Both Jewish and early Christian traditions held that mountains formed after God created the world, which initially was a more perfect form, like a sphere or an egg. Some held that God scooped out the ocean basins and piled up the spoils to form continents and mountains a couple of days before he created people. Others thought that topography arose from sin but argued over the timing. Perhaps God inflicted the inconvenience of mountains to punish Adam and Eve when they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Or maybe mountains formed when He cursed Earth for receiving Abel’s blood. Many of those who pondered such things believed that topography formed when Noah’s Flood reworked Earth’s surface. Whether formed before or during the Flood, the irregular form of mountains testified to how God could extend his punishment of humanity to scarring the face of a once perfect Paradise.
In this vein, early Christians generally considered fossil seashells relics of Noah’s Flood, tangible reminders of humanity’s depravity. Through the Middle Ages Christian theologians taught that the ongoing decay of the world mirrored mankind’s spiritual and moral degeneration. Where today we see high mountains and dramatic landforms as iconic natural cathedrals embodying the wonder of creation, for centuries the Christian perspective was just the opposite.
Augustine’s views endured in those of thirteenth-century Catholic philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas. Like Augustine, he advocated flexibility in interpreting Genesis. He thought that because the church was eternal, Christianity could wait until natural philosophers determined what was certain before deciding which of the possible interpretations of Genesis to abandon in the face of apparent contradictions. Although Aquinas accepted the reality of Noah’s Flood, he promoted understanding the book of nature—God’s other book—in seeking to understand both scripture and the world around us. God created reason and endowed humanity with the ability to judge truth and the free will to embrace or deny it. Aquinas allowed no room for conflict between the Creator and how the world worked. He considered such conflict a logical absurdity.
Aquinas and Augustine viewed reason as a fruitful gift and a way for people to embrace and practice learning about things larger and more meaningful than one’s self. To me, this sounds perfectly consistent with how geologists like myself, and scientists in disciplines from astronomy to zoology, conduct our inquiries. I didn’t expect to find the bedrock principle underlying science enshrined in early Christian thought.
Still, times have changed. In Aquinas’s day, three generally accepted facts about earth history were rooted in the teachings of the church. The world was a few thousand years old, Noah’s Flood reshaped topography, and everything would end in a great conflagration at the end of the millennium (although, as we’ll see, opinions differed as to just when that would be).
Later in the Renaissance, the rediscovery and translation of influential Greek and Arabic philosophical texts blurred the distinction between living and nonliving things. If Earth itself was alive, perhaps fossils, a name that covered any odd thing found in a rock, could grow in rocks. Stalactites dripping from the ceiling of caves grew within the earth. Why not fossils too? Such thinking led natural philosophers to see fossils as objects that simply mimicked the shapes of living organisms. While natural philosophers came to regard fossils as nothing more than mineral curiosities, a few, like Leonardo da Vinci, thought otherwise.
Late in the fifteenth century, the rivers and hills of northern Italy fascinated the son of a public official in the town of Vinci, nestled at the foot of Monte Albano. As a boy Leonardo wandered up the mountain and found a cave where the rock walls were a hash of seashells and fish bones. A natural skeptic, he didn’t believe the common explanation that Noah’s Flood had carried the shells into the mountains. His doubts were strengthened when, years later, he worked on canal projects where excavations exposed numerous fossils embedded in solid rock. Observing his surroundings, Leonardo concluded that a great flood did not entomb marine life in stone. Some shells were clamped shut, as if buried alive. Others were broken into fragments and scattered in deposits resembling modern beaches. The surfaces of rock layers even preserved worm tracks. He may have been the first to question whether worms could crawl around the seafloor and leave perfectly shaped, undisturbed tracks during an epic flood.
Watching how flowing water moves sediment, Leonardo concluded that no flood could have carried ancient seashells into the mountains for the simple reason that fossils and other objects heavier than water sank to the bottom of a current. Fossils were neither souvenirs of the Flood nor inanimate curiosities. Either God was trying to trick him, or the story was more complicated than implied by a simple reading of Genesis.
Leonardo reasoned that layers of sedimentary rock initially formed from mud that gradually settled to the bottom of an ancient sea. Fossil shells preserved in the rocks high on ridges were deposited during an era of higher sea level. Trusting reason and the testimony of his own eyes to decipher the structure of God’s grand design, he saw no evidence of a catastrophic deluge.
Even if Noah’s Flood had drowned the world, Leonardo did not see how it could have carved topography. If it rained enough to submerge the highest peaks, the floodwaters would have formed a great sphere. But were water to everywhere rise to the same elevation, it would have no slope to propel it. How could the floodwaters erode valleys without moving? Besides, where did all that water go afterward? For a mind such as Leonardo’s, more looking and thinking only spawned more questions.
Getting rid of the floodwaters presented as great a challenge as generating a global flood. Evaporating a globe-covering mass of water would require more heat than the Sun could muster. And not only were shells heavy enough to settle out in turbulent water, but the water at the bottom of a wave moves away from shore. Noah’s Flood would have dragged fossils out to sea rather than pushed them up onto mountains. To Leonardo, fossil shells entombed in upland rocks, the conventional evidence for a global flood, amounted to no evidence at all.
Later, exploration of the New World would raise new problems for a global flood. Particularly troublesome was the huge increase in the number of species Noah had to house on his ark as explorers discovered the world’s great variety of life-forms. As confounding as how all of these new animals could have fit aboard was the question of how they traveled to the ark before the flood and then back home again afterward, all without leaving any offspring in the Old World.
Unlike Leonardo, who stuck close to home, everywhere European explorers went they found people who didn’t appear to be descended from a Jewish patriarch. Biblical apologists proposed that Native Americans descended from the lost tribes of Israel, from Viking expeditions, or from people who had crossed ancient land bridges to the New World. Such solutions introduced even more problems. Where were these continent-connecting land bridges now? Could Pygmies, Vikings, and Aborigines all have descended from Noah in just a few thousand years, when classical statues revealed that Greeks and Italians looked the same two thousand years ago as they do today? If people changed so slowly, how could the kaleidoscope of the world’s ethnicities have developed since Noah’s Flood? However one looked at it, the biblical account provided an incomplete view of earth history.
The discussion changed with the arrival of Protestant thought. The reformers who split the church broke with the centuries-long Catholic tradition of allegorical interpretation but could not agree among themselves about how to read the story of Noah’s Flood. Protestants introduced both more literal and liberal interpretations as they taught all people to interpret the Bible for themselves.
Unlike their contemporaries in the sixteenth-century Catholic church, Martin Luther and John Calvin ignored the implications of New World discoveries. They were religious reformers, not explorers faced with conundrums manifest in the flesh of exotic animals and peoples. But here again we find more debate than uniformity of thought. The two great minds that laid the intellectual foundation of the Protestant church, and all its denominational offspring, offered opposing interp
retations of Noah’s Flood. In their commentaries we can recognize a resemblance to scientific rivals hashing out how to interpret puzzling data.
Published in 1545, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis devoted more than a hundred pages to commentary on Noah’s Flood. He declared that Moses “spoke properly and plainly, and neither allegorically nor figuratively.”4 He held that the Flood annihilated the earthly paradise and left no trace of Earth’s original surface in its wake. Petrified wood and fossils dug out of mines, the buried ruins of the former world, were all that was left to testify to the destruction of humanity’s cradle. Generating the Flood was no problem because God held the continents above the seas through divine buoyancy He could rescind on command.
And then, like the coat of a dog shaking off after a bath, the surface of the world went from flat to wrinkled. A quick dunk and shake sums up how Luther’s Flood reshaped the world to create modern topography. Some areas rose to become mountains. Others sank beneath the seas. The Flood destroyed Earth’s original soil that had produced incredible bounty with little labor. “Before the Flood turnips were better than melons, oranges, or pomegranates were afterwards.”5 Luther even asserted that the Flood began in springtime to maximize the terror for a populace “full of the expectation of a new year.”6 Clearly, such opinions expand upon a literal interpretation of Genesis, if only because, like dinosaurs, turnips are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Given his propensity to supply details of his own, even Luther, someone generally considered a strict biblical literalist, struggled with biblical interpretation.
Having grown up in the tamed, rolling hills of lowland Germany, Luther was unaccustomed to and intimidated by alpine topography. To his eye, the ragged nature of mountains mirrored mankind’s spiritual deterioration. Mankind had been in decline since the chaos of the Flood resurfaced the world and left mountains tarnishing the face of creation.
Luther’s fellow reformer John Calvin also endorsed a literal interpretation of the biblical flood but did not fill in the kind of detail that Luther offered up. Noting a lack of consensus on such matters, Calvin did not offer fossils as evidence of a global flood. In contrast to Luther, he maintained that after the Flood the world remained in roughly its former state. Rather than a catastrophic reshuffling of the physical world, Calvin’s version of Noah’s Flood served as a quiet reset button.
Unlike Luther, Calvin lived much of his life in and around the Swiss Alps. He loved nature and could not believe God would create a world that was not beautifully rugged. Neither could he believe that God would curse the world itself on account of humanity’s sins. Just as reason elevated men above beasts, nature was a lens through which to behold God. And if Earth did not share in God’s curse, then how could mountains have been created during Noah’s Flood?
These two traditions that trace back to the roots of the Protestant church essentially stake out different ways of dealing with the relationship between science and religion. The Protestant followers of Calvin encouraged study of the natural world in seeking to understand the universe and humanity’s role in it, an approach paralleled in the Jesuit tradition of Catholic scholarship in natural philosophy. While Calvin’s accommodating views fostered a spirit of scientific inquiry, Luther’s cultivation of more literal followers led to a less flexible understanding of the natural world. Although the two great reformers differed on how to interpret Noah’s Flood, they both thought Nicolaus Copernicus heretical to challenge the conventional view that the Sun circled us.
Copernicus announced his radical theory that we circled the Sun as a visiting scholar in Rome around 1500. At first he cast the idea as an intellectual curiosity, a novelty to exercise the mind. Later, after decades contemplating the matter, he became convinced that this was indeed how the world worked. And although Pope Clement VII reacted favorably to the idea in the gardens of the Vatican, Copernicus returned to his hometown in Poland rather than tangle with the papal censors in Rome when he dedicated his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres to Pope Paul III in 1543. Unbeknownst to him, his publisher added a groveling preface that apologized for ideas intended as hypothetical speculation rather than fact. An anguished Copernicus only learned of this duplicity on his deathbed when he first glimpsed his just-published book.
Copernicus was not the only one disappointed with his book. Ever the literalist, Luther was appalled by the suggestion that our world was not the center of the universe. His plain-sense understanding of scripture led him to denounce such egregious heresy. “This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.”7 The ideas that Jerusalem was the center of the world and that Earth was the center of the universe were solidly enshrined in Christian doctrine. Besides, the classical theory that the Sun circled Earth seemed to account for the movement of heavenly bodies. How else could Joshua have commanded the Sun to stand still (Joshua 10:12–13)? Over the next several centuries, Calvin’s attitude of greater flexibility in how to interpret natural phenomena helped generations of Protestants accept scientific revelations.
Half a century later, Galileo Galilei inadvertently supported Copernicus and tested another Pope’s patience by pointing his newly invented telescope at Jupiter in 1610. His discovery that moons circled another planet took Copernicus’s hypothesis out of the realm of speculation. If moons orbited other planets, then might not Earth itself orbit the Sun? Although he prudently named Jupiter’s moons after his Medici patrons, Galileo was still denounced as an enemy of Christian faith.
Scholars eager to defend the Bible agreed that Galileo’s findings were absurd. When he offered doubters a chance look through his telescope, many either proclaimed it impious to look or denounced Jupiter’s tiny satellites as devilish illusions.
Turning his telescope toward the Moon, Galileo made another heretical discovery—plainly visible mountains. This was a problem, for mountains were not supposed to be there. If Earth’s topography resulted from Noah’s Flood or Adam’s Fall, then why would similar features scar the surface of the Moon? It made no sense for man’s curse to extend to worlds where no sinners lived.
This time Galileo had gone too far. His support for the Copernican system was labeled atheistic, and he was denounced to the Inquisition in Rome.
Attempting to defuse the controversy, Galileo wrote to his friend Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine and argued that literal interpretations of the Bible should not be applied to scientific questions. His critics were missing the point and needed to think more liberally.
Contrary to the sense of the Bible and the intention of the holy Fathers… they would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage, though under the surface meaning of its words this passage may contain a different sense.8
Galileo further argued that the study of nature reveals facts about the way the world works—but that the Bible is notoriously difficult to interpret.
If anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken: for he opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible, which is beyond his comprehension, but rather his own interpretation; not what is in the Bible, but what he has found in himself and imagines to be there.9
Galileo was saying that the problem lay in how one read scripture rather than in anything one could observe and study about the world. To his way of thinking, apparent conflicts between scripture and reason could be resolved if one reinterpreted the Bible on the basis of careful observation of nature, on the basis of natural facts. New discoveries could guide biblical interpretation on matters pertaining to the natural world.
Galileo further defended Copernican theory and his own thinking by arguing that Moses adapted his language to his audience. Today one generally does not try to teach quantum physics in high school, or James Joyce to the illiterate. You can’t teach someone something he or she lacks the background to learn.
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br /> Although the Inquisition could not condemn Galileo for observing something, interpreting scripture was a different matter. The Council of Trent had forbidden interpretations that contradicted the traditional commonsense views of the church fathers. And an Earth-centered universe was enshrined in Catholic tradition. To argue otherwise was heresy.
When informed of Galileo’s correspondence in 1615, the Inquisition convened a handpicked panel of theologians who were ordered to judge propositions extracted from his letters. They obediently ruled that “the proposition that the sun is the centre and does not revolve about the earth, is foolish, absurd, false in theology, and heretical, because expressly contrary to Holy Scripture.”10 In February of the next year, Pope Paul V ordered Galileo brought before the Inquisition, where Cardinal Bellarmin decried the damage it would do to Christian faith were the planets found to revolve around the Sun. If Earth was nothing special, just one of many planets careening through space, how special were its inhabitants? Galileo’s telescope not only threatened humanity’s favored place in the eyes of God, it threatened the Bible’s promise of salvation.
Galileo found himself in ever more awkward quarters. How could one individual challenge the most powerful political and cultural force of his day? In his own defense, Galileo invoked the authority of St. Augustine’s ideas, but even that didn’t work.
Several weeks later the Inquisition condemned an already dead Copernicus and banned all writing that affirmed that Earth revolved around the Sun. To teach that our planet moved through space was dangerous in this world and invited damnation in the next.
The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood Page 5
