The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (8 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.”
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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.

After Pope Urban VIII permitted Galileo to write a book outlining the arguments for and against the Copernican system, Galileo eventually published his
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
in 1632. The price of publication was the condition that Galileo include the pope’s views and yet another humiliating preface admitting that Copernicus had fabricated it all. This time, however, scholars all across the continent laughed at the transparently coerced disclaimer. If Galileo secretly felt redeemed, it did him no good. He didn’t help himself by putting the pope’s traditional views in the mouth of a character named Simplicio, which can be interpreted as simpleton. The embarrassed and infuriated Pope ordered Galileo to his knees in front of a tribunal and forced him to recant his heretical ideas.

Galileo’s experience shows how conflict arose when science revealed things that contradicted traditional beliefs. It also raised a still controversial question: How were Christians supposed to react to the discoveries of natural philosophers? Did empirical observation trump biblical revelation, or vice versa? That this issue remains unresolved is apparent in the arguments used in today’s ongoing conflict over what to teach in science classrooms.

Although Galileo endured clerical condemnation for arguing that Earth was not the center of the universe, the then conventional idea that Earth stood at the center of everything came from the Greek geographer Ptolemy. The Bible does not directly address the issue. Neither does it address the date of creation. The belief that the Bible says we live on a not-quite six-thousand-year-old Earth at the center of the universe is itself an interpretation. Gradually, the idea that there were other ways to interpret biblical stories came to be accepted. By the time Pope John Paul II apologized publicly for Galileo’s persecution in 1992, the church had long since abandoned the idea of Noah’s Flood as a global deluge. The new official view was that those who condemned Galileo did not recognize the potential for differing interpretations of the Bible’s plain words.

Consider, for example, how through a literal interpretation one can read something into the Bible one knows not to be true, like that the world is flat. The Creation story in Genesis says Earth is covered by a great vault (firmament) on which the celestial bodies move across the sky, which makes literal sense if the world is flat—like the floor of a grand temple. And must not Daniel have considered Earth essentially flat when he interpreted the dream of a great tree that could be seen to the farthest end of the world (Daniel 4:20)? This only would be possible if the world were flat (and a lot smaller than it actually is). Obviously, it is impossible to see the far side of the world on a spherical planet, which is why one understands the obvious meaning as a figure of speech.

This is not just an Old Testament problem. Literal interpretation of the New Testament also implies a flat Earth. Matthew wrote that the devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world from the top of a high mountain (Matthew 4:8). This would only be possible if the planet were indeed flat, unless of course Matthew was referring to all the kingdoms of the Middle East, the world known to the Jews. Similarly, the Book of Revelation refers to “the four corners of the earth” (Revelation 7:1) despite the fact that spheres lack corners. In other words, acknowledging the fact that we live on a planet requires allowing for figurative or allegorical interpretations for these, and therefore other, biblical passages.

As debate about the nature of the cosmos, the beginning of the world, and evidence for the Flood moved from cloisters into more public forums, Protestants generally promoted biblical literalism in their feud with the Catholic Church and its allegorical readings of the Bible. Today, however, few realize that until the Reformation Christian theologians considered strict biblical literalism simplistic fodder for the illiterate masses.

Questioning traditional biblical ideas about the natural world became less dangerous in the decades after Galileo’s ordeal. Despite substantial friction between religious denominations (not to mention a few wars), natural philosophers investigating Earth and the cosmos developed experimental approaches to scientific inquiry and proposed imaginative theories to rationally explain Noah’s Flood through secondary, natural causes rather than miracles. Although science as we know it was yet to emerge, scholars increasingly believed that investigating the natural world held the key to deciphering the mysteries of God’s creation. Observation paved the way to insight. Those investigating nature were confident that they would not only confirm the truth of a global flood but discover how cleverly God pulled it off—and reveal just what the Bible meant in describing how “all the fountains of the great abyss were released, and the floodgates of heaven were opened” (Genesis 7:11).

The history of attempts to understand the Bible shows that what one reads into it can be as influential as what it says. As people learned more about the world, certainty in the reality of Noah’s Flood led to imaginative ideas for reconciling geological evidence with biblical stories. But instead of resolving the issue, these efforts created new divisions, because the harder people looked for evidence of a global deluge, the less convincing the case for one became.

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