Since I bashed that absurd article on evolution on Salon, it’s only fair that I mention that they’ve also published a good one: The destruction of creationism: How the search for the beginning of time sparked a scientific revolution. It’s by Martin J.S. Rudwick, and I adore Rudwick’s books — he writes about 19th century geology, and how the scientists of the day struggled with the evidence to develop our modern understanding of geologic time. Gripping stuff, if you’re a nerd.
This article is all about old-time theologians grappling with the idea of a pre-Adamite history of the Earth, which is the beginning of what will eventually kill creationism as scientifically viable. Once you start asking questions of the book, and you start looking at other sources to, say, merely clarify ambiguities, you’re doomed — you’re going to have to start considering new evidence, and pretty soon the splendorously isolated purity of your source text is corrupted.
We’ve only got an excerpt here. There’s more to come.
To summarize: the history of the universe, the Earth, and human life itself was traditionally conceived in the West as having been very brief in comparison with the modern picture. But this is a relatively trivial difference: the quantitative contrast is less significant than the qualitative similarity. What is not trivial is that the scholarly history represented by chronologists such as Ussher was almost exclusively based on textual evidence (the astronomical evidence of past eclipses, comets, etc. also came from textual records). Even in the historical analysis of Noah’s Flood by scholars such as Kircher the textual evidence was dominant and the use of natural evidence was marginal.
At much the same time, however, and still in the 17th century, other scholars were beginning to bring the natural evidence much more substantially into debates about the Earth’s own history, yet without seeing any obvious need to extend the timescale on which it had played out. This is the subject of the next chapter.
Tease! Now I’m going to have to buy Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters.
But the important message is that creationism was already intellectually dead by the 19th century — it wasn’t some one guy writing a book that did it, but a whole pattern of widespread scholarly activity that was honestly trying to answer the question of origins, and quickly expanded beyond the one source text.
Modern creationism is really brain dead — it’s zombie theology, mindlessly stalking the landscape. It’s not going to be killed by mere scholarship.
And therein lies the pernicious evil of the religious wrong/current conservative ideology/corporatists.
Dumb down the people via the education system, bust unions so that workers have less power and less knowledge to do something about it and then strip away any social safety nets. Now the people are destitute and desperate. They only have one place to turn that WILL accept them and give them some solace. Artificial though it is.
They’ve seen the people leave their religions in droves. The people were better educated to at least a reasonable basic. Unions allowed for the rise of a massive middle class to live decent respectable lives. The same middle class that would buy all the goods to keep the economy churning. The social safety net didn’t come with strings attached by way of having to sit through prayers and be proselitized to and practically forced to join.
Vicious evil.
Damn, another book I need to read. I love History Of Ideas stuff.
A long time ago I read C.C.Gillispie’s Genesis and Geology, which covers the development of British geology from ~1790-1850, including the interplay with theology over that period. The modern creationists really are in denial about everything that’s happened in the natural science for the past two centuries and more. And there’s an awful lot of “Reverends” among the people describing rocks and fossils and laying the foundations of the modern view, making it a bit hard to discount the whole enterprise as an atheist conspiracy.
And one more: David Montgomery, a geologist here at University of Washington, wrote in 2013 a very fine popularization of how deep geological time was discovered, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood. The title gives the impression that it is going to be arguments against present-day creationist “flood geologists”. But actually it is about how geologists, starting about 1700, discovered that the Noah story was wrong.
Highly recommended. Disclaimer: I have not met Montgomery, even though we work on the same campus.
Great, so now we need to metaphorically shoot a metaphorical zombie in its metaphorical head. We’ll need some metaphorical guns. It could get metaphorically messy.
I’ll put a plug in here for Simon Winchester’s The Map That Changed the World:William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. A canal digger notices that the rock is in layers … and decides to make a map of this, spending 20 years traveling around, measuring, and getting it all down. The final product in 1815 was 8 feet by 6. It reads like a story — a very good story.
Genuine curiosity and an ability to ask real questions will eventually kill any dogma. That’s why those who believe in weird things also seem to believe they need to avoid the “corrupt” who will “harm” them with their “lies.” I suspect that outspoken atheism and the internet will have as much if not more effect on creationism than scholarship. Break the idea that ‘faith’ is a universally acknowledged virtue and open up closed communities to discussion and dispute.
Don’t forget Clair Patterson! He (yes, that’s a man) did most of the grunt work that led to the discovery of the age of the earth, *and* also that led to the removal of lead tetra-ethyl from gasoline in the US. He’s one of the most important people no one knows about.
PZ, could you maintain a page with book recommendations? I tend to have about 5 hours a week I spend reading interesting non-fiction, and I love reading about genetics and evolution, and the history of how we came to know stuff: science, language, anthropology, etc. But it’s always a challenge to figure out which book is worth spending time on.
I would value your recommendations very much!
Also, it became untenable to rely on that scripture when it was finally being itself deconstructed and scientifically investigated as an historical text, set in its proper historical and archaeological context. In other words, the corpse* is dead thrice over: geology, biology, and history overkilled it.
*I’d say the corpse isn’t just creationism, it’s every religion that requires a belief in historicity of scriptural claims. Christianity is a zombie religion in more ways than one.
@Ibis:
I’d add cosmological physics to that list.
One of the things that was discussed by natural philosophers was whether light itself had a finite speed. I think most came to the consensus that light moved infinitely fast, with a few dissenters (Alhazen; Roger Bacon), who of course had no specific rate they could calculate).
That changed after Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter. In the 17th century, Ole Rømer made careful observations of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, and found that those eclipses would appear sooner or later than would be predicted if they were being viewed instantaneously, and so was the first to offer a direct experimental prediction demonstrating that light had a finite speed. Later observations refined his first estimates of c, which were off by a small amount from the current measurement. I suspect that the better estimates derived mostly from having more accurate and precise chronometers, which were first invented to help with the rather different problem of determining longitude at sea.
Once it’s clear that the speed of light is finite, it then follows that the most distant stars — visible with better telescopes as the technology of optics improved — are not just hugely distant in space, but that what we see of them is also hugely old in time.
And thus once again overkilling the corpse.
____________________________
Ref:
Roemer and the First Determination of the Velocity of Light (1676)
Author(s): M. Romer and I Bernard Cohen
Source: Isis, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Apr., 1940), pp. 327-379
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/225757
As I vaguely recall, Stephen Jay Gould wrote at least one essay discussing some of the failed experiments (mostly thought ones, as I now recall) of various creationist-leaning people (mostly in the 19thC). The only example I can now recall, albeit poorly, was a rather serious attempt to work out just how Mr Noah’s barge might actually work. Not only the obvious questions of how big and what to do with all the shite, but how to store the food, actually build the thing, and numerous other practical details.
Actually my big take-away is that PZ or anyone actually cares about what is on Salon these days.
Way back, Salon got me through a year overseas without a free weekly paper that carried Tom Tomorrow. But that was nearly 20 years ago (and Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World is gone too). Salon now consists mostly of badly written self-discovery tales and book excerpts. I only know this because I still keep reading it. But why?
The geology thing began primarily with James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, 4 vols., 1795 and Horace B. Saussure’s Voyages dan le Alpes also 4 vols., 1779-1796.
Even before modern geology developed the Noah story wasn’t credible. It’s vaguely believable if “the whole world” consists of everything within say a few hundred miles of where you live. But the bigger the world gets, the more stuff the story has to deal with, ranging from how much water it would take to flood the whole world, and where it came from, to the number of different animals Noah would have had to put on his boat. How many creatures would the average Middle Eastern tribesman, including whoever wrote the Ark story we know, have known of? 100 maybe? That’s closer to being a believable number for what to such a person would have been a really big boat.
I have trouble believing that it was taken literally in the ancient world. It would have been respected as a sacred text, but not viewed as a reliable source of information about boat building or animal husbandry among other topics it touches.
I think people have always been a lot more sophisticated in placing writing in context than they are given credit for. It is a more recent pathology to look for dates, locations, and measurements when these are clearly the wrong questions to ask. It smacks more of fandom than scholarship.
I’ve read ‘Earth’s Deep History’. I strongly recommend it.
Since someone has mentioned the late, great Stephen Jay Gould, I’ll recommend Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. It develops a theme touched on in that Salon piece: the tension between the view of history as an endless repetition (where in the long run nothing really changes) vs. history as a linear progression. I turns out that it’s a bit of both.
Owlmirror @9
A good book about the invention of chronometers is Dana Soret’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. In 1714 the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering £20,000 (equivalent of several million nowadays) to anyone who could produce a reliable system of determining longitude at sea within half a degree. A clockmaker named John Harrison came up with a clock which gave accurate time even on a rolling ship. Harrison’s method beat out the attempts at solving the problem by such luminaries as Edmond Halley, Sir Isaac Newton, and the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne.
Dava Sobel: Longitude
The book is an excellent read.
Sorry, in my post @17 I misnamed the author. She’s Dava Sobel.
PaulBC:
Like the Greek epics and its predecessors in Sumerian mythology, it’s set in a mythic past. We moderns take the concepts of uniformity and mediocrity for granted; the present is for us in complete continuity with the past. But among premodern peoples the usual mode of imagining the distant past was discontinuity. Everyone knew that worldwide floods and last-ditch divinely-mandated rescue efforts didn’t happen “in real life” or, as Biblical-minimalist scholar Thomas Thompson put it, that iron doesn’t float on water (2 Kings 6:6). But that there had once upon a time been an age of wonders “when giants walked the earth” was a common way of conceptualizing the distant past across cultures. There was no contact between the answers to the questions “could it happen now?” and “did it ever happen?”
This is a good way to put it. Was it understood in a basic way that the mythic past was primarily a setting for fantastic tales? Probably. Was there a great deal of tension for the audience between this appreciation and the assumed authority of such improbable narratives? I doubt it.
@18: ….and the exhibit at the Maritime Museum at Greenwich was also excellent. The early chronometers weren’t just superb pieces of engineering, they were works of art. Big brass gear wheel? Well *of course* we’re going to fill the face of it with intricate etched filigree….
I also enjoyed Dava Sobel’s Longitude. Galileo’s daughter was interesting also. More in keeping with the thread, Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder is a wonderfully written romp through the lives and discoveries of a number of scientists in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Not by Gould, but read it anyway: the list of miracles needed to make that story work.
“In fact, these sixty-eight verses of Scripture, when interpreted literally, are crammed with more miracles than any comparable piece of literature anywhere on earth—miracles that are often pointlessly complicated and unedifying. Building one large ship of wood rather than many small ones, landing it on a volcano instead of a plain, preserving all five varieties of venereal disease while permitting thousands of species to become extinct—these examples plus more add up to a thoroughly senseless level of supernaturalism. If there was ever a situation in which Hume’s distinction between the credibility of miracles and the credibility of miracle-tellers applies, this is it.”
Somehow, I’d missed Hume’s “On miracles” chapter.
http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/14.html
Damn, that dude had it down. Calling out liars for Jesus in a time when that could get you seriously fucked over. Then again, he self censored that chapter, probably out of fear of being murdered by liars for Jesus…
David Hume was born in Edinburgh about a decade or so after the authorities of that city executed a young man for expressing dissenting religious opinions deemed “blasphemous”.
I hear Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel.
You don’t even need modern knowledge to reject biblical inerrancy — St Augustine was savaging the literalists way back in the 4th century.
Nineteenth century geology was muddled by the fact that the sun could only be about 20 million years old, if it were powered by gravitational contraction energy. Nuclear energy was only understood in the late 1930s. If you read old geology books, the age estimates were only about 20% of current ones. This put the Cambrian about 120 million years ago, still large for astronomy.
Current stellar structure and evolution models employing nuclear fusion are a triumph in the understanding of the behavior of stars.
Here.
I wouldn’t make a hero out of Augustine that fast. In City of God Book 18, one finds Chapter 40: About the Most Mendacious Vanity of the Egyptians, in Which They Ascribe to Their Science an Antiquity of a Hundred Thousand Years. “For as it is not yet six thousand years since the first man, who is called Adam”, thus supporting young-earthism.
Also, his idea of allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation stories was to suppose that the “days” are some logical framework instead of literal passing of time. He believed that God had created everything all at once.
So I don’t think that one ought to pine away for some supposed Good Old Days of allegorical interpretation.
I don’t think there are any Good Old Days of anything, but there were times when it might have been forgivable to suppose that the world was 6000 years old. An antiquity of 100000 years is not supported by the historical record or architectural ruins. The Egyptians would not have had any way to determine the age of smaller artifacts and human remains. So their claim was just bluster.
It was natural (as the article points out) to equate the age of the universe to the time period that humans existed, and little direct evidence that humans had existed for more than a few thousand years. So Augustine’s statement does not seem totally crazy, unlike those of a modern YEC who makes the same assertion in the face of overwhelming evidence against it.
@owlmirror #9 & Al Dente #17 and other interested parties…
Wrong.
Allow me to fix this for you:
Hope that helps!
@Crip Dyke:
I bow before you; I was WRONG on the Internets . . .