Rocks of Ages (3 page)

Poor Doubting Thomas. At his crucial and eponymous moment, he acted in the most admirable way for one style of inquiry—but in the wrong magisterium. He espoused the key principle of science while operating within the different magisterium of faith.

So if Thomas the Apostle defended the norms of science in the wrong magisterium of faith, let us consider another Thomas usually (but falsely) regarded as equally incongruous in the other direction—as a man of dogmatic religion who improperly invaded the magisterium of science. The Reverend Thomas Burnet (1635–1715), although unknown outside professional circles today, wrote one of the most influential books of the late seventeenth century—
Telluris theoria sacra
, or
The Sacred Theory of the Earth
, a work in four sections,
with part one on the deluge of Noah, part two on the preceding paradise, part three on the forthcoming “burning of the world,” and part four “concerning the new heavens and new earth,” or paradise regained after the conflagration. This book not only became a “bestseller” in its own generation, but gained lasting fame as a primary inspiration (largely, but not entirely, in criticism) for two of the greatest and most comprehensive works of eighteenth-century intellectual history—the
Scienza nuova (New Science)
of Giambattista Vico in 1725, the foundation for historical studies of cultural anthropology, and the
Histoire naturelle
of Georges Buffon, the preeminent compendium of the natural world, begun in 1749.

But modern scientists dismiss Burnet as either a silly fool or an evil force who tried to reimpose the unquestionable dogmas of scriptural authority upon the new paths of honest science. The “standard” early history of geology, Archibald Geikie’s
Founders of Geology
(1905 edition) featured Burnet’s book among the “monstrous doctrines” that infected late-seventeenth-century science. One modern textbook describes Burnet’s work as “a series of queer ideas about earth’s development,” while another dismisses the
Sacred Theory
as a “bizarre freak of pseudo-science.”

Of course, Burnet did not operate as a modern scientist, but he faithfully followed the norms of his time
for proper residence within the magisterium of scientific inquiry. Burnet did begin by assuming that the Bible told a truthful story about the history of the earth, but he did not insist on literal accuracy. In fact, he lost his prestigious position as private confessor to King William III for espousing an allegorical interpretation of creation as described in the Book of Genesis—for he argued that God’s six “days” might represent periods of undetermined length, not literal intervals of twenty-four hours or physical episodes of one full rotation about an axis.

Burnet accepted the scriptural account as a rough description of actual events, but he insisted upon one principle above all: the history of the earth cannot be regarded as adequately explained or properly interpreted until all events can be rendered as necessary consequences of invariable natural laws, operating with the knowable regularity recently demonstrated for gravity and other key phenomena by his dear friend Isaac Newton. Ironically, the most bizarre features of Burnet’s particular account arise from his insistence upon natural law as the source and explanation of all historical events in the earth’s history—a difficult requirement given the peculiar and cataclysmic character of several biblical tales, including universal floods and fires.

Burnet begins, for example, by seeking a source for the water of Noah’s flood. (He greatly underestimated
the depth and extent of the earth’s oceans, and therefore believed that present seas could not cover the mountains. “I can as soon believe,” he wrote, “that a man could be drowned in his own spittle as that the world should be deluged by the water in it.”) But Burnet then rejects, as outside his chosen magisterium of “natural” (i.e., scientific) explanation, the easiest and standard solution of his age: that God simply made the extra water by miraculous creation. For miracle, defined as divine suspension of natural law, must lie outside the compass of scientific explanation. Invoking the story of Alexander and the Gordian Knot, Burnet rejected this “easy way” as destructive of any scientific account. (According to legend, when Alexander the Great captured Gordium, the capital of Phrygia, he encountered a famous chariot, lashed to a pole with a knot of astonishing complexity. He who could untie the knot would conquer all Asia. So Alexander, using raw power to circumvent the rules of the game, took his sword and severed the knot clean through. Some call it boldness; I, and apparently Burnet as well, call it anti-intellectualism.) Burnet wrote:

Instead, Burnet devised a wonderfully wacky theory about a perfectly spherical original earth with a smooth and solid crust of land covering a layer of water below (the natural and eventual source of Noah’s flood). This crust gradually dries and cracks; waters rise through the cracks and form clouds; the rains arrive and seal the cracks; the pressure of water rising from below finally bursts through the crust, causing the deluge and producing the earth’s present rough topography. Wacky indeed, but fully rendered by natural law, and therefore testable and subject to disproof under the magisterium of science. Indeed, we have tested Burnet’s ideas, found them both false and bizarre, and expunged his name from our pantheon of scientific heroes. But if he had simply advocated a divine creation of water, such a conventional and nonoperational account could never have inspired Buffon, Vico, and a host of other scholars.

Burnet followed the common view of a remarkable group of men, devout theists all, who set the foundations of modern science in late-seventeenth-century Britain—including Newton, Halley, Boyle, Hooke, Ray, and Burnet himself. Invoking a convenient trope of English vocabulary, these scientists argued that God would permit no contradiction between his
words
(as
recorded in scripture) and his
works
(the natural world). This principle, in itself, provides no rationale for science, and could even contradict my central claim for science and religion as distinct magisteria—for if works (the natural world) must conform to words (the scriptural text), then doesn’t science become conflated with, constrained by, and subservient to religion? Yes, under one possible interpretation, but not as these men defined the concept. (Always look to nuance and actual utility, not to a first impression about an ambiguous phrase.) God had indeed created nature at some inception beyond the grasp of science; but he also established invariant laws to run the universe without interference forever after. (Surely omnipotence must operate by such a principle of perfection, and not by frequent subsequent correction, i.e., by special miracle, to fix some unanticipated bungle or wrinkle—to make extra water, for example, when human sin required punishment.)

Thus, nature works by invariant laws subject to scientific explanation. The natural world cannot contradict scripture (for God, as author of both, cannot speak against himself). So—and now we come to the key point—if some contradiction seems to emerge between a well-validated scientific result and a conventional reading of scripture, then we had better reconsider our exegesis, for the natural world does not lie, but words can convey many meanings, some allegorical or
metaphorical. (If science clearly indicates an ancient world, then the “days” of creation must represent periods longer than twenty-four hours.) In this crucial sense, the magisteria become separate, and science holds sway over the factual character of the natural world. A scientist may be pious and devout—as all these men were, with utmost sincerity—and still hold a conception of God (as an imperial clockwinder at time’s beginning in this version of NOMA) that leaves science entirely free in its own proper magisterium.

I choose Thomas Burnet to illustrate this central principle for three reasons: (1) he was an ordained minister by primary profession (thereby illustrating NOMA if he truly kept these worlds distinct); (2) his theory has become an unfair source of ridicule under the fallacious notion that science must be at war with religion; and (3) he upheld the primacy of science in a particularly forceful way (and with even more clarity than his friend Isaac Newton, as we shall see on
this page
). Recognizing the primacy of science in its proper magisterium, Burnet urges his readers not to assert a scriptural interpretation contrary to a scientific discovery, but to reexamine scripture instead—for science rules the magisterium of factual truth about nature:

In a lovely passage equating an independent magisterium for science with a maximally exalted concept of God, Burnet develops a striking metaphor for contrasting explanations of the earth’s destruction in Noah’s flood: do we not have greater admiration for a machine that performs all its appointed tasks (both regular and catastrophic) by natural laws operating on a set of initial parts, than for a device that putters along well enough in a basic mode, but requires a special visit from its inventor for anything more complex:

As a professional clergyman and a leading scientist, Burnet practiced in both magisteria, and kept them separate. He allocated the entire natural world to science, but he also knew that this style of inquiry could not adjudicate issues beyond the power of factual information to illuminate, and in realms where questions of natural law do not arise. Using an image from his own century (we would define the boundaries differently today), Burnet grants the entire history of the earth to science, but recognizes that any time before the creation of matter, and any history after the Last Judgment, cannot be encompassed within the magisterium of natural knowledge:

I may be reading too much into Burnet’s words, but do I not detect a preference, or at least a great fondness, for the factuality of science when, in the chronological narrative of his
Sacred Theory of the Earth
, Burnet must bid adieu to reason as his guide, as he passes from the factually knowable history of an earth fully governed by natural law to a radically different future at the Last Judgment, when God will institute a new order, and can therefore only inform us (if at all) through the revelation of his words? Burnet speaks to the muse of science:

I told this tale of two Thomases to sharpen the distinctions between two entirely different but equally
vital magisteria of our rich and complex lives—the two rocks of ages in my title. One must not assume that a book (the Bible in this case) or a day job (as a clergyman in this example) defines a magisterium. We must look instead to the subject, the logic, and the particular arguments. Our goal of mutual respect requires mutual understanding most of all. But I must complete this intuitive and particular case for NOMA by telling another story—with a similar message, but from the moral side this time—before presenting the more formal argument in
chapter 2
.

I
CAN HARDLY THINK OF
a more common, or sillier, fallacy of human thought and feeling than our propensity to construct “golden age” myths about a simpler past of rustic bliss. When I hear such reveries, I feel an almost irresistible urge to chime in with a grounding statement that should be chiseled into everyone’s consciousness in uppercase as the Great Reminder. I don’t like boom-box rappers, the U.S. tax code, or the corps of paparazzi any more than the next upright fellow; and I have often dreamed about making my fortune by marketing moral fiber in cereal boxes as a replacement for a seriously eroding natural product. But if anyone tells me that he would rather have lived a century ago, I will simply remind him of the one irrefutable trump card for choosing right now as the best world we have ever known: thanks to modern
medicine, people of adequate means in the industrial world will probably enjoy a privilege never before vouchsafed to any human group. Our children will grow up; we will not lose half or more of our offspring in infancy or childhood. We will not have to sing Mahler’s heartrending
Kindertotenlieder
, or “Songs on the Death of Children.” We will not have to hire the local daguerreotypist to make the only image of our dead child. (Young children could rarely sit still long enough for the several minutes required by this early photographic technique. But the dead do not move, and many daguerreotypists specialized in this profitable, if ghoulish, work.)