Genesis and Geology

With this special attack upon geological science by means of the dogma of Adam’s fall, the more general attack by the literal interpretation of the text was continued. Especially precious were the six days—each "the evening and the morning"—and the exact statements as to the time when each part of creation came into being.... Difficult as it is to realize it now, within the memory of many now living the battle was still raging most fiercely in England, and both kinds of artillery usually brought against a new science were in full play, and filling the civilized world with their roar.

Andrew Dickson White

The story which has worked its way into the public consciousness is that, throughout history, the study of Geology has been hampered, held back and opposed by those who were standing up for the Genesis account; not only with the present day creationist movement, but also in the 18th and 19th centuries. This story has been fostered by the self appointed spokespersons of science and used for ideological purposes.

As the scientific study of the world progressed there was a dawning realisation that human history was but a tiny speck at the end of a long and eventful geo-history of the earth. Something of this was captured during last night’s episode of the Victorians, presented by Jeremy Paxman. The show’s narrative included the painting by William Dyce of Pegwell Bay; a significant location because it was where St Augustine of Canterbury landed in 597 AD. The painting conveys a great sense of unease, an effect created by the looming cliffs and the autumnal light. The focus of attention is drawn to the women collecting seashells in the foreground and the evidence of the great age of the earth all around them, the fossils, the flints and the eroded chalk cliffs. Dyce’s curiously joyless painting is therefore a typically Victorian expression of religious doubt, the gloomy rocks and the comet which traces its course over the sky both dwarfing one’s existence into insignificance.

This is a sentiment we find echoed in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, with it's ‘sea of faith’, ‘once full’, but now ‘Retreating, to the breath of the night-wind and naked shingles of the world’. When Alfred Lord Tennyson, consumed by grief for the lost of his friend Arthur Hallum, turns to the rocks for solace he sees only the brutality of mass extinction; ‘ From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, "A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go’. No wonder that John Ruskin was moved to comment, in 1851, "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 verses'. Geology then, had an undeniable significance in the Victorian crisis of faith.

It was in the 17th century that the much maligned Archbishop Ussher proposed the night preceding 27 October 4004 BC as the date for the creation of the universe, and interestingly, the beginning of time itself. Usher was a not very distinguished member of a whole science called chronology. This was a discipline of textual scholarship, which wasn’t even primarily biblical. Mainly this was a historical science, a branch of human history, into which the bible naturally fitted because it was one of the oldest historical narratives. The goal of chronology was to construct a world history which would be cross cultural. Usher’s book covers the period from 4004 BC, up till around the time of the fall of Jerusalem, and it primarily is focused on the last few centuries which was where the vast majority of evidence lay.

Somewhat later than Ussher, Bernet’s ‘Sacred Theory of the Earth’ was published. The frontispiece has Christ standing astride over seven successive stages of the earth. Although this is arranged in a circle, it is a linear kind of history with Jesus in charge from the beginning to the end. The position Burnet argues against is Aristotle’s eternalism, the idea that the cosmos has always existed. So the area of conflict at this point of time was between two alternate accounts, neither of which was the modern concept of a very long, but finite, history of the earth. Instead the choice was between a short, but finite, history and on the other hand, Aristotle’s concept of an infinitely long and uncreated kind of history. In this context geology could be used to counter enlightenment deism, in particular the idea of an eternal present summarised by James Hutton (1726-97), ‘we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’. The development of modernity was to extend the short time scale but specifically to recognise that a great deal of the earth’s history was pre-historical and pre-human. Aristotle was wrong, and not for the first time I might add.

In the 18th century, the relevant natural historians became aware that there was good evidence for a very long time scale. One of the reasons for this was because of the immense piles of sedentary strata we see around us, many of which contain large quantities of marine shells. It therefore became inconceivable that all these layers could be easily fit into a short time scale (Yes, I know! - it is conceivable, Young Earth Creationists try to do it today - but we shall leave that aside). The second reason was volcanoes, specifically the historical records which showed one eruption after another. One could therefore get a pretty good idea of how much of the cones of volcanoes such as Etna and Vesuvius had been accumulated within recorded history; a very small amount as it happened.

By the end of the 18th century therefore, there was a very strong sense of ‘deep time’, as research progressed this would be strengthened and qualified. Comte De Buffon, drawing on his theory that the earth had been a cooling body, estimated that the age of the earth was 75,000 years. The Oxford Geologist William Buckland(1784-1856 - pictured on the right) writing in the early part of the following century, spoke of geological time as amounting to ‘millions and millions of years’. According to the research of Professor Martin J Rudwick, deep time appears to have had no religious implications amongst scientists, the reason being that there was a long standing hermeneutic tradition - going all the way back to the church fathers - by which you could interpret Genesis according to the natural facts. You could for example, say that the days of Genesis were simply long periods of time, or you could say that it was simply a story about human history. The biblical literalism which had been a novelty in the 17th century had yielded in the 18th century to an appreciation of the multi-vocality of the bible and a realisation that taking bible passages at face value might obscure the meaning. A good example is this is the case of Haydn, whose 'Creation' was based on Genesis 1. Having lived in London, Haydn was a friend of a naturalist called John Hunter who knew all about deep time and would presumably have discussed it with him. It doesn’t appear to have made any difference to the composer.

It is only in the 1820's that we find a reversion to literalism in the movement called scriptural geology which emerged in Great Britain. This movement was attacked most vehemently by those geologists who were known as believing Christians. It was a conflict which would find an echo in the twentieth century with the growth of young Earth creationism.

In the 19th century, the flood story was seen to be historical in character in a way which was no longer applied to the creation story. The reason for this was that similar stories were being discovered in non European societies and it appeared to be a cross cultural phenomenon. It was therefore regarded as being part of the earth history and seemed to be a boundary event between the history of humanity and that of the deep time which preceded it. There appeared to be natural documents as well as human records. This led to the theory of the geological deluge which could either be regarded as distinct from, or the same event as the biblical flood.

One can easily understand why this became a serious scientific proposition called the Diluvial theory. One of the biggest problems at the time was that Geologists would find enormous blocks of rock which could be traced back to their source. In many cases was found that they had moved hundreds of kilometers. How had they made this journey?. The explanation at the time was that they had been transported by an enormous current of water, which seemed to need a huge causal origin; a mega tsunami. It was an obvious starting point to link this to the biblical flood and similar events recorded by other civilizations. The account of Noah’s ark does not suggest a worldwide catastrophe, but it was felt by Geologists like Buckland that the story, although garbled, had a core of historicity. Buckland’s description of how material had been transported from Northern England to London therefore drew on the flood for explanation. Diluvial theory was extended by Georges Cuvier into an explanation of the extinction of the large mammal species and the Pleistocene mega fauna in the geologically recent past.

The evidence for a great deluge was dramatically reinterpreted over several years in the light of a new theory, the ice age. Rather than science triumphing over religion, the biblical flood was simply recognized as referring to a local Mesopotamian event and separated from evidence for the proposed geological tsunami, now interpreted as due to the action of glaciers. Buckland soon changed his mind and helped introduce the glacial theories of Jean Louis Agassiz. Geologists returned to earlier hermeneutical methods ( e.g. days as geological periods) and reconciled Genesis and Geology. Buckland , for example, held the view that the first two verses of Genesis covered the immensity of geological time, and this approach was endorsed by leading Anglican theologians. The bible was held to cover the history of mankind, scared chronology, the period of the humanity’s existence.

There was one uncomfortable fact which the rocks established in 1800; the presence of extinct fossilized creatures. How could death be a punishment for man’s sin if it had already occurred so much in pre-human history?, and why would a good creator allow the gratuitous death and destruction of so many creatures?. There were two solutions, one to claim death was a punishment for man, but not for the whole of creation. Utilitarian arguments were applied to show how death could benefit animals by ending the suffering of the young, the weak and the old. There was also the development of the idea of a great chain of being, the theory that what the fossils showed was progress and progressive development; fish to reptiles, mammals to human beings. For Adam Sedgwick and Buckland, the Christian idea of history having a direction and a teleology seemed vindicated against the enlightenment’s cyclical time and eternalism; although to many, it was a little too open ended for comfort. Of course not everyone was very happy about this, with Ruskin, for instance, bemoaning the ‘filthy heraldries which record the relation of humanity to the ascidian and the crocodile’.

The great detractor from this view was Charles Lyell, who felt that the idea of progressive development he had first encountered by reading Lamarck affronted human dignity and turned mankind into a glorified Orang Utang. As a result he stripped the fossil record of any progressive scheme. Man, he thought, had to be special. As it turned out, he was wrong and the progressive creationists would soon have reason to feel vindicated.

What we find in the historical record is the continual reinterpretation of Genesis as the evidence accumulated; the findings of geology occasioned no deep rupture between science and religion and the difficulties which arose were quickly accommodated. Geology was a science which was developed and pursued by Christians; most of whom appear to have been able to reconcile their religious beliefs with the evidence. In fact, the leading English geologists of the early nineteenth century-William Buckland, William Daniel Conybeare, and Adam Sedgwick- were all clergymen, as was the American geologist Edward Hitchcock. As Nicolaas Rupke concludes in ‘Science and Religion’ (Ferngren)

‘By and Large, mainstream Christian geologists and palaeontologists succeeded in coming to terms with the new geology. Their reconciliation schemes provided space for scientific inquiry as well as religious belief. Traditional flood geology, with its tenets of a young earth and a geologically effective cataclysmal deluge, became regarded as incorrect and antiquated’

All the most ironic that it has re-emerged among American fundamentalists.

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Revolutionary Art (and plagiarism)

In March 1770, matters began to turn ugly in Boston. Following three days of provocation against the occupying British troops - including incidents where stones wrapped in snow were thrown at soldiers, a private was attacked with a club and had his arm broken, and another soldier’s face was smashed in - a group of colonists gathered on King Street. Twenty of them surrounded a sentry called Hugh White and accused him of striking at someone who had insulted him. They taunted him as ‘a son of a bitch’ and ‘a scoundrel lobster’, threw snowballs and chased him to the customs house. Here six other soldiers and a corporal came out to rescue him. An angry mob assembled, led by Crispus Attucks, a 27 year old man of mixed Indian and African heritage. According to John Adams's testimony, Attucks:

‘appears to have undertaken to be the hero of the night..with one hand he took hold of a bayonet and with the other knocked the man down. To his mad behaviour, in all probability the dreadful carnage of the night is to be ascribed’

The private who had been struck and fallen was Hugh Montgomery. He fired in response and his shots were joined by other soldiers. The crowd dispersed rapidly, leaving behind three dead, two dying and six wounded. Following a day of rioting, the new governor Thomas Hutchinson received the leader of the rebels, Sam Adams; agreed to try the soldiers and ordered the troops out of the town.

As the anger subsided, Paul Revere, a local goldsmith and engraver, copied some drawings of what became known as ‘The Boston Massacre’ which had been made by the young  Henry Pelham. Pelham appears to have been a bit peeved by this. A letter was found fifty years ago from the young lad to Paul Revere which reads:

'Sir, when I heard that you was cutting a plate of the late murder I thought it impossible, as I knew you were not caperble of doing it unless you copied it from mine and as I thought I had entrusted it in the hands of a person who had more regard to the dictates of honour and justice than to take the undue advantage you have done of the confidence and trust I reposed in you. But I find I was mistaken and after being at the great trouble and expense of making a design paying for paper printing etc.., find myself in the most ungenerous manner, deprived not only of any proposed advantage but even of the expense I have been at, as truly as if you had plundered me on the Highway. If you are insensible of the dishonour you have brought on yourself by this act, the world will not be so. However I leave you to reflect upon and consider of one of the most dishonourable actions you could ever be guilty of.

H Pelham

PS I sent the bearer the prints I borrowed of you. My mother desires you would send the hinges and part of the press, that you had from her. 

The result of Revere's 'theft' became the famous engraving known as ‘Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated by the State’; this image went on sale to the Boston papers three weeks after the incident. It was a masterful piece of political properganda and would do much to increase tensions. In the image the British troops are shown firing an orderly volley at the orders of their commanding officer Captain Preston. Preston has an evil grin on his face and appears to be urging his men on rather than trying to stop them. With irony, the sign over the Customs House has been made to read "Butcher's Hall. The belligerence and violent protests of their colonial assailants has not been depicted, instead they are presented as a peaceful assembly. Crispus Atturks is depicted as a white man and no snow is shown in the picture. The colours, which were chosen by Christian Remick contrast the blue, black and green of the colonists with the red of the hated British lobsterbacks and the blood they have unleashed. Revere’s print would become a powerful influence in provoking an outspoken anti-British public opinion. Many copies of the print would go on to be hung in country kitchens where generations of young children would grow up learning to hate England.

What is less well known is that a poem was written to go underneath. It reads:

Unhappy BOSTON! see thy Sons deplore,
Thy hallowe'd Walks besmear'd with guiltless Gore:
While faithless P--- and his savage Bands,
With murd'rous Rancour stretch their bloody Hands;
Like fierce Barbarians grinning o'er their Prey,
Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.

If scalding drops from Rage from Anguish Wrung
If speechless Sorrows lab' ring for a Tongue,
Or if a weeping World can ought appease
The plaintive Ghosts of Victims such as these;
The Patriot's copious Tears for each are shed,
A glorious Tribute which embalms the Dead.

But know, FATE summons to that awful Goal,
Where JUSTICE strips the Murd'rer of his Soul:
Should venal C-ts the scandal of the Land,
Snatch the relentless Villain from her Hand,
Keen Execrations on this Plate inscrib'd,
Shall reach a JUDGE who never can be brib'd.

The unhappy Sufferers were Messs. SAM. L GRAY, SAM.L MAVERICK, JAM.S CALDWELL , CRISPUS ATTUCKS & PAT.K CARR Killed. Six wounded two of them (CHRIST.R MONK & JOHN CLARK) Mortally

The image of martyrdom (and its lyrical accompaniment) would become familiar motifs as nationalist movements erupted over the course over the next hundred years, one has only to think of La Marseillaise or David’s painting of the martyrdom of Joseph Bara. And yet the writing of poems to accompany massacres is something that has gone out of fashion in the mainstream press. The closest we get nowadays is the odd sombre commentary delivered during news reports on channel 4. I suppose there are only so many things you can get to rhyme with ‘gore’.

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Pope Leo XII and the Vaccination Ban

Whoever allows himself to be vaccinated ceases to be a child of God. Smallpox is a judgement from God : thus vaccination is an affront to Heaven

Quote attributed to Pope Leo XII 1829

He was a ferocious fanatic, whose object was to destroy all the improvements of modern times, and force society back to the government, customs, and ideas of mediaeval days. In his insensate rage against progress he stopped vaccination; consequently, small-pox devastated the Roman provinces during his reign, along with many other curses which his brutal ignorance brought upon the inhabitants of those beautiful and fertile regions.

G. S. Godkin

Annibale della Genga - a sickly 63 year old crippled by chronic haemorrhoids - was elected Pope Leo XII in 1823 and began a stronger, more religious and more conservative regime in the Papal states. As a consequence, he became a much derided figure. The authority of the popes had been much weakened during the enlightenment, the subsequent revolution and the violence which followed. Leo’s appointment by the Zelanti came in reaction to this and to the constant manipulation of papal policy by political prudence. He was pious, puritanical and confrontational; with a habit for shooting birds in the Vatican gardens which shocked the cardinals. In the internal government of the Papal states he took steps to establish his moral authority. Gaol sentences were introduced for people caught playing games on Sundays and feast days, tight fitting dresses were forbidden for women. Encores and ovations in theatres were forbidden and actors and actresses ad libbing lines on current affairs were forbidden. The bars in Rome were forbidden from selling alcohol which had to be bought in the street from grills; this led to a massive increase in public drunkenness. The Jews were ordered back into ghettos and forbidden to own real estate. 300 of them were required to attend Christian services every week and business transactions between Jews and Christians were forbidden. The subsequent exodus of Jews from the Papal States worsened an already fraught economic situation.

Leo’s assistants were no better. Cardinal Ravorolla who was sent as legate to Ravenna became a figure of fun for his tyrannical decrees. He closed inns, banned gambling and required anyone who went out at night to carry a lantern with them. He also installed a great iron bound chest outside his residence into which people could put anonymous denunciations of their neighbors, Cardinal Palotta attempted to deal with the huge numbers of brigands in his provinces, but became so hated he was forced to resign. When he did so the brigands held thanksgiving masses to celebrate.

By far the most damning accusation against Leo XII was that he denounced and banned the practice of vaccination. Paul Badham for instance in his 'Sources of Authority in Christian Ethics' mentions that:

Later the practices of inoculation and vaccination faced fierce theological opposition. Indeed in 1829 Pope Leo XII declared that whoever decided to be vaccinated was no longer a child of God; smallpox was a judgement of God, vaccination was a challenge to heaven.

Others tell a more lurid tale, for instance this site mentions that:

‘He forbid vaccination against smallpox during an epidemic, stating that it was 'against the natural law'.

Other sites go on to mention that thousands died during outbreaks of smallpox, all as a result of the Pope’s obstinacy and theological lunacy. This story, in its various forms has gone on to become frequently cited in the science religion debate as an example of how Christianity has blocked scientific and medical advance.

Vaccination in the 19th century in Italy and the provinces of the Papal States

In 1796 Edward Jenner famously created a method of vaccination which could prevent the spread of smallpox. The disease was greatly feared at the time as one in three of those who contracted smallpox died, and those who survived were often badly disfigured. Jenner discovered that by grafting a little pus produced by a benign disease of cows called cow pox he could successfully inoculate a young boy called James Phipps against the virus. Jenner's process would soon replace the inoculation by variola variolisation where a small amount of live smallpox virus was administered to the patient; this carried the serious risk that the patient would be killed or seriously ill. As Jenner’s discovery was published, the practice of vaccination began to spread gradually through Europe.

The Napoleonic wars actually helped the introduction of vaccination to the Mediterranean region. Two eccentric doctors, Joseph Marshall and John Walker were sent to Gibraltar, Minorca and Malta to assist Britain’s army and navy and to inoculate the inhabitants of allied cities. Marshall ended up in Palermo where 8,000 had recently died from a smallpox outbreak. He decided to set up a vaccination centre in a Jesuit seminary where he treated the poor twice a week. From Palermo, the vaccine was brought to Naples by Michele Troja, physician of the royal family, then to Rome where he was administered in the summer of 1801. Marshall followed in the period of peace from 1802-3, setting up an institute in Naples and travelling through Rome, Genoa and Turin, spreading the benefits of Jennerian Vaccination. It was badly needed, Marshall noting for example that in the slums around Genoa, beggars would parade their pustule covered infants in a bit for charity. Meanwhile in the north, vaccination had arrived in Lombardy, brought by doctors accompanying the march of French armies. Luigi Sacco was appointed director of vaccination for Napoleon’s Cisalpine Republic in 1801 and was able to boast that within 3 years he had eliminated smallpox completely. ‘I flatter myself’, he wrote, ‘that in Italy, I have been the means of promoting vaccination in a degree which no other kingdom of the same population has equalled’.

The response of the Papacy to the arrival of vaccination in Italy has been documented in Pratique de la vaccination antivariolique dans les provinces de l’État pontifical au 19ème siècle, an article written by Yves-Marie Bercé and Jean-Claude Otteni for Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique. When smallpox struck Rome, vaccination was endorsed by Pope Pius VII. At the hospital of the Holy Spirit in the Borgo Santo Spirito between the shore of the Tiber and the Vatican, the papal authority established a vaccination centre which received 800 newborns each year. This was operated by doctors like Dr. Alessandra, who had previously been an ardent propagator of smallpox inoculation, Domenico Moricchini the Neapolitan chemist (1773-1836) and the young Alessandro Flajani. 'Almost all the new born children are vaccinated’ Sacco reported to Baron in 1824 ‘so that we now know no fear of the smallpox’.

The approval of vaccination in Rome is demonstrated by a work by Alessandro Flajani in 1805 which documented his investigation into the medical policies in progress in Berlin, Vienna, London and Paris’; a large part of this work concerned the practice of vaccination. The report was published on his return to Rome. According to the rules of censure, the book was judged conform to the Catholic religion, the faith and manners; it received on June 16, 1807 the approvals of P. Oliveri, Dominican, professor in Archiginnasio of Rome, the professor of medicine Francisco Petraglia and the administration of the ecclesiastic state . The book was then dedicated to the Pope. It is therefore certain that in the beginnings of its circulation in Europe vaccination was officially allowed by the Church in moral theology and that it was practised publicly in the large Roman hospital. Ample precedent for this had already been set by Pope Benedetto XIV (Pope Lambertini) who had tried to introduce smallpox inoculation by the old variolation method into the Papal States in the early eighteenth century.

Did things change later on?. Apparently not. According to Bercé and Otteni, in January 1814, the French evacuated central Italy, to be replaced by the troops of Murat, king of Naples. In the provinces of the North of the State of the Church, Emilie and Romagna, it was the Austrian army which assumed the leading role. Pope Pius VII returned to Rome on May 24 1814 and in May 1815, the pontifical administration recovered its territories to the North. All the measures of the previous leadership were retained and the only changes were titular, which became pontifical rather than imperial. The use of French was removed from public documents, but most notable dignitaries, magistrates, administrative officers were unchanged, with very little prosecution of the beneficiaries of the previous regime. Vaccination initiatives, which had become fewer because of the military events in 1813 and 1814, began again to operate fully at the end of 1815.

In 1821 the Council of Vaccination was founded, which was made up professors of medicine of the Universities of Rome and Bologna. It had under its supervision all of the doctors guaranteed by the communes (the use of municipal doctors, medici di condotta, had been instigated since the 14th century). The doctors could not be considered for these municipal posts without having shown competence in vaccination. Orphanages and old people's homes were routinely inoculated and Gonfaloniers of communes (the equivalent of the mayor) were instructed to enable the activities of vaccinators. Municipal magistrates were ordered to organize a general vaccination of the new-born babies every spring and autumn. There was no official law of obligation to vaccinate, but no newborn could escape vaccination

The authorities of the various Italian States were attentive to the dangers of epidemics. The arrival of the cholera in Rome in 1830 occasioned emergency measures and the reinforcement of the medical commissions. It does not seem that there were any unusual levels of mortality in Rome during the 1820s and 1830s, nor beyond that. An investigation by a French doctor, Hippolyte Combes in 1838, gave very favourable judgements of the Italian medical policies in general. According to its account, the ecclesiastical State was not an exception and had maintained a rate of medicalisation comparable with the remainder of the peninsula. It also singles Leo XII out for praise for subsidising medical education in Rome. The Italian medical press does not make any mention of any ban on vaccination or any unusual rate of death in the ecclesiastical states; nor do the doctor’s professional bodies - although often resolutely critical towards the temporal authority of the pope - criticize the the papacy for being negligent in its medical affairs. In short, no record of a ban or any suggestion of a ban by Leo XII and his administration can be found in the archives.

The Imaginary edict

All this forces us to raise the question, where did this idea that the pope banned vaccination come from?. According to Bercé and Otteni, the biographers and contemporaries of Leo XII do not mention any interdict. The Knight Artaut, the first biographer of Leon XII and of Massimo d' Azeglio, quotes the latter as being a great admirer of Jenner, “a man who has saved many from death, God knows how many million… the day will come when Jenner will be held in dimensions higher than Napoleon”. It is probable that if Leo XII had promulgated one interdict of vaccination, Azeglio who was well informed of the actions of the pope, would have some mentioned it in his Memories relating to the life in Rome during first half of 19th century. In the same way, historians of the 19th century popes do not mention an opposition to vaccination. Philippe Boutry for instance writes:

‘After Consalvi, vaccination continued under Leon XII, who does not seem to have required it to stop, as opposed to what a certain tradition claims’.

Research of the interdict in treaties of ecclesiastical history has also failed to turn up anything.

A Catholic historian Donald Keefe came across the story when it was repeated by Prof. Daniel Maguire of Marquette University. Keefe tried to trace the source of the quote from Leo XII, tracing it from footnote to footnote, from book to book and found it had emanated from a Dr. Pierre Simon in Le Contredes naissances with no authority given at all. It is probable however, that the myth is much older and dates from the 19th century as it can be found in G. S. Godkin’s ‘Life of Victor Emmanuel II’ from 1880.

According to Bercé and Otteni the origin of the mythical vaccination ban of Leo XII is undoubtedly due to the personality of Cardinal Della Genga when he become pope in 1823. His intransigence and piety alienated liberal opinion very quickly. His austere spirituality made him the target of criticisms and mocking remarks. English travelers visiting the peninsula and many of the diplomats established in Rome remarked on the severity of the pontiff. The obscurantism of the Church, the inertia of the pontifical government, the ridiculous superstitions of Italian piety, the idleness and the dirtiness of the Southerners were commonplaces stereotypes from the accounts of travelers to Italy. These rumors would have reached the ears of whig historians such as G. S. Godkin and percolated into their historical narratives.

In conclusion, Leo XII’s alleged ban of vaccination is a whiggish myth which has been repeated and promulgated slavishly ever since, despite having absolutely no basis in fact whatsoever. No doubt in cyberspace it will continue to take on a new lease of life amongst those who will swallow any myth as long as it is anti-catholic or anti-religious.

Thanks to Alfonso Taboada for bringing this to my attention.

Further Reading

‘Tracking a footnote’ – Donald J Keefe

Pratique de la vaccination antivariolique dans les provinces de l’État pontifical au 19ème siècle - Remarques sur le supposé interdit vaccinal de Léon XII - Yves-Marie Bercé1 - Jean-Claude Otteni

‘The life and death of small pox’ Ian Glynn


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Augustine on Ignorant Christians

Here's an old but brilliant quotation from St Augustines Literal Commentary on Genesis (1.19.41):

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens and the other elements of this world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and relative positions… Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of the Holy Scriptures, talking nonsense on these topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

Everyone who dabbles in science and religion should remember this.

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Plantinga vs. Dennett

Here. I was going to excerpt a few passages, but you just need to read the whole thing. Wow.

Update (10 Mar): I just noticed in the comments at the link that someone recorded the whole thing and made it available online to download. Here it is, 50 MB worth.


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Columbus and the 'Flat Earth'

Columbus : The earth is not flat, Father, it’s round!
The Prior : Don’t say that!
Columbus : Its the truth; it’s not a mill pond strewn with islands, it’s a sphere
The Prior : Don’t, don’t say that; it’s blasphemy

Dialogue from 'Christopher Columbus', A Play by Joseph Chiari

In a momentous passage from book 2 of ‘On the Heavens’, Aristotle concludes that the earth is spherical:

Either then the earth is spherical or it is at least naturally spherical. And it is right to call anything that which nature intends it to be, and which belongs to it, rather than that which it is by constraint and contrary to nature. The evidence of the senses further corroborates this. How else would eclipses of the moon show segments shaped as we see them? As it is, the shapes which the moon itself each month shows are of every kind straight, gibbous, and concave-but in eclipses the outline is always curved: and, since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth's surface, which is therefore spherical.

Again, our observations of the stars make it evident, not only that the earth is circular, but also that it is a circle of no great size. For quite a small change of position to south or north causes a manifest alteration of the horizon. There is much change, I mean, in the stars which are overhead, and the stars seen are different, as one moves northward or southward. Indeed there are some stars seen in Egypt and in the neighbourhood of Cyprus which are not seen in the northerly regions; and stars, which in the north are never beyond the range of observation, in those regions rise and set.

All of which goes to show not only that the earth is circular in shape, but also that it is a sphere of no great size: for otherwise the effect of so slight a change of place would not be quickly apparent. Hence one should not be too sure of the incredibility of the view of those who conceive that there is continuity between the parts about the pillars of Hercules and the parts about India, and that in this way the ocean is one. As further evidence in favour of this they quote the case of elephants, a species occurring in each of these extreme regions, suggesting that the common characteristic of these extremes is explained by their continuity. Also, those mathematicians who try to calculate the size of the earth's circumference arrive at the figure 400,000 stades. This indicates not only that the earth's mass is spherical in shape, but also that as compared with the stars it is not of great size.

In God and reason in the Middle Ages, Edward Grant writes that:

‘All medieval students who attended a university knew this. In fact any educated person in the Middle Ages knew the earth was spherical, or of a round shape. Medieval commentators on Aristotle’s 'On the Heavens' or in the commentaries on a popular thirteenth century work titled ‘Treatise on the Sphere' by John of Sacrobosco, usually included a question in which they enquired ‘whether the whole earth is spherical’. Scholastics answered this question unanimously: The earth is spherical or round. No university trained author ever thought it was flat’

John of Sacrobosco's book, the ‘Treatise on the Sphere' or 'Tractatus de Sphaera' mentioned by Grant, was published in 1230. This popular work discussed the spherical earth and its place in the universe and was required reading by students in all Western European universities for the next four centuries. If the 'poor benighted medievals' had really believed that the earth was flat as was claimed in the 19th century, they must have been ignoring their own textbooks. Perhaps the heavily annotated copy of 'Treatise on the Sphere' shown on the right has been graffitied by scholasitics claiming 'it's not true!' and 'this is heresy!'; but I highly doubt it.

And yet the popular conception of Columbus’s voyage is that he discovered the world is round, in the process refuting the medieval view. The culprit here was Washington Irving, which conjured an imaginary scene in which Columbus pleads his case for a spherical earth in front of Church dignitaries and professors in Salamanca. In Washington’s imagination, Columbus ‘who was a devoutly religious man’ was assailed ‘with quotes for the Bible and the Testament...such are the specimens of the errors and prejudices, the mingled ignorance and erudition and the pedantic bigotry with which Columbus had to contend’

The truth is that when Columbus was planning his voyage, he gathered evidential support from a scholastic treatise entitled ‘The Image (or representation) of the world (ymango mundi)’ which had been written by the theologian and philosopher Pierre d’ Ailly and was one of the most popular printed books in the later fifteenth , sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Not only did D’Ailly say from the very outset of the treatise that the earth is a sphere, but he also cited Aristotle and Averroes in reporting that the end of the habitable earth towards the east and the end of the habitable earth towards the west are very close with a small sea in between. D’ Ailly reported the earth’s circumference as 56 2/3 miles multiplied by 360 degrees, as measured by Alfraganus (al-Farghani). Edward Grant reports that, in Columbus’s annotated copy of the book, this circumference measurement has been written in the margin and surrounded by boxes to emphasise the point. This was important for Columbus because it made the world seem much smaller than it actually was, so that sailing from Spain to India would require only a few days to cross the small sea. In fact, by going with the smaller estimate Columbus had underestimated the distance he would have to travel to India, and had the Americas not been in his path he would have run out of provisions.

Not only did Columbus not discover that the earth was round – that had been the scholarly consensus since Aristotle, despite the best efforts of the self educated Cosmas Indicopleustes – he gained the information for his voyage from medieval sources.

As Grant concludes in ‘God and reason’:

Although some progress has been made in rectifying the egregious historical error that a flat earth was commonly assumed in the Middle Ages, the error lives on. Perhaps it is because, as Russell plausibly suggests ‘the idea of the dark middle ages is still fixed in the popular consciousnesses and consequently ‘no caricature is too preposterous to be accepted.

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Mathematical Monks and the Multiverse

I recently read a truly excellent SF novel by Neal Stephenson entitled Anathem. It's about an alternate universe that has monks whose interests are more on mathematics rather than theology; and they have an alternate philosophical history that parallels the real one. I highly recommend it to pretty much everyone (especially Elliot at CotC if he hasn't already read it).

Part of my motivation for bringing it up is that at one point the monks discuss the Anthropic Principle, and give an excellent account of it:

Paphlagon said, "The cosmogonic processes that lead to the creation of the stuff we are made of -- the creation of protons and other matter, their clumping together to make stars, and the resulting nucleosynthesis -- all seem to depend on the values of certain physical constants. The most familiar example is the speed of light, but there are several others -- about twenty in all. Theors used to spend a lot of time measuring their precise values, back when we were allowed to have the necessary equipment. If these numbers had different values, the cosmos as we know it would not have come into being; it would just be an infinite cloud of cold dark gas or one big black hole or something else quite simple and dull. If you think of these constants of nature as knobs on the control panel of a machine, well, the knobs all have to be set in just the right positions or --"

Again Paphlagon looked to Moyra, who seemed ready: "Suur Demula likened it to a safe with a combination lock, the combination being about twenty numbers long."

"That is right. If you dial twenty numbers at random you never get the safe open; it is nothing more to you than an inert cube of iron. Even if you dial nineteen numbers correctly and get the other one wrong -- nothing. You must get all of them correct. Then the door opens and out spills all of the complexity and beauty of the cosmos."

"Another analogy," Moyra continued, after a sip of water, "was developed by Saunt Conderline, who likened all of the sets of values of those twenty constants that don't produce complexity to an ocean a thousand miles wide and deep. The sets that do, are like an oil sheen, no wider than a leaf, floating on the top of that ocean: an exquisitely thin layer of possibilities that yield solid, stable matter suitable for making universes with living things in them."

However, to get around the theistic repercussions, Anathem appeals to the multiverse hypothesis. Stephenson does this very cleverly: any view that argues that the physical universe isn't all that exists is a sort of multiverse hypothesis. So the Platonic world of forms is positing a multiverse, in which one is a universe of pure forms (in the Anathem alt-history Plato = Protas and Platonist = Protist). Similarly, any theistic explanation of the Anthropic Principle is a multiverse hypothesis, since it holds that there is another world that has some effect in this one. Stephenson's monks conclude from this that, if we have to posit another world in order to account for this one, there can be no reason for limiting the number of other worlds to one.

"It is a legitimate move in metatheorics. You have to be continually asking yourself, 'why are things thus, and not some other way?' And if you apply that test to this diagram, you immediately run into a problem: there are exactly two worlds. Not one, not many, but two. One might draw such a diagram having only one world -- the Arbran Causal Domain -- and zero arrows. That would draw very few objections from metatheoricians (at least, those who are not Protists). One might, on the other hand, assert 'there are lots of worlds' and then set out to make a case for why that is plausible. But to say 'there are two worlds -- and only two!' seems no more supportable than to say 'there are exactly 173 worlds, and all those people who claim that there are only 172 of them are lunatics.'"

Of course, in this post I pointed out that there is a reason for limiting the number of worlds to two: Occam's Razor. The more entities you have to posit, the less likely your theory is correct. The Anthropic Principle shows that we have to posit a world in addition to this one in order to account for the fact that this world has the very specific properties necessary for the existence of life. But unless we have a reason to posit a third or fourth or 173rd world, then to do so simply violates Occam's Razor.

Ironically, part of Anathem's alternate history includes a parallel to Occam's Razor, which is frequently referenced by the characters:

Gardan's Steelyard: A rule of thumb attributed to Fraa Gardan (-1110 to -1063), stating that, when one is comparing two hypotheses, they should be placed on the arms of a metaphorical steelyard (a kind of primitive scale, consisting of an arm free to pivot around a central fulcrum) and preference given to the one that "rises higher," presumably because it weighs less; the upshot being that simpler, more "lightweight" hypotheses are preferable to those that are "heavier," i.e., more complex. Also referred to as Saunt Gardan's Steelyard or simply the Steelyard.

So, basically, the multiverse hypothesis violates the Steelyard: the anthropic coincidences make it absurdly implausible that this world is the only one that exists; but unless it is absurdly implausible that only two worlds exist, it is invalid to think there are more than two. Anathem contains the refutation of one of its premises without realizing it.

However, I'm willing to give Stephenson some grace here, since such an acknowledgment would essentially destroy the premise of the entire book. Now go read it.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Science and Religion: Same Old Story

I have just finished watching Colin Blakemore’s programme on Channel 4 on the history of science and Christianity. I’ve had a few emails since it aired on Sunday night (I recorded it) asking what I think.

Sadly the programme was not very good. Blakemore himself came across as insufferably smug even when he was trying to be serious. The storyline was the nineteenth century yarn of science beating back the forces of superstition with heroic battles fought by Bruno and Galileo. Most of the details were wrong but even if they had been right, I doubt it would have made much difference to the tone.

I’ll just make three points:

Firstly, if you want to make a show about history do get yourself an academic advisor who is a historian. The historical consultant on Blakemore’s show was John Gribbin, a physicist. He’s written a couple of works of popular history, but given there are plenty of historians of science around, it would have been a good idea to hire one.

Second, it is a bit rich devoting your whole show to how sneaky Christians are for accommodating their faith to scientific discoveries and then at the end say science is great because it always chucks out theories that don’t work. Either responding to the evidence is commendable or it isn’t. It can’t be good for scientists and bad for Christians.

Third, do have a look at Humphrey’s demolition of the Giordano Bruno myth below.

By the way, at one point Blakemore picked up a big book and said it was volume one of the Inquisition’s big book of torture. Does anyone have any idea what it was?

PS: Here's someone else who is not happy about the show.



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Dictating Physics

It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.

Albert Einstein

Soviet science is the standard-bearer for most modern and progressive ideas of contemporary natural science...the development of science can only be secured by total renunciation of Einstien's conception without compromise or half measure'

I.V. Kuznetzov - Soviet theoretician

Albert Einstein’s General relativity has developed into an essential tool in modern astrophysics, yet it was threatened in its infancy by the arrival of new ideologies which promised a great leap into a heroic future; a future based on the creation of a perfect society and a new conception of man. Both Nazism and Communism felt ill at ease with the new physics; the Nazis because it was tainted by Jewishness, the Marxists because it seemed to threaten their materialist dogma. Accordingly it was suppressed until more practical considerations came into play.

During the 1930s the Nazi party began a campaign to systematically turn traditional subjects into expressions of their political ideology. The attempt to do this in Physics was led by Philipp Lenard, an elder statesmen of German science, who had worked with Heinrich Hertz, the discoverer of radio waves, and been awarded the Nobel prize in 1905 for experiments on cathode rays. Lenard was very sceptical of theory and had a tendency to emphasise careful and precise experimentation. He also had an intense hatred of the British, having clashed with the physicist J. J. Thompson for allegedly stealing his work. After the First World War his German nationalism crossed over into anti-Semitism and he became outraged when Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was confirmed in 1919. Einstein represented all he despised, a pacifist, a Jew, a supporter of Weimar and a theoretical physicist; to put the icing on the cake, the scientists that confirmed Relativity were a British team under Arthur Eddington. Lenard proclaimed the whole thing as a ‘Jewish fraud’ and having led a backlash against it, began to gravitate towards the Nazi party, eventually joining in 1937.

Lenard was an enthusiastic contributor to the regime and celebrated the removal of Jewish professors. He then published a four volume book on physics which was supposed to be the foundation for a new racially based ‘Aryan Physics’ that would eliminate Jewish relativity altogether. Due to his age, the task of constructing a Nazi physics was passed over to his friend Johannes Stark, another experimentalist who had discovered the splitting of spectral lines in an electric field. Stark was given the resources to launch a campaign to change the funding of science in order to cut off the proponents of Quantum mechanics and relativity. Problems immediately became apparent. There was not much substance to Nazi physics once all the anti-Semitic diatribes and political rants were taken out. Other scientists decided Relativity and Quantum mechanics were useful after all and argued that they embodied Nordic concepts and rejected ‘Jewish’ materialism.

The most impressive achievement of Nazi physics was to launch a campaign against Werner Heisenberg, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and block his appointment to the chair of theoretical physics at Munich. Stark attacked Heisenburg as a follower of the hated Einstien, this despite the fact Einstien had rejected Quantum physics. Heisenburg, a conservative nationalist drafted a response petition signed by 75 leading scientists, which put a stop to further public attacks. Behind the scenes, Stark called on Reinhard Heydrich’s SS to assist, while Heisenburg sent his mother to intercede with Himmler’s mother.

Despite Heisenburg’s name being cleared, he failed to get the Munich post, which was given to Wilhelm Muller. Muller wasn’t even a physicist and was principally recommended because he had published a book called ‘Jews and Science’ which argued that Relativity was a Jewish con-trick. As a result the standard of scientific teaching in Germany declined dramatically, although scientific research flourished in the private sector and amongst the scientific research institutes which lay outside the universities. As the war drew nearer, Heisenburg was able to show his trump card, claiming that theoretical physics was necessary for the development of military technology. Stark was accordingly removed and scientific funding was expanded dramatically, with the proviso that the research had to be shown to have the remotest possible relevance to the war effort.

General Relativity has a similarly chequered history amoungst the Communists. During the pre-Stalin era, Marxist philosophers had disagreed over the problem of defining dialectical materialism in relation to ongoing discoveries in science. This controversy produced a range of Marxist attitudes toward the theory of relativity, ranging from complete acceptance to total rejection. During the Stalin era conflicting forces in Marxist thinking were eliminated, and complete unity was established and firmly guarded by the state. Marxist theorists declared war on “idealistic” principles built into Einstein’s scientific work, which was seen as anti-materialist and a challenge to Marxist-Leninist materialist epistemology.

Stalin himself held that General Relativity was nothing but ‘bourgeois mystification’, treating any support for the theory as conniving at the overthrow of the Soviet order. When Beria pleaded after the Second World War that soviet physicists needed Einstein’s equations to build a nuclear weapon, Stalin eventually relented saying that ‘Leave them in peace, we can always shoot them later’. That was as close as you got to a concession from Koba the Dead

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Giordano Bruno - Martyr for Science and Reason

But the new truth could not be concealed; it could neither be
laughed down nor frowned down. Many minds had received it, but within the hearing of the papacy only one tongue appears to have dared to utter it clearly. This new warrior was that strange mortal, Giordano Bruno. He was hunted from land to land, until at last he turned on his pursuers with fearful invectives. For this he was entrapped at Venice, imprisoned during six years in the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome, then burned alive, and his ashes scattered to the winds. Still, the new truth lived on.

Andrew Dickson White

It is then unnecessary to investigate whether there be beyond the heaven Space, Void or Time. For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.

Giordano Bruno

A couple of days ago I had the misfortune of watching a channel 4 documentary entitled ‘God and the Scientists’, which was largely a garbled version of the 19th century ‘conflict thesis. The show, which was presented by Colin Blakemore, regurgitated the myth that Giordano Bruno was burned because of his support of the Copernican model. The truth is he really was a heretic in the traditional sense and was burned for his religious beliefs after a long drawn out trial in 1600. It was unfortunate that the Copernican model had been promoted by Bruno as a component of his worldview as it tainted the theory as heretical.

Bruno was a follower of a movement called Hermetism, which was a cult that based its beliefs on documents which were thought to have originated in Egypt at the time of Moses. These writings were linked with the teaching of the Egyptian God Thoth, the God of learning and had arrived in Italy from Macedonia in the 1460s. To followers of this cult, Thoth was known as Hermes Trismegitus, or Hermes the thrice great. The Egyptians worshipped the sun and it is possible Nicolaus Copernicus himself was influenced by Hermetism to put the sun at the centre of the universe. For instance, he wrote in De revolutionibus that:

At rest, however, in the middle of everything is the sun. For in this most beautiful temple, who would place this lamp in another or better position than that from which it can light up the whole thing at the same time? For, the sun is not inappropriately called by some people the lantern of the universe, its mind by others, and its ruler by still others. [Hermes] the Thrice Greatest labels it a visible god, and Sophocles' Electra, the all-seeing.

The scriptures of Hermetism were later found not to have originated from ancient Egypt at all (it was discovered in 1614 that they were written long after the arrival of the Christian era), but to believers in the fifteenth century, they were thought to predate the birth of Christ. Subscribers to Hermeticism included such high profile figures as Phillip II of Spain, and the writings were generally tolerated by the Catholic Church. Bruno’s ‘dangerous idea’ was to take the view that the Egyptian religion was the true faith and that the church should return to these old ways; which they were none too pleased about.

As it transpired, Bruno had something of a talent for stirring up trouble. He joined the Dominican order in 1565 but was expelled in 1576 for defending the Arian heresy and possessing a heavily annotated copy of Erasmus’s works. Having joined the Calvinists in Geneva, Bruno published an attack on the work of Antoine de la Faye, a distinguished professor. This did not go down well and he was arrested and forced to leave for Paris. In France he enjoyed the patronage of some powerful admirers, winning fame for his theological lectures and his amazing feats of memory, which were based on his elaborate system of mnemonics.

Following this he moved to England and became acquainted with arch enemies of the church such as Philip Sidney and John Dee. Having managed to make so many enemies in England that he was forced to take refuge in the French embassy, he left for Paris and then, finding the situation there had deteriorated, he moved to Germany. Despite a run in with the Lutherans, he was able to produce several Latin works on magic and the composition of signs, images and ideas. At the Frankfurt book fair he ran into Giovanni Mocenigo who had heard of his feats of memory and told him to apply for the professorship of mathematics at Padua. Unfortunately, having applied for this post, he lost out to a certain Galileo Galilei. Mocenigo invited him to Venice to act as an in-house memory tutor, but sadly Bruno’s personality proved too difficult. Mocenigo was not only unhappy with Bruno’s teaching; he also decided to denounce him to the Venetian inquisition. After being handed over to the Roman inquisition and a long imprisonment, Bruno was finally condemned on then specific charges of Arianism and for carrying out occult practices. As the work of Frances Yates in the 1970s showed, far from being a martyr for science, Bruno was a martyr for magic. The full list of charges were as follows:

Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith and speaking against it and its ministers. Holding erroneous opinions about the Trinity, about Christ's divinity and Incarnation. Holding erroneous opinions about Christ. Holding erroneous opinions about Transubstantiation and Mass. Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity. Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes. Dealing in magics and divination. Denying the Virginity of Mary.

Bruno's fate was tragic and especially harsh by modern standard. To some extent he brought it upon himself since he was given every opportunity to recant, which was one reason why he was held for nearly a decade before being condemned. During his earlier life, his wanderings appear to have had less to do with his being hounded by the Inquisition as it did with his own extremely difficult personality. While Bruno was successful at finding powerful patrons to shelter him, he invariably did something to alienate and outrage them, usually fairly quickly after entering their service. He had an outstanding talent for repeatedly failing to act in his own best interests and continually managing to wriggle out of favourable circumstances.

There is no evidence that his support for Copernicanism featured in the trial at all, but Bruno was a keen advocate of the sun centred universe because it fitted so well with the Egyptian view of the world. He also enthusiastically espoused Thomas Digges’s idea that the universe is filled with an infinite array of stars; each one like the sun and that there must be life elsewhere in the universe. The theme of his 'On the Infinite Universe and Worlds' is not Copernicanism, of which he had a rather flawed technical understanding, but pantheism, a theme also developed in his 'On Shadows of Ideas', and which would come to influence Baruch Spinoza. It was his personal cosmology which informed his espousal of Copernicus, not the other way around. Bruno and his trial made a big splash at the time and all his ideas were tarred with the same brush. It is possible if it hadn’t been for Bruno, Copernicanism would not have made such a splash with the authorities and Galileo might not have been persecuted.

How to get burned by the Inquisition
(a handy checklist)

1) Live during the Reformation period when hysteria about reformers and heretics is at its height.

2) Read some ancient Egyptian mysticism and try to pass it off as the true religion. Put forward some controversial ideas, for example that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.

3) Move countries and ingratiate yourself with a range of rich benefactors, including arch enemies of the Catholic Church.

4) Piss them all off and get chased out of a succession of countries by denouncing your opponents in print and getting into trivial arguments.

5) Move back to Italy where the Inquisition can actually get at you

6) Annoy your employer so much he hands you in to the authorities

7) Refuse to recant in full. Keep this up for 7 years.

8) Success!. Prepare to be hailed as a ‘Martyr for Science and Reason’ in an historically sub-literate Channel 4 Documentary series.

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