message and the rest are business as usual, in which case it seems fairly trivial for God to work out the different variables to get the timing and location of a few specific eclipses to work out as necessary. Second, all eclipses are messages, and God has a system of equations to solve with thousands of fixed points and some number of variables to tune. Now the particulars matter; it could be that a solution exists which satisfies all the constraints, or it could be that no solution is realizable.

I’m not sure we have enough data to play with that second option in any meaningful way; I know I certainly don’t. We can imagine that the Earth could orbit the sun at different speeds, although not any arbitrary speed, since it is related to distance and we need to be in an inhabitable zone. There’s probably more flexibility with the speed of the moon’s orbit, although play too much and you lose the balance of the apparent size of the moon and sun that makes a total eclipse possible. The number of moons is flexible, as is the angle of the moon’s orbit relative to the orbit of the Earth around the sun; tweaking that angle yields more or fewer eclipses per year. The rotational speed of the Earth is another variable; it has been faster in the past. And all of that assumes an orbital arrangement similar to our current one; there are also places like Nix and Hydra with chaotic sunrises and sunsets. Under such circumstances, the timing of eclipses would seem more like the timing of earthquakes. This might further relax constraints for timing everything out in advance, or it might introduce further complications.

Now, let the reader understand that I am not endorsing any specific claims about the significance of the recent earthquake or eclipse, or even the general program of trying to interpret events like these at any time. I’m inclined to take providential-business-as-usual as the null hypothesis and require a significant burden of evidence to reject it. Instead, what I am encouraging is more effort in understanding other points of view, and a more charitable approach to how to apply a scientific perspective. While there are times when folks are asking a specific question that has already been addressed by observation or experimentation or theory, there are also times when it is more fruitful or more sociable to explore whether there is a possible model that would fit the data that have been put forward.