Earth's Deep History: Did Geology Kill Christianity?
While I have read quite a bit on the 20th century creationism and evolutionism struggles (particularly good are books by Ronald Numbers, Adam Shapiro, Karl Giberson and Kevin Yerxa, and Peter Bowler), one of the (many) areas I have yet to read up on is geology. A few essays have crossed my path here and there, but I had yet to find a good monograph on the topic. The destruction of Ussher's chronology (where he determined the world was created in 4004 BC) is of course considered to be one of the more obvious examples of Christianity failing laughably before the science it tries so hard to suppress. When combined with other vignettes like the later Scope's Monkey Trial, it begins to create what appears to be a nigh unbreakable case demonstrating Christian ignorance. John Ruskin, for example was haunted by hammers digging into the deep edges of a time seemingly far beyond what the Bible predicted: “[My] faith, which was never strong, is being beaten into mere gold leaf, and flutters in weak rags from the letter of its old forms; … if only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verse.” (Quoted in John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion, p.32).
Doing a little research I found that one of the leading experts on the history of the profession of Geology is Martin Rudwick, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California. I happened across his latest book, Earth's Deep Time: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Though the back cover is endorsed by Simon Conway Morris (a Christian who holds the chair of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge), and though the inner flap says Rudwick overturns the "warfare" narrative, I wasn't quite sure how central that would be to his narrative. Perhaps this would just be an interesting history of geology from a less militant perspective?
To my surprise, however, Rudwick wastes no time destroying the so-called "warfare" narrative in his work, making it as a central feature as well. In fact, he does quite a bit more than that early in the introduction. I thought since it has been too quite around the blog lately I would post a quick excerpt. Enjoy!
[A] reason for the neglect [of the story of the rise of the notion of earth's deep time] is that it has been shrunk into just one episode in the triumphant march of Science in its struggle against Religion. The notorious 4004 BC date already mentioned has been widely taken to typify the repressive obscurantism of The Church in resisting the progress of Enlightened Reason. But this use of labels such as Science and Religion, Church and Reason (usually in the singular and often with initial capitals), should make us suspicious. Real history is never so abstract or so tidy. In fact, this stereotype of a perennial conflict between Science and Religion has long been abandoned by historians who have studied any of its alleged episodes at all closely. It makes shoddy history, though of course it provides stirring rhetoric. ...
I argue in fact that the discredited stereotype of perennial conflict between Science and Religion should, at least in the case, be turned upside down [emphasis added]. Once we recognize that the core of this great revolution in human thought lay in the realization that nature has had a history of its own, the merely quantitative enlargement of its timescale becomes a secondary issue. What is much more important to understand are the origins of this new sense of the historicalness or historicity of nature. It should be no surprise that its source lay in the contemporary understanding of human history, which was deliberately and knowingly transposed into the world of nature. Human history, not physics or astronomy, became the model for tracing the history of nature.
The rise and fall of empires, for example, was utterly unpredictable even in retrospect, unlike the predictable movements of the planets. Human history was recognized as being deeply contingent: at every point things could well have turned out differently. ... This was the sense of historicity that was transferred from culture into nature, generating a new understanding of nature, and specifically the Earth, as similarly historical. If this transfer seems surprising, it is probably because it entails accepting that the sciences of nature have here been decisively enriched by an input from the sciences of human history, right across the supposed gulf between the Two Cultures, between Science and the humanities. ...
In view of the character of Western culture during the relevant centuries (roughly, seventeenth through nineteenth), it should also be no surprise that that one major source--even arguably the major source--for the new vision of nature as historical was the strong sense of history embodied in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, with their dynamic narrative thrust from primal Creation through pivotal Incarnation towards an ultimate City of God. These culturally foundational texts, far from obstructing the discovery of Earth's deep history, positively facilitated it. To borrow a metaphor from biology, they pre-adapted their readers to find it easy and congenial to think in similarly historical terms about the natural world that formed the context of human action and, so believers claimed, of divine action. Of course this suggestion is neutral with respect to the validity of the religious perspective embodied in the texts ... [but] my purpose in making the connection is historical, not apologetic. [Rudwick, Earth's Deep History p.3-4]
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