MH370, mystery and tracking down truth

A guest post by James Garth, a practising aeronautical engineer.

The tragic disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 has captured the attention of the world and generated a mystery unprecedented in modern aviation. My aeronautical friends and I have watched the story unfold with a mixture of shock and perplexity: how could this have happened?

At the time of writing, the aircraft has still not been found, and a potential search area the size of Australia is currently being scoured for any sign of airliner debris, ten days after the Boeing 777 went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

To find the proverbial lost sheep gone astray, we are deploying enormous resources; some experts estimate costs exceeding six figures per hour. Yet no one doubts that this is money that ought to be spent. These people matter. Finding the truth matters. People of all religions and of none are united in their desperate desire to search, and in their hope that the passengers may still be found alive. Yet deep down we fear that the eventual truth will offer no solace for those with missing loved ones.

Tragically for the families, we may be in for a long wait before the full truth about MH370 is uncovered. When Air France Flight 447 went missing back in 2009, it took nearly two years to recover the black boxes from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, despite the fact that its crash site was known. When will we know what happened to MH370? As the sobering quote from the movie Contact goes: “Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe never.”

A highly respected aviation journalist recently received a phone call from another journalist desperate for information on MH370. “Do you have any theories?” was the plea. “No,” he responded, “theories are still not possible with the limited and conflicting data we have.” The journalist paused. “My editor wants me to find some theories. Do you know of any other aviation experts who have theories?”

We can understand his urgency and discontent. The prospect of perhaps never knowing the truth is a disquieting one. For all of our technologies, events like this remind us that real life events can be an epistemological morass. We try. But we get bogged down, and it’s frustrating.

Aircraft crash investigation is a perfect example of the wider problem of how we discern truth in an uncertain world where evidence is often incomplete and contradictory. The late Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence”. But how well does this catch-all statement stack up in the real world? Frequently, the more you dig the more you uncover. In the initial stages of the MH370 search, there was an absence of evidence that the aircraft had diverted from its flight path to Beijing, leading to huge search and rescue resources being deployed in the Gulf of Thailand, the site of last known radio contact. More careful investigation and data from Inmarsat satellite pings overturned this hypothesis; the plane had kept flying for many hours afterwards.

In the early stages of the investigations, authorities were quick to stress the absence of evidence regarding any foul play. But when it later came to light that the aircraft’s transponder and ACARS system were separately deactivated, the hypothesis that the aircraft was deliberately diverted came to the fore. Suddenly, the scrutiny of pilots and passengers began anew. Authorities began to re-examine their assumptions. Something initially downplayed as being unremarkable – a pilot’s political views, a passenger’s country of origins, now takes on heightened relevance.

These sort of subtleties remind us that neat, catchy mantras like “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” actually don’t have much practical utility or purchase in the real world. Carl Sagan famously said the opposite, that “absence of evidence does NOT equal evidence of absence”. In an ironic twist, Donald Rumsfeld said the same regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The relationship between absence of evidence and evidence of absence remains fluid and nuanced, and we remain stuck in the epistemological morass.

These events serve to remind the armchair epistemologist of the importance of abductive reasoning in the real world. Lacking final conclusive proof, we try to search for the working hypothesis with the ‘best fit’. Which hypothesis has the greatest explanatory power? Has the least number of ad hoc assumptions? Is the most economical? Has the greatest explanatory scope? This sort of thinking can help us parse the field of inquiry from outlandish options.

This much is clear: MH370 reveals both how important it is to retain agnosticism in the face of uncertainty, but also how important it is not to remain satisfied by it. No one would argue that since we don’t know what happened to the flight that there is no need to keep striving to find out. Indifferent agnosticism won’t cut it.

Suppose now we turn to the question of the existence of God. Though this Big Question lacks the immediate urgency of determining the cause of an airliner crash, many of us could relate to the feeling of uncertainty it engenders. We strive for truth, we are confused by data which could be interpreted either way, some of us are satisfied with an inference to the best explanation, some of us aren’t. Some of us, perhaps the most emotionally honest, make Pascalian bets. For many, the investigation is ongoing, for some, it’s turned into a cold case.

And yet, this biggest mystery has far greater existential importance in the long term than the outcome of an investigation into a tragic air accident. It’s a question both universal and personal. It is difficult to imagine any tenable prospect for a human destiny beyond death or for ultimate justice to triumph unless a Being of immense and ultimate power, with the will and capacity to restore and redeem all that is lost, really does exist at rock bottom.

So I think it actually makes very good sense to persist in investigating, to dedicate a good portion of our intellectual resources to examine and re-examine this question. Have we paused to ask whether we really, honestly, deep down, have made our best efforts to do this?

If God did act in history, what sort of evidence would we be likely to find?

If God does still act today, what sort of evidence would we be prepared to accept?

Would new evidence perhaps persuade us to consider this question afresh? Have we, in our quietest moments, free of all pretensions, paused to ask such a Being, if he exists, whether he might, in his own way and time, reveal himself to us? Would we be prepared to change our lifestyle, our actions, if he did so?

What of the intelligent friend who gives a sudden and articulate testimony on how they’ve experienced the presence of God? Or the faithful family whose lives are rent asunder by unspeakable tragedy? Or the respected philosopher who starts practising a religion? Or the archaeological find which casts doubt upon a cherished sacred text? Have we seriously considered, as an adult, the historical evidences for the resurrection of Jesus? How far are we willing to allow new evidence to alter our opinions, on whichever side? Can we find the courage to track down the evidence and follow it wherever it leads?

Like the investigators of MH370, we must press on with the difficult questions and keep trying to track truth down. In our efforts we should be careful, humble, honest, measured, calm and rational. What we can’t afford to be is indifferent.

James Garth is a practising aeronautical engineer. He is a Fellow of ISCAST with an active interest in practical apologetics and the science/faith interface.

^{Photo by Sheila from Pexels}