FRANCIS WATSON
Nothing should be more welcome than the extension of knowledge of any and every kind. . . . If geology proves to us that we must not interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally; if historical investigations shall show us that inspiration, however it may protect the doctrine, yet was not empowered to protect the narrative of the inspired writers from occasional inaccuracy, if careful criticism shall prove that there have been occasionally interpolations and forgeries in that Book, as in many others; the results should still be welcome. . . . The substance of the teaching which we derive from the Bible will not really be affected by anything of this sort.1
Such was the view of Frederick Temple, eventual bishop and archbishop but headmaster of Rugby School at the time of writing.2 Not all of his readers were convinced by his reassurances. The volume that contains them, blandly titled Essays and Reviews, was published early in 1860, just a few months after Darwin’s Origin of Species. Its seven authors found themselves at the centre of a storm of controversy involving a flurry of pamphlets, letters to the Times, mass petitions, and recourse to the ecclesiastical courts. As critics were quick to point out, there is little that is original in this volume. As they did not point out, it is precisely this lack of originality that makes it a valuable source for understanding the age that produced it. It was in mid-Victorian England that the public came to perceive a fundamental conflict between two monolithic entities labelled “science” and “religion.”
This public perception is with us to this day. Science, we still hear, has disproved religion; we live in an age of science and no longer in an age of faith. The age of faith gave way to the age of science when Darwin’s theory of evolution was accepted and the rival Genesis account of the origins of life was discredited. Indeed, in current usage “Darwin” and “Genesis” can serve as surrogates for “science” and “religion.” In 1860 the opposition to Genesis was still represented by “geology,” and not yet by “Darwin” or “evolution,” but otherwise the battle-lines were remarkably similar to the present-day ones. Equally familiar is the counterclaim that, as Temple puts it, the substance of the Bible’s teaching remains essentially unaffected by modern scientific and historical knowledge. In the years after 1860, that counterclaim would be repeated again and again by Christian apologists, not least by Temple himself in his later Bampton Lectures on The Relations between Religion and Science.3
We must carefully examine the counterclaim that rejects the necessary antagonism between science (or modern knowledge more generally) and religion (or the Bible or Genesis). As represented by Temple, the counterclaim proposes a compromise. Three fields of knowledge are selected: geology, history, and criticism. Geology shows that we must not interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally. Historical investigation shows that the biblical text is not immune from factual errors. Criticism identifies later additions to the biblical text. Yet, according to Temple, the essential content of the Bible is in no way affected by these newly discovered limitations. With a few minor adjustments, modern knowledge and biblical teaching can coexist without difficulty.
That a mid-Victorian theologian should adopt such a compromise in the face of competing truth claims is entirely understandable, not least because views of this kind remain a familiar feature of contemporary discourse on the supposedly problematic “relationship” between science and religion. This, however, is precisely the wrong strategy. Its fundamental premise is that all truths are alike and that it should be possible, with some necessary fine-tuning, to demonstrate their ultimate unity and harmony, at least in principle. But doing so overlooks the possibility that truths may be incommensurable with one another without necessary detriment to their truth status within the areas of their jurisdiction. A critical analysis of nineteenth-century debates can show how and why this potentially promising option was widely ignored.
We must look closely at the three fields of knowledge selected by Temple. The first and perhaps the most significant is geology, which “proves to us that we must not interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally.”4 How does geology do that? Temple’s readers possess Bibles in which the date “4004 BC” is printed in the margin of the text of Genesis 1.5 Scattered chronological references from the Bible and elsewhere were supposed to provide a date late in the third millennium BC for the birth of Abraham, and the two genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 provide not only a list of Abraham’s ancestors through nineteen generations but also, crucially, the ages at which each of those ancestors fathered his successor. Thus, Adam was 130 years old when he fathered Seth, and Noah was 500 years old when he fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Adding up all these figures, we learn that 1,456 years elapsed from the creation of Adam to the birth of Shem, a century before the Flood, with a further 390 years to the birth of Abraham. By the mid-nineteenth century, this chronological scheme had lost all credibility. As another contributor to Essays and Reviews notes, “Almost all intelligent persons are [now] agreed that the earth has existed for myriads of ages.”6 People were convinced by geologists’ claim that the shaping of the physical world is best explained by slow but inexorable natural processes still operative today. The physical evidence does not support the belief that the world came into being recently and instantaneously on the second and third days of creation or that fossil-bearing rock strata are vestiges of a universal flood. For such reasons as these, Temple notes that geology warns us against interpreting the first chapters of Genesis literally.
Temple also refers to “historical investigations” which show that even the inspired biblical authors were not immune from “occasional inaccuracy” and to “criticism,” which (“occasionally” again) identifies “interpolations and forgeries” within the sacred text. These findings ought to be welcomed too, however disconcerting they may at first appear. Among these biblical “forgeries,” Temple may possibly have included later chapters of the book of Daniel in which Near Eastern history following Alexander’s conquests is presented as prophecy of a still distant future. A large-scale interpolation might be seen in the latter part of the book of Isaiah. Late dates for the later chapters of Daniel and Isaiah were commonplaces of nineteenth-century German biblical scholarship, and they were gradually gaining acceptance even in religiously conservative England.7 Equally, he may have in mind smaller-scale instances such as the text-critical data that would eliminate the so-called “Johannine comma,” the Trinitarian interpolation that occurs at 1 John 5:7 in the King James Bible, from the Revised Version of 1881.8 As for the occasional inaccuracies demonstrated by historical investigation, Temple may have in view the apparent discrepancies between one biblical text and another. For example, Matthew has Jesus’s parents initially residing in Bethlehem, while Luke transfers them to Bethlehem from Nazareth only to take part in a census. Has one or the other evangelist perpetrated an “inaccuracy”?9 Unlike other essayists, however, Temple does not actually provide any examples. The point is to establish a principle: that a flawed and limited Bible remains religiously significant and that, conversely, religious significance does not stand or fall with the usual apparatus of infallibility and plenary inspiration.10 Modern investigation in the fields of geology, history, and criticism has acquired a better understanding of certain realities than was available to earlier generations of readers, and new knowledge is always to be welcomed, never to be feared.
Like all the contributors to Essays and Reviews, Temple is in quest of a via media between the competing absolutisms of right and left. To his left there are those, already strident, for whom the credibility of the Bible and traditional religion has simply been destroyed by the rise of modern science. To his right are those for whom a flawed and fallible Bible is inconceivable; for such people the Bible remains the touchstone for all human knowledge, and true science will always be in harmony with it. These parties of left and right compete with one another to occupy the same space, the space of fundamental knowledge—knowledge of the basic constitution of the world and of our own existence within the world. Is fundamental knowledge to be acquired through the natural and historical sciences or through the Bible? Temple wants to persuade the religious right to abandon its claim to monopolize this sphere of fundamental knowledge. The Bible will retain an important role within that sphere, but it will not occupy the whole of it. In particular, its claim to tell the truth about the world’s origins must be abandoned, for geology “proves to us that we must not interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally.”11 Here Temple exemplifies a traditional Anglican concern to maintain an authoritative role for reason alongside Scripture, although in harmony with it, in opposition to the monopolistic Bible of the Puritans.12 In the nineteenth-century version of this position, the place of reason is now occupied by science, but the concern remains the same: to assert that the sphere of fundamental knowledge is not the sole preserve of the Bible and that, where there are tensions with the results of free human enquiry, accommodations and compromises must be found.
Also characteristically (though not uniquely) Anglican is the related point that the sphere of fundamental knowledge is itself singular. Truth is one and indivisible; there can be only one true account of the world’s origins. In the past the Bible appeared to provide a framework for that true account, but that role must now be taken over by geology. It is assumed that there cannot be more than one true story of the world’s origins. It does not occur to Temple—or to any of his fellow-essayists—that geology and Genesis might have their own distinct and incommensurable perspectives on the world’s origins.
For participants in the mid-Victorian debate, the indivisibility of truth is axiomatic. It could hardly be otherwise in the context of an established church, a “Church of England” that identifies itself with the entire national community. Truth is one because church and state are one. Oxford and Cambridge Universities played a key role in the maintenance of this status quo, for it is at these two institutions that the future ministers of church and state prepare for their life’s work. Frederick Temple and his fellow-essayists are all closely associated with the two universities, especially with Oxford. He himself was a fellow of Balliol College and had lectured in mathematics and logic. The other contributors include the Regius Professor of Greek, the Savilian Professor of Geometry, a former Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon, and a tutor—soon to be rector—of Lincoln College.13 These five Oxonian essayists were all Church of England clergy, members of an educational institution open only to Anglicans. Mid-nineteenth-century Oxford produces and imparts an increasingly diverse range of knowledge, but the ethos within which this occurs is still distinctively Anglican. The particular domains to which this diversified knowledge belongs are parts of a greater whole, a single truth grounded ultimately in the one God.
In this intellectual context, it is impossible to envisage two true yet incommensurable accounts of the world’s origins. However, that is not a logical impossibility. It is entirely possible to speak truthfully of the same entity from incompatible perspectives. In the early modern period a geocentric universe gives way to a heliocentric one, yet the sun continues to rise and set as before. In a heliocentric universe, the moon is visible only insofar as it is illuminated by the sun, but no one proposes to remove the term “moonlight” from ordinary language because it implies that the moon produces its own light just as stars produce starlight and the sun sunlight. The two perspectives on the same reality—the sun, moon, and Earth in their relationship to one another—are not in competition with one another. Rather, they operate in different spheres—one in the sphere of general human experience in which the sun rises and the moon shines, the other in the specialized sphere of modern scientific discourse in which these phenomena are caused by the rotation of the Earth and the light of the sun. Of course, the scientific findings may seem to deny the evidence of ordinary experience. It may be said that the sun only appears to rise and that, in reality, this phenomenon is caused by the earth’s movement and not by the sun’s. This may be pragmatically appropriate language in the context of elementary science teaching; otherwise, its subordination of appearances to reality is only possible from the perspective of a Platonist. For non-Platonists, appearances are the immediate forms in which reality presents itself and in which we must engage with it. It is true that Earth revolves on its own axis and around the sun, but it is also true that the sun rises and sets. To ascribe motion exclusively to Earth in one context does not make it false to ascribe motion exclusively to the sun in another. These are two distinct truths, not a single truth accompanied by a necessary fiction or a higher truth accompanied by a lower one. The two truths are incommensurable, not because they have nothing in common and cannot be informed by one another, but because they belong within different domains of human activity, one general and universal and the other highly specialized. In spite of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, and with no detriment to their achievements, the universe as humanly experienced remained stubbornly geocentric.
We return to Temple’s claim that geology—or science more generally—“proves to us that we must not interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally.” What does this familiar claim actually mean? As a thought experiment, we may apply the principle stated here to another biblical passage, Ecclesiastes 1:5 (as rendered in the King James Version familiar to the first readers of Essays and Reviews): “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.” Holy Scripture here ascribes to the sun a constant circular movement around an evidently stationary earth. Does science show that we must not interpret the Preacher’s words literally? If so, in what sense? Science does indeed make available to us a radically different perspective on the earth’s relation to the sun, one that for certain purposes is useful and obligatory to adopt. Yet science teaches that we must not interpret the Preacher’s words literally if and only if “interpreting literally” means ascribing to a scriptural text a direct and exclusive relationship to its referent. In that case, a literal interpretation of the Ecclesiastes text would have to insist that the sun revolves around Earth independently of the perspective of any human observer and that the scientific claim that Earth revolves around the sun is absolutely false. But it is not clear that a “literal interpretation” of the Ecclesiastes text would commit us to any such conclusion. A literal interpretation would reflect on the author’s perception of a never-ending cycle of days and its place within his pessimistic worldview. Literal interpretation takes seriously the wording of the text as it stands, within its literary and historical contexts, and it seeks to clarify the authorial perceptions and purposes underlying it. In no circumstances, however, is a literal interpretation obliged to demonstrate a direct and exclusive relationship between the text and the reality to which it refers.14 One can interpret the text literally without having to claim that, according to the Bible, the sun revolves around the earth.
That does not make the modern scientific worldview irrelevant to the interpreter. A premodern reader of Ecclesiastes very well might find confirmation here that the sun revolves around Earth in an absolute sense. A post-Copernican reader would read the text differently, aware that it speaks from the distinctive perspective of the human observer. But the change of worldview does not undermine the text, destroying its credibility and damaging the reputation of the Bible as a whole. Rather, it shows that truth is plural and that the sphere in which the biblical text may be held to be true is different from the sphere of the Copernican revolution. The two truths do not compete with one another. It requires no mental effort to believe that Earth revolves around the sun while recognizing that the movement of the sun around a stable Earth is a fundamental fact of human experience of the world.15
Nineteenth-century readers of the Bible do not seem to have worried about its geocentrism and its anthropocentrism, that is, its assumption of the standpoint of human participants in the world, addressed as such by God. They do not discredit the Bible because it contains statements about the sun rising and setting even though modern science has shown such statements to be not true in an absolute and exclusive sense. Similar mental adjustments might have been made in response to the new scientific hypotheses about the age of the earth or the origin of species. These discoveries would naturally make a significant impact on the reading of the biblical text, but that impact need not have been negative. Genesis 1 gives a carefully ordered account of the preconditions for human life on earth. Light and darkness alternate, dry land emerges from the primal ocean, plants and animals come into being—and humans are created in the image of God to fill the earth and make it their home. All these events must have occurred for the world to be as it is. Science offers the nineteenth-century reader a radically different version of the story of the world’s origins—one in which the human race enters the scene belatedly and contingently, as one species among others, surviving against the odds and achieving mastery over its competitors and environment.16 Once again, scientific advances demonstrate that anthropocentric accounts of the world’s existence can no longer claim absolute and exclusive truth. Yet such accounts might remain valid within their own frame of reference. Just as the sun continues to rise and set in a post-Copernican universe, so the world as imagined in Genesis 1 can still provide the context for human existence in a post-Darwinian one. Genesis 1 speaks of the coming into being of the humanly significant world, the world that matters to us. Its timeframe is that of a humanized time: the time of day and night gathered into a recurrent seven-day week that closes with a day of rest and the lifetime of successive generations that stretches back into a remote past and lays the foundation for the present. To read Genesis this way is still to read it literally, but to do so within its specific domain—the world humanly experienced and thus given.
In the debate between science and religion that took shape during the mid-nineteenth century, the possibility of plural truths occupying distinctive domains was inadequately recognized. The assumption established itself that Genesis and therefore the whole Bible had been discredited or “disproved” by modern science. Frederick Temple himself, future archbishop of Canterbury, seems to envisage a Bible, which if not discredited is at least significantly diminished by modern geology, history, and criticism. As science advances, the Bible recedes. The concept of a “debate” between science and religion presupposes a prior breach between science and religion, geology and Genesis, a conflict in which evidence-based science was perceived to have conquered and occupied territory previously held by irrational and ungrounded belief systems.
How and why did this breach come about? Why was geology supposed to have inflicted such fatal damage on Genesis and the Bible—Genesis and therefore the Bible? The conclusion might have been drawn that geology clarified the meaning of Genesis by assigning it to its proper domain. Why was that conclusion found unconvincing? A broad range of historical, political, and cultural factors converge to produce the event in which, at some point in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Genesis is perceived to have been discredited. The event is at the same time a collective decision, not a unanimous decision, of course, but nevertheless a decision that must universally be considered and recognized as an enduring entity within our cultural landscape.
Like all accounts of origins, Genesis takes the form of a story. Like all stories, Genesis must compete with other stories for an audience’s attention. The decision against Genesis is also a decision in favour of other stories that many modern hearers or readers find more engaging and more in keeping with their sense of self. One such story, increasingly popular during the nineteenth century, is alluded to in the title of Temple’s essay: “The Education of the World.” The essay opens the Essays and Reviews volume, and its title sums up the ethos of the whole collection. The world is imagined as a single individual; world-history becomes biography, the story of a single educational process extending from childhood to adult maturity. The metaphor is indebted to Lessing, whose essay “On the Education of the Human Race” was widely read and imitated—not least, and on a grand scale, by Hegel.17 Twentieth-century echoes of it are still perceptible in Freud’s view of religion as representing an “infantile” stage of human development that must be “outgrown,”18 and in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of a world “come of age.”19
In Temple’s mid-Victorian rendering of this metaphor, we are invited to contemplate a three-stage process of development, that is,
a childhood, a youth, and a manhood of the world. The men of the earliest ages were, in many respects, still children as compared with ourselves, with all the blessings and with all the disadvantages that belong to childhood . . . Our characters have grown out of their history, as the character of the man grows out of the history of the child.20
As in the Lessing essay, three stages of the world’s education are sharply differentiated. “First come Rules, then Examples, then Principles. First comes the Law, then the Son of Man, then the Gift of the Spirit.”21 The law’s commandments and prohibitions were appropriate to the world’s childhood, and Christ’s example was appropriate to the world’s adolescence, but the world’s adulthood requires us to move beyond the law and the gospel to the age of the Spirit. To reinforce this potentially controversial claim, Temple draws on Pauline language derived from Galatians 4:
The world was once under tutors and governors until the time appointed by the Father. Then, when the fit season had arrived, the Example to which all ages should turn was sent to teach men what they ought to be. Then the human race was left to itself to be guided by the teaching of the Spirit within.22
Here Temple tries in vain to insert a permanent backward glance into the educational process in order to preserve some kind of role for Christ, “the Example to which all ages should turn.” But there is little opportunity for the backward glance amid the relentless forward movement required by the educational metaphor. The adulthood of the human race is marked by self-reliance on its own powers of thought, discovery, and invention. In contrast, Genesis would be the product of the world’s childhood. If modernity is celebrated as the world’s coming-of-age, it is inevitable that the Genesis account of the world’s origins will be set aside. The educated adult has outgrown stories intended for children, preferring stories that reflect his or her adulthood. The retelling of the world’s history as a painful learning process that comes to fruition in the present is guaranteed to appeal to the progressive adult who identifies with its hero.
In spite of twentieth-century disillusion, it is still possible to narrate human history as a story of progress or “ascent.” Like most powerful and influential stories, this one is true, illuminating, and useful in some respects, but not in others. Like other such stories, it is open to ideological distortion as soon as it is given exclusive canonical status. No story provides a final and definitive account of the reality to which it relates; if this is true of the Genesis narrative of creation and fall, it is equally true of modern narratives of human ascent.
But perhaps truth is singular, not plural. Perhaps truths are all of the same kind, tightly interlocked like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps truth is independent of the perspectives and interests of the communities concerned with it. Only a singular all-comprehending truth can produce a conflict between Genesis and natural science and then resolve it by acclaiming modern scientific progress and viewing Genesis as a product of the world’s childhood. Genesis would then have no part in the human activity of truth telling, except as a document of the history of religion. Alternatively, commitment to a singular truth might result in an attempt to harmonize Genesis and science by showing that they can coexist peaceably and cooperate effectively within the same intellectual space. As science advances under its own momentum, it may seem to provide confirmatory evidence of the truth of the biblical account; evidence, indeed, of the truth of the Christian religion itself.
During the decades before the publication of Essays and Reviews and The Origin of Species, there is much concern with the issue of evidence. Older appeals to the evidence of fulfilled prophecy and biblical miracles are still in circulation, but they have been forced onto the defensive by Deist critiques dating back to the 1720s. Newer “evidences” of Christian truth are sought especially in the natural sciences.23 Science discloses the intricate construction of living creatures and their perfect adaptation to their environments, and so—in a pre-Darwinian world—it confirms the existence, wisdom, power, and benevolence of a creator deity.24 Yet the biblical deity is just, as well as benevolent, and the event that most clearly expresses both sides of the divine character is the biblical flood. As represented in Genesis, this flood was a universal event. So long as it lasted, water covered the entire surface of the globe. Such an event would surely have left its traces in the geological record. Scientific confirmation of the biblical flood would be a valuable addition to the arsenal of evidences needed to defend church and religion against the assaults of atheism and other undesirable ideologies.
This brings us, unexpectedly perhaps, to the celebrated “voyage of the Beagle”—the trip to South America and beyond that launched the career of the young Charles Darwin, providing him with a vast store of empirical data on which to draw as he refined his theories about life’s origins in the years that followed. Actually there were two voyages of the Beagle, and they are the subject of a three-volume work published in 1839 by the Beagle’s captain, Robert FitzRoy, and entitled: Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of his Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, between the Years 1826 and 1836, describing their Examination of the Southern Shore of South America and the Beagle’s Circumnavigation of the Globe.25 During the first voyage, which lasted four years, FitzRoy assumed command of the Beagle following his predecessor’s suicide in 1828. In 1831, FitzRoy was instructed to undertake a second voyage, and it is at this point that Charles Darwin enters his account. Darwin was then aged 22 and had recently graduated from Cambridge; FitzRoy was 26. FitzRoy writes:
Anxious that no opportunity of collecting useful information, during the voyage, should be lost; I proposed to the Hydrographer that some well-educated and scientific person should be sought for who would willingly share such accommodations as I had to offer, in order to profit by the opportunity of visiting distant countries yet little known. Captain Beaufort approved of the suggestion, and wrote to Professor Peacock, of Cambridge, who consulted with a friend, Professor Henslow, and he named Mr. Charles Darwin, grandson of Dr. Darwin the poet, as a young man of promising ability, extremely fond of geology, and indeed all branches of natural history. In consequence an offer was made to Mr. Darwin to be my guest on board, which he accepted conditionally; permission was obtained for his embarkation, and an order given by the Admiralty that he should be borne on the ship’s books for provisions. The conditions asked by Mr. Darwin were, that he should be at liberty to leave the Beagle and retire from the Expedition when he thought proper, and that he should pay a fair share of the expenses of my table.26
And so the Beagle sailed off on the five-year voyage which prepared Darwin for the unique role assigned to him within modern intellectual history and popular culture.
It is not clear that the book of Genesis was much on his mind at the time; his diary never refers to it.27 He seems already to have absorbed the view that scientific questions should be pursued without reference to theology. FitzRoy came to hold a quite different view. In the concluding chapter of his account of the Beagle’s voyage, he claims to have found traces of the Genesis flood, which convinced him of the truth of the biblical narrative. Initially, he had been sceptical:
I suffered much anxiety in former years from a disposition to doubt, if not disbelieve, the inspired History written by Moses. I knew so little of that record, or of the intimate manner in which the Old Testament is connected with the New, that I fancied some events there related might be mythological or fabulous, while I sincerely believed the truth of others; a wavering between opinions, which could only be productive of an unsettled, and therefore unhappy, state of mind. . . . Much of my own uneasiness was caused by reading works by men of Voltaire’s school; and by those of geologists who contradict, by implication, if not in plain terms, the authenticity of the Scriptures.28
FitzRoy’s account of his earlier scepticism indicates that he is now operating within the genre of the exemplary conversion narrative. The voyage of the Beagle is at the same time a journey from doubt to faith, a journey that FitzRoy’s readers are supposed to reenact for themselves. Faith is produced by evidence, and credit for discovering this evidence goes to none other than Mr. Darwin himself:
In crossing the Cordillera of the Andes Mr. Darwin found petrified trees, embedded in sandstone, six or seven thousand feet above the level of the sea: and at twelve or thirteen thousand feet above the sea-level he found fossil sea-shells, limestone, sandstone, and a conglomerate in which were pebbles of the “rock with shells.” Above the sandstone in which the petrified trees were found, is “a great bed, apparently about one thousand feet thick, of black augitic lava; and over this there are at least five grand alternations of such rocks, and aqueous sedimentary deposits, amounting in thickness to several thousand feet.” These wonderful alternations of the consequences of fire and flood, are, to me, indubitable proofs of that tremendous catastrophe which alone could have caused them;—of that awful combination of water and volcanic agency which is shadowed forth to our minds by the expression “the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”29
Marine fossils on mountains had been a long-standing topic of scientific debate. Did these fossils indicate that what was now a mountain had once been a seabed that was raised far above sea level by a long series of natural causes such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions extending over not thousands but millions of years? Or were the remains of sea creatures deposited on already existing mountainsides in a single catastrophic event occurring in the relatively recent past? FitzRoy finds a place for volcanic activity as well as rainfall in the scriptural reference to “the fountains of the great deep.” First there were the trees, then successive layers of lava and sedimentation from the raised sea level, and finally intact marine fossils. These are, “to me, indubitable proofs” of the Genesis flood narrative—“to me” though not necessarily to “Mr. Darwin.” But FitzRoy’s readers are tacitly invited to make his profession of faith their own.
Hearers or readers of conversion narratives are dependent on testimony, reports of another’s experience—in this case Darwin’s experience as interpreted by FitzRoy. Yet readers may be invited to make the reported experience their own wherever possible—to see for themselves. FitzRoy’s readers are unlikely to follow Darwin high up into the Andes, but more accessible evidence of the Genesis flood is available at sea level, although admittedly still in a remote South American location. FitzRoy is particularly interested in the compressed remains of shells:
One remarkable place, easy of access, where any person can inspect these shelly remains, is Port San Julian. There, cliffs, from ten to a hundred feet high, are composed of nothing but such earth and fossils; and as those dug from the very tops of the cliffs are just as much compressed as those at any other part, it follows that they were acted upon by an immense weight not now existing. From this one simple fact may be deduced the conclusions—that Patagonia was once under the sea; that the sea grew deeper over the land in a tumultuous manner, rushing to and fro, tearing up and heaping together shells which once grew regularly or in beds: that the depth of water afterwards became so great as to squeeze or mass the earth and shells together by its enormous pressure; and that after being so forced down, the cohesion of the mass became sufficient to resist the separating power of other waves, during the subsidence of that ocean which had overwhelmed the land.30
So sea creatures as well as land creatures perished in the Genesis flood. Rainwater cascading down from above uprooted them from their natural habitat, hurling them together with such force as to crush them and embed them permanently in the earth, so that what emerges as the flood waters recede is a new cliff. The consequences of this discovery at Port San Julian are momentous:
If it be shewn that Patagonia was under a deep sea, not in consequence of the land having sunk, but because of the water having risen, it will follow as a necessary consequence that every other portion of the globe must have been flooded to a nearly equal height, at the same time; since the tendency to equilibrium in fluids would prevent any one part of an ocean from rising much above any other part, unless sustained at a greater elevation by external force; such as the attraction of the moon, or sun; or a strong wind; or momentum derived from their agency. Hence therefore, if Patagonia was covered to a great depth, all the world was covered to a great depth; and from those shells alone my own mind is convinced, (independent of the Scripture) that this earth has undergone an universal deluge.31
The conversion process is complete: “My own mind is convinced.” The first-person singular again functions rhetorically as an invitation to the reader to assent to the speaker’s conviction. We too are supposed to be convinced by this chain of scientific argumentation that Earth has undergone a universal deluge, even if we never make the journey to Patagonia to examine FitzRoy’s cliff for ourselves. The evidence for the universal flood could be read from the Patagonian cliff even if we did not also read of it in Genesis.
Or so it is claimed. In reality, it is the Genesis story that has led FitzRoy to his imaginative account of the inundation of Patagonia and his un-Darwinian interpretation of Darwin’s findings in the Andes. FitzRoy’s problem with the unimaginable extension of geological time is not that it is implausible in and of itself but that it contradicts the Bible. He seeks to embed the world of the natural sciences in the world of the Genesis narrative, with science producing “evidence” and Genesis being the framework within which that evidence is set. Thus Genesis and geology are supposed to coexist harmoniously within the same space—the space of a truth that is singular and uniform. If that is how truth is envisaged, then Genesis will be discredited as soon as geology refuses to cohabit with it and chooses to live on its own. Conversely, the Genesis that is supposedly discredited by natural science is not the text as such but the text as read through the distorting lens of a monopolistic scientific truth claim (of which the fundamentalist creationism represented by FitzRoy is simply the mirror image). For Christians and for Jews, the text finds its natural habitat within distinctive literary contexts and communal settings which enable it to communicate its own truth in its own ways.
1. Frederick Temple, “The Education of the World,” in Essays and Reviews (London: Parker & Son, 1860), 1–49, quote on 47.
2. On Temple, see Peter Hinchcliff, Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
3. Frederick Temple, The Relations between Religion and Science: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 (London: Macmillan, 1884).
4. On geology and Genesis in the nineteenth century, see my article “Genesis Before Darwin: Why Scripture Needed Liberating from Science,” in Reading Genesis after Darwin, ed. Stephen C. Barton and David Wilkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23–37.
5. The date derives from the chronological researches of James Ussher, in his Annales veteris testamenti a prima mundi origine deducti (1650), translated as Annals of the Old Testament Deduced from the First Origins of the World (1658). See James Barr, “Why the World Was Created in 4004 BC: Archbishop Ussher and Biblical Chronology,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 67 (1984–85), 575–608.
6. Benjamin Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in Essays and Reviews, 330–433, quote on 349.
7. See John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPCK, 1984).
8. “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (1 John 5:7 KJV). The authenticity of this Trinitarian testimony, along with that of the Greek Textus Receptus that contains it, were controversial topics in the nineteenth century. For a succinct summary of the text-critical evidence, see Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (New York: United Bible Societies, 1975), 715–17.
9. Early translations of German critical literature that brought this problem (among many others) to the attention of English-speaking readers include F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Luke: A Critical Study, trans. Connop Thirlwall (1825; repr., Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1993), 51–52, with an additional comment by the translator, 317; D. F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) (London: Chapman Brothers, 1846; repr., London: SCM, 1973), 184–90.
10. Temple’s argument is indebted to S. T. Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, ed. H. N. Coleridge (London: Edward Moxon, 1840, 1853), where an eloquent critique of the doctrine of biblical infallibility is short on examples of alleged scriptural errors.
11. Temple, “Education of the World,” 47.
12. For a thorough though unsympathetic analysis of the origins of this Anglican emphasis, see H. Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London: SCM, 1984), 91–285.
13. Respectively, Benjamin Jowett (“On the Interpretation of Scripture”), Baden Powell (“On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity”), Henry Bristow Wilson (“Séances Historiques de Genève. The National Church”), Mark Pattison (“Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688–1750”).
14. The hermeneutical distinction between meaning and reference is forcefully asserted by Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).
15. In the background of these remarks is Heidegger’s elusive yet compelling insistence on the priority of human being-in-the-world, characterized by “care” or “concern,” over the theoretical knowledge, which is simply a mode of that being-in-the-world: “Only in some definite mode of its own being-in-the-world can Dasein [being human] discover entities as Nature” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [Oxford: Blackwell, 1962], 93). In the case of the sun, ontological priority belongs to its role in demarcating the time that Dasein has and takes for its projects: “When the sun rises, it is time for so and so. . . . The sun dates the time which is interpreted in concern” (465; italics original).
16. The key text here is Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: John Murray, 1871; repr., London: Penguin, 2004). This work, hugely successful and influential in its own time, has more recently been totally overshadowed by The Origin of Species, in which currently objectionable doctrines of race and gender are less in evidence. As his modern editor’s note, “A contextual understanding of Darwin’s process of creation shows how issues of race, gender, and class were integral to his thought—indeed, one cannot explain the origins and development of the Descent of Man without them. Science is a messy, socially embedded business, Darwin’s particularly so” (Moore and Desmond, “Introduction,” vi).
17. G. E. Lessing, “Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts” (1780), in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Werke, vol. 8, Theologiekritische Schriften III, Philosophische Schriften (Munich: Hanser, 1979), 489–510. An English translation was published in 1858 (The Education of the Human Race: From the German of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, trans. F. W. Robertson [London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1858]). Robertson’s translation was revised by Henry Chadwick, trans., Lessing’s Theological Writings (London: Black, 1956), 82–98.
18. Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” in Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, Civilization, Society and Religion, ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1991), 183–241.
19. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhart Bethge, trans. Reginald Fuller and John Bowden (London: SCM, 1971), 325–29, 341–47, 359–63, 380–83.
20. Temple, “Education of the World,” 4.
21. Temple, “Education of the World,” 5.
22. Temple, “Education of the World,” 5.
23. The classic text in this genre is William Paley, Natural Theology, or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, collected from the Appearances of Nature, ed. Matthew D. Eddy and David Knight (1802; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Paley’s work was followed in the 1830s by a series of nine Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as Manifested in the Creation, a project funded by a bequest from the Earl of Bridgewater, who had died in 1829. On the Bridgewater Treatises see John Robson, “The Fiat and Finger of God: The Bridgewater Treatises,” in Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief, ed. Richard J. Helmstadter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 71–125; Jonathan Topham, “Science and Popular Education in the 1830s: The Role of the Bridgewater Treatises,” British Journal for the History of Science 25 (1992): 397–430; Topham, “Beyond the ‘Common Context’: the Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises,” Isis 89 (1998): 233–62.
24. Thus, the first of the Bridgewater Treatises, published at the time of Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, was Thomas Chalmers’s The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1833).
25. FitzRoy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of his Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle (London: Henry Colburn, 1839). On FitzRoy, see H. E. L. Mellersh, FitzRoy of the Beagle (London: Mason & Lipscomb, 1968).
26. FitzRoy, Narrative, 2.18–19.
27. R. D. Keynes, ed., Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
28. FitzRoy, Narrative, 2.657.
29. FitzRoy, Narrative, 2.667–68.
30. FitzRoy, Narrative, 2.666.
31. FitzRoy, Narrative, 2.666.