Galileo and the terrible, horrible, awful, really bad day
So the understanding of Genesis cannot be dependent on a literalistic reading of its early stories. That implies, for its flip side, that its early stories simply need not be taken at face value, their events literally as they seem to be described. Christians often have balked at such a suggestion, supposing that if certain events in Genesis can't be taken at literal face value, then it implies an undermining of the reliability of Scripture in general, an unraveling which would lead ultimately to negating the validity of the gospel accounts, and in fact to a wholesale collapse of the Christian faith, a sort of domino effect resulting in atheism. Some creationist proponents have actually maintained that this is the direct, inevitable outcome of starting down what they perceive as a theological slippery slope: if A, therefore Z. Spiritual catastrophe!
And there is nothing new about that sort of alarm. Galileo ran afoul of it nearly 400 years ago, when he made extensive, careful observations of the skies through the recently invented telescope, and made fascinating discoveries ... among them, that markings on the moon are actually mountains and craters; that the "flawless" sun has irregular, dark spots that come and go over its surface; that Jupiter has its own system of moons; that Venus displays crescent-to-full phases, just as our moon does; that it is Earth that turns on its axis, not the heavens that revolve above it; and that Earth and the other planets orbit the sun, it isn't they that orbit Earth. We learn all that in elementary school, and no creationists (that I know of) even bat an eye at it; but to the church in Galileo's time, every one of those findings flew right in the face of views that had been held for centuries, and which were considered to have solid Scriptural backing in its clear and literal reading.
Nothing new under the sunBut it was nothing new even in Galileo's time. Over the previous couple of centuries, as Europe had been emerging from the long dark of the medieval era toward what became the Renaissance, for the first time (since the classical period, anyway) Europeans grew curious about the natural world ... what it was made of, how it worked, what was over the horizon or beyond what we could see with unaided eyes. The church, however ... which had, during the same time, rather understandably settled into a position of security after having survived early persecutions, fought doctrinal battles to clarify its beliefs, helped shore up society through Rome's collapse into "barbaric" turbulence ... and, through these victories, had also gained increasing carte blanche to extend its hegemony over European society ... suddenly found its preeminence challenged: this time not by pagan or heretical assaults from without, but by honest curiosity from within its own ranks. Devout Christian thinkers were beginning to ask questions about the natural world; and then along comes Galileo, able to peer more deeply into the heavens than had anyone else in history, and presenting even more disturbing results.
The church's understanding of faith was something akin to a 1970s bumper sticker: "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" ... except that they had the ability to forcibly exact others' compliance with their beliefs. Wonder about how God's creation works? Just as well erase parts of the Bible, or try to plant spies in heaven's courts out of mistrust in how God handles the universe! The very notion of asking any questions about the natural world was taken as complete effrontery toward God, a rejection of faith by demanding to know what he does and how he does it (rather than as fulfilling the divine heritage for humankind to "search matters out," as in Pr 25.2; let alone to obey Jesus' own directive to continually "ask, seek, knock," in which incidentally he also promised that all seekers would be rewarded with answers, Mt 7.7-11). Faith was seen as simply accepting events and phenomena in nature as God's will, and questioning of any sort was to display the impudence of Job ... who spent most of his book carping over how God didn't know what he was doing, only to be shut up when God appeared and silenced him by demonstrating the limitations of Job's understanding. So there! Yet now here were more and more people, honest Christians, who honestly wondered how the universe worked ... and the church grew increasingly powerless to stop them.
How in heaven ...?
So when Galileo had the presumption to point a spyglass at heaven and impudently offer a gossip report on what he voyeuristically saw there, with the crowning gall of contradicting what Scripture plainly taught, it only got church hackles up even more. Earth not at the center of the universe?! The world of humans is presented in Scripture as the center of God's heart and interests; so where else could Earth be positioned, but at the center of the created universe? And since Earth is at the center, where else would anything orbit but around it? Blemishes on Sun and Moon?! Everything created by God is described in Scripture as "good"; so, except for the effects of sin and corruption on Earth, how could anything in the universe display flaws or irregularities? Scripture repeatedly describes Earth as being firmly fixed, that "it shall never be moved" (as see Ps 104.5); how in heaven could it turn?
We may roll our eyes today at the simplistic views that they dug in to defend (and, again, I don't know of any creationists who go so far as to take those views); but church representatives at that time were utterly, and very sincerely, convinced that an admission of any of their doctrinal views as not literally true would lead, directly and inevitably, to a complete breakdown of the Christian faith, precisely as some creationists do today with respect to their views ... and in both cases, these Christians defended, and today defend, their positions with very seriously (though very literalistically) interpreted passages of Scripture. (It's worth considering that Galileo, for his part, was in no way attempting to undermine anything about Christianity; there is no evidence that he was anything but a very devout and genuine Christian.) And of course it was no joke for Galileo, who, at the tender mercies of the Inquisition, was forced to recant his findings, was confined to house arrest for his remaining years, and narrowly escaped losing his life. It is said that the scientist, at his hearing before the Inquisitors ... where, by then an old man, he was humiliated by being forced to kneel before them as he "confessed" that his views were "wrong" ... was heard to mutter, as he rose and left the room: "Eppur si muove ["And yet it does move"]!"
And yet it does move
Yet, while we consider the dogmatic views of the church in Galileo's day as the product of their ignorance (it still took the
And yet human understanding of God's universe does continue to move on. Almost every significant advance in the sciences, both before Galileo and since, has met with some measure of opposition, if not alarm, from very sincere Christians ... who, greatly unsettled, were convinced that observations and rational conclusions of science implied a direct contradiction to (what they saw as) clear teachings of Scripture. The concept of gravity itself, as a force in nature, was at first seen as a fiction that had no mention in Scripture (as, in fact, it does not), and which actually denied biblical truth by proposing a natural power apparently separate from God's own acts. Descriptions of other forces and processes in nature (such as electricity; the identification and nature of physical elements; blood circulation and other internal workings of the body; causes of disease; etc.) likewise were deeply disturbing to many Christians, and stirred objections from the church on very sincere grounds that important principles of the faith were being thrown into question, that humankind was prying into affairs of God that we ought not to stick our noses into. (The contemporary alarm du jour usually revolves around issues of cloning.) The concern, as always, was not that people might find more reason to trust or glorify God, but that we might find less ... which, if you think about it, really implies a faith that must not be too confident in itself (or its God) to begin with. If you really thought that the whole universe is God's ongoing work, then it would stand to reason that you ought to be more eager to dive in and explore it ... expecting to find more of God's ways revealed in it ... not less eager, for fear that his truth would be undermined.
Scandals galore! God's Word thrown into question! News at eleven!
And it didn't stop there! The very notion that species of life could (and had) become extinct was scandalous to Christians when it was first suggested, because nowhere does Scripture even hint that God would ever destroy his creation (that is, never again after the great flood, and not until the new earth is created at the end of time). The recognition that some islands are of volcanic origin, and that their building and erosion processes can actually be traced, shocked religious convictions and appeared to refute Scriptural texts indicating that creation, once completed (and recovered from the flood), would not change.
Observations of geological formations that clearly show vast and repeated deposits (and often of a variety of materials, from sedimentary muds and sands to ash, lava, and other igneous rocks); their subsequent folding or distortion; erosion of parts of their folds; and the deposition of many later layers above those ... processes that, in their complex series of forces, would simply have been physically impossible without requiring vast spans of time (as opposed to having all been accomplished in the year's length of the biblical flood, as some creationists suggest) ... completely overturned the traditionally accepted view (derived from attempts to calculate biblical dates, as mentioned in an earlier section of this series) that Earth is only a few thousand years old.
Suggestions that parts of coastlines or islands had at various times risen or sunk raised Scriptural objections, once again, that Earth was immovable, and that the oceans' bounds had been fixed since the flood. In 1915, Alfred Wegener proposed that the close fit between Old and New World landmasses indicated the long–ago drift of those continents to their present positions; his idea was met with disbelief from the rest of the scientific world itself, and the church again presented its now–familiar objection that the earth was permanently fixed. (Today, of course, radar and laser measurements by means of satellites can directly measure tectonic plate movement as it happens.)
Eppur si muove. Ongoing observations and rational explanations of nature, meanwhile, brought other findings that, while not necessarily objected to by the church, would in Galileo's time have aroused the same severe reaction to "questioning God's creation" that he faced. Following the Second World War, studies of weather led to the detailed understanding of weather and climate that we have today ... although any daily report on the Weather Channel would have been denounced by the Inquisition as defaming God, by ascribing meteorological phenomena to "mere" natural processes, rather than to the direct agency of God. And curiously, you never hear of even the most diehard creationists admonishing their children not to watch that "secular science", nor for that matter homeschooling them against the errors of Galileo.
(As may be seen by all these examples, if the medieval view of "not questioning God's works" had prevailed, not one of our modern scientific, technological, or medical advances would likely have been possible ... in other words, almost every single thing that developed society uses, wears, eats, treats disease with, communicates with, or travels in could not have been developed. The very fact that you are reading this on a scientifically–developed machine, powered by its electrical infrastructure ... even the very fact that you are able to read at all, which is a direct result of the invention of the printing press and its impact on the spread of literacy to ordinary people ... is testament to this "assault" on faith. A defense of the "literal" interpretation of the Bible usually does not take into consideration what the actual stakes would be, if society were to revert sincerely and authentically to that position. At least we could rest secure, knowing that we were at the center of the universe again!)
You never heard such whining
And then in the midst of all this commotion, about midway through the 19th century, came a rather boring, almost unreadable (sort of like this series) book which reported on painstaking observations of nature, made over decades. It really very humbly and calmly presented the findings and most reasonable conclusions from those observations, and made a sincere attempt to anticipate and critically examine any possible problems with its ideas ... but its conclusions rocked the religious world like it had never been rocked. It was called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (even the title would about put you to sleep), by a naturalist named Charles Darwin. You never heard such complaining after that.
©2008 Roger S. Smith
Part 5: Don't monkey around with my faith!
