Bones in the Mountains
CONSIDER MOUNT EVEREST. The world’s highest mountain consists of three geological formations separated by two faults, shattered zones across which rock formations slid into place. Much as the layer-cake rock sequence exposed in the Grand Canyon captures the scope of geologic time, the shuffled geology of Mount Everest reveals the power of unimaginably slow deformation to transform the bottom of the sea into three different kinds of rocks and stack them back up to crown the world. This would have been unimaginable to early Christians. Climb up the mountain and you can see it for yourself.
After leaving Katmandu and trekking more than a week through the glacier-carved valley of the Dodh Kosi river, you’d arrive at Everest base camp, 17,590 feet above sea level. From there it is another eleven and a half thousand feet up to the top. The bottom half of the mountain, the part below about 23,000 feet, consists of the Rongbuk Formation, metamorphic rock with a composition similar to granite. Like the Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the Rongbuk Formation formed when marine sediments were buried miles below ground.
The suite of minerals in the Rongbuk indicates it formed at temperatures of 1000–1250°F and at 8,000–10,000 times atmospheric pressure, more than fifteen miles down in Earth’s crust. Radiometric ages of unaltered mineral inclusions in the Rongbuk reveal that the original marine sediment was deposited some 490 million years ago. Once the rocks were stacked up into enough of a pile to heat up, deform, and start melting its own base, numerous granitic dikes rose like crystallized tendrils climbing their way up toward the surface.
Continuing up through shattered rock to cross the Lhotse Detachment, the lower of two fault zones, you’d reach the North Col Formation, which extends up to about 28,200 feet. This formation consists of 490-million-year-old marble, schist, and phyllite—limestone, sand, and mud buried deep enough to be pressure-cooked into harder rocks, but not so deep as to start melting. The mineral assemblage in the North Col Formation shows it underwent metamorphism just two to four miles below ground, at temperatures of 850–950°F and pressures of 1,000–2,000 times atmospheric. It was never buried anywhere near as deep as the rock right below it. Missing are the miles of rock that must have once lain between the now neighboring rock formations.
At the top of the North Col Formation, a distinctive stripe of yellowish marble (metamorphosed limestone) called the Yellow Band cuts across the mountain. At the top of the Yellow Band, a zone of completely shattered rock defines the second fault zone, the Qomolangma Fault, which separates the marble below from unmodified limestone of the overlying Qomolangma (or Everest) Formation. These uppermost rocks also date from about 490 million years ago, and extend to the summit 29,035 feet above sea level.1 The three rocks of Everest were born in the same sea, but they had radically different histories before being spliced together to form the world’s highest mountain.
Standing on the frigid summit of Everest, if you could pick up a piece of the limestone and view it under a microscope you would find that the top of the world consists of fragmented trilobites and tiny fecal pellets that settled to a tropical seabed. Beneath your boots you’d see the essential truth of the world’s highest mountain—the rock at its top once lay at the bottom of the sea.
How could a scrap of seafloor come to cap the world? Based on the cooling history of minerals they contain, these rocks started rising from the sea about fifty million years ago, when India began smashing into Asia. As India moved north, Asia stayed put, crumpling, folding, and faulting the incoming rock that had been deposited in a shallow sea. Crushed in a geological vise, the old seafloor was squeezed up and up, rising centimeters a year to eventually stand more than five miles above the coast. Faults formed as the incoming rock compressed, fractured, and pushed aside the rock that was already there. The southern edge of the Tibetan Plateau began to slide down toward India in much the same way that material starts sloughing off the top and sides of a pile of sand if a bulldozer keeps advancing into it.
But if you didn’t know about plate tectonics, how could you explain finding an old ocean floor on top of the planet’s highest peak? People around the world faced a similar question when they saw marine fossils entombed in high mountains. One way to resolve such puzzles is to assume that mountains don’t rise and that an incredibly deep sea once covered the peak, and thus the whole world. Another way is to assume that the rocks now exposed in the mountain somehow rose miles up out of the sea. Imagining that Noah’s Flood submerged the Himalaya is no less intuitive than the modern scientific idea that India is slamming into Asia and bulldozing up the world’s highest mountains in a process so slow one could not observe its progress over many lifetimes.
If you think the world is static, the idea of deforming and deconstructing rocks into whole new formations would never cross your mind. Before the concept of geologic time entered into people’s thinking, it was crazy to imagine that India was pushing up an old seabed to form the Himalaya. Faced with the choice between a catastrophic flood or mysteriously rising mountains, early natural philosophers considered a mammoth flood less preposterous.
Naturally, arguments erupted about how to interpret and reconcile religious beliefs with discoveries about nature, and vice versa. How could they not? Humanity’s essential curiosity and propensity to talk promote debate. Was Genesis intended as a concise history of the Jewish people, a literal and comprehensive history of the world, or as metaphorical parables for ages to come? The modern creationist concept of fundamental conflict between faith and reason would have shocked early Christians who believed that discoveries about the world revealed natural truths that could only support biblical truths.
Noah’s Flood was a powerful narrative that greatly affected the early development of geology because natural philosophers initially looked to the biblical flood to explain rocks, topography, and whole landscapes. How could the shells of sea creatures come to rest inside mountains? Discoveries of marine fossils found far above the sea bolstered the view of Noah’s Flood as a global catastrophe. The idea that the world had been reshaped by a great flood doubled as biblical truth and the first geological theory for much of postclassical antiquity.
In ancient Greece, however, there was a wide range of strikingly modern ideas about why mountains contained marine fossils. Some of the earliest known philosophers recognized the organic nature of fossils as creatures that lived in a remote time long before people walked the Earth. Fossil seashells told of oceans that covered the land. Giant vertebrae and enormous teeth that were occasionally unearthed were widely recognized as ancient bones. Fossils discovered near sites of legendary battles were displayed in temples as the remains of epic heroes or mythical monsters. The Greek idea that modern animals and people were but puny shadows of bygone days reinforced the widespread belief that the world was running down, wearing out, and growing old.
One might even be tempted to consider the great philosopher Aristotle a protogeologist for recognizing that landscapes evolved over unimaginably long time spans. In his view, land and sea constantly swapped places, and marine fossils in the rocks of mountains testified to how sea could become land. Rivers carried silt and sand to the sea, gradually filling it in, causing the sea level to rise and submerge coastal areas. This endless cycle in which land became sea and then land again so slowly as to escape observation paralleled Aristotle’s belief in a world without beginning or end. Civilizations rose and fell before they could record even a single round of this grand cycle. The world was eternal and always changing.
Philo offered one of the earliest surviving commentaries on Noah’s Flood in his Questions and Answers on Genesis, published in the first century AD. Born into an aristocratic Jewish family in Greek-ruled Alexandria, Philo didn’t question the historical veracity of the biblical flood. He was primarily interested in revealing the true meaning of scriptural passages. To him, this meant exploring deeper, allegorical meanings. He considered literal interpretations superficial. Philo singlehandedly initiated both sides of a long history of novel and conflicting interpretations of Noah’s Flood. He characterized the biblical flood as both limitless, having drowned the whole earth, and as having flowed almost beyond Gibraltar, implying that its influence was restricted to the Mediterranean.
Whether he meant to or not, Philo articulated both sides of what would become a grand debate among generations of theologians and natural philosophers. Did the biblical flood inundate the entire planet or just the world known to Noah? Christians debated this question long before science entered the fray. At stake was how to evaluate the truth about the world. Do you have faith in what you already think you know, or do you adapt your thinking to new information? Ever since, this question has been at the heart of an ongoing conversation between faith and reason. And the story of Noah’s Flood has put these different styles of belief into direct conflict perhaps more than any scientific issue other than evolution.
Among those arguing about how to read Noah’s story was Celsus, a second-century Greek philosopher. An opponent of Christianity, he charged the Jews with borrowing Noah’s story from pagan sources. Biblical critics like Celsus questioned the ability of the ark to hold pairs of all the world’s animals. How could one build such a boat? The preposterous story of a farmer building a lifeboat for all of creation seemed like a Jewish fairy tale.
In response, the second-century church father Origen countered that Genesis should be understood figuratively.
Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without sun and moon and stars. . . . I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events.2
Origen invoked Greek culture in promoting a figurative reading of the story of Noah. Why did his contemporaries allow Greek myths allegorical meanings but insist on literal meanings for the biblical story? To him, the symbolic meaning of Noah’s Flood was as important as its historicity. Noah foreshadowed Christ, the animals stood for the kingdom of Christ, and the ark represented the church—the ark’s three decks symbolized heaven, Earth, and the underworld. In his mind, a literal reading did not do Noah’s story justice.
Origen’s insistence on allegorical readings was not unique. Christians in his era tended to interpret biblical stories allegorically to encourage moral behavior. Sensitive to pagan critiques like those of Celsus, Christian philosophers advocated using knowledge of the natural world to better understand the Bible. Clement, Origen’s teacher and head of the Catechetical School in Alexandria, chided those who did not wish to use logic and reason in interpreting the holy book. He embraced both faith and reason. Understanding the truth expressed in God’s creation could only lead to a better understanding of God. Clement held that Christians should bring all knowledge to bear on the truth because the world could not contradict its creator. To him the bond between faith and reason was as close as that between God and Christ.
Saint Augustine stands out among early Christians who wrestled with such questions. Born in Roman Africa in 354 AD to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Augustine was educated in Carthage, where he became familiar with classical knowledge, Latin literature, and pagan beliefs. A brilliant intellect who lived a hedonistic lifestyle as a youth, he rose to become professor of rhetoric at the imperial court in Milan, the most visible academic post of his day. His worldly experiences before converting to Christianity in his early thirties helped frame an attitude of belief in what one could see firsthand. In his view, nature didn’t lie. He interpreted fossil shells and bones entombed in the fabric of the land as natural evidence that verified the story of Noah’s Flood.
Remarkable for the clarity of his thoughts about the relationship between rational and spiritual life, Augustine warned of the danger in embracing biblical interpretations that conflicted with reason. Fearing that Christians could lose faith when confronted by evidence contradicting sanctioned interpretations of scripture, Augustine wrote:
Let no one think that, because the Psalmist says, He established the earth above the water, we must use this testimony of Holy Scripture against these people who engage in learned discussions. . . . Ignorant of the sense of these words, they will more readily scorn our sacred books than disavow the knowledge they have acquired by unassailable arguments or proved by the evidence of experience.3
Secure in his faith that Scripture and the natural world shared a common author, Augustine advocated flexible biblical interpretation that could be adjusted in light of what one learned about the natural world. He advised Christians to avoid endorsing biblical interpretations contradicted by what they could see for themselves.
Augustine also defended the idea that Noah’s Flood covered the whole planet by employing explanations based on the knowledge of his day. When critics argued that floodwaters could not have risen higher than the lighter clouds surrounding Mount Olympus, Augustine countered that Olympus itself towered over the clouds despite being made of earth, the heaviest element. Why, therefore, could not water rise as high for a brief time? While this argument seems rather silly today, it sounded rational at the time and shows Augustine’s flexible thinking in reasoning about the nature of the world. To him, one could make sense of natural and physical phenomena so long as one had a keen eye and a curious mind.
To Augustine, the most compelling evidence for a global flood was the widespread occurrence of plant and animal remains in rocks. Fossils seemed to tell the story as plainly as the Bible. Far more interesting and controversial were questions about the symbolic meanings and significance of Noah’s story.
Augustine’s contemporary, Saint Jerome, translated the Bible into Latin and institutionalized allegorical interpretations. Jerome also extolled the virtues of thoughtful reasoning in understanding scripture. Holding Earth’s disrupted, broken, and twisted crust as evidence of God’s wrath, he considered literal interpretation of the Bible as shallow reasoning. Jerome cemented within the church a tradition of considering literal interpretations for the illiterate masses and allegory for more advanced minds—that is, the clergy. For a thousand years it was the clergy’s job to offer deeper and more meaningful interpretations for those lacking the interest, commitment, or intellect to take on the task. Eventually, the tide shifted when Martin Luther led the sixteenth-century Protestant rebellion against an elite, allegorically minded priesthood, reclaiming the banner of biblical interpretation for the more literal-minded.
Jerome’s translation of Genesis introduced unintended fodder for conflicting interpretations when he chose to translate the Hebrew word “adamah” to Latin as terra, “earth,” instead of humus, “soil.” His choice of earth instead of soil for this passage (Genesis 3:17) in the Latin Bible sparked debate about whether God cursed the whole planet or just the fields tilled by man. If earth meant soil, then Adam’s punishment consisted of having to work the land for a living. But if God cursed Earth itself, then perhaps topography was a manifestation of divine vengeance, the lasting signature of a world-shattering catastrophe. This (mis)translation would greatly influence fellow Christians who believed in the ongoing degeneration of both humanity and the world following Adam and Eve’s fall from grace.
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 interpretations 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.
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.
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.