In midwinter 1656, fourteen years after Galileo had died peacefully in his Tuscany home, still under house arrest for his views on the motion of the earth, armed men burst into the home of another subversive, the French Calvinist Isaac La Peyrère, and hauled him off to prison. Heresy hunters had dispatched them to deal with a threat to Christianity even greater than that of Galileo. After “enhanced interrogations” La Peyrère was escorted to Rome where, after an audience with the pope, he recanted his heresy, rejected his Calvinism, and joined the Roman Catholic Church.
In midwinter 2011 as I started work on this book, another scholar, this time an American Calvinist named John Schneider, was summoned by heresy hunters and interrogated for the same beliefs that had threatened La Peyrère.
The heresy was the status of the biblical Adam. La Peyrère got in trouble for his book Men before Adam, arguing that Adam was not the first man. While no historically celebrated trial accompanied Schneider’s interrogation, he, like Galileo and La Peyrère, still suffered serious consequences: he lost the job he had held—and loved—at Calvin College for a quarter century. His crime was a 2010 article “Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins,” published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, which suggested that not only was Adam not the first man but that he never existed.