Key topics
- Religious teachings clashed with scientific discoveries on Earth’s age.
- Fossil finds challenged biblical accounts, fueling the rise of modern geology.
- Darwin’s evolution theory faced resistance but reshaped human understanding.
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By RW Johnson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
I well remember how, at my Catholic boys’ school, the headmaster, Brother Mullen, decided to tell us boys about the Creation. “The Earth is very old”, he began. “It is 4,000 years old”. A forest of hands went up because most of the boys knew this was nonsense. But it was risky to say anything out of turn to Brother Mullen because, like all the other teachers, he carried a large strap which he was only too willing to use. “Four thousand” he repeated, slowly and threateningly. Many of the hands went down. He then proceeded to give us a ridiculous tour of his imaginary history of the Earth, ignoring the pained and puzzled looks of his pupils. At the end one boy said “but sir the dinosaurs were here 75 million years ago”. Mullen snapped: “We are talking about God’s Creation, not about dinosaurs. Stay in detention after school and write 100 lines of “I must not interrupt teachers with foolish irrelevancies”.
In fact Brother Mullen, even in his own terms, had got it wrong, as I learned from a wonderful new book*. The universally acknowledged “expert” on this issue was the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, James Uusher, who spent much of his life researching the exact date of the Creation. By 1654 he had produced a 2,000 page work (in Latin) in which he worked back through all the Biblical patriarchs who “begat” one another until he had settled Adam’s birth date. It turned out that the Creation had happened on a particular Saturday night of 22-23 October, 4004 BC. (Brother Mullen clearly remembered the “4,000” bit, although he failed to realise that that actually meant that world was now just over 6,000 years old.) For several centuries Uusher was regarded as having definitively settled this question: indeed, his finding was stamped into every King James version of the Bible.
However, in November 1812 a young girl, Mary Anning, discovered the skull of a ‘crocodile’ below the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset. Further excavation revealed a 17 foot monster which was clearly not a crocodile but some much earlier reptile, now extinct – a proteosaur. But the very idea of extinct species was thought to be blasphemous, for Noah was supposed to have taken two pairs of every animal into the ark. But he clearly hadn’t known about proteosaurs. Moreover, the Bible said God had created land and sea on the third day of Creation and marine creatures only on the fifth day.
So how could the proteosaur, if it was created after the land, have been found under 100 feet of rock ?
* Michael Taylor…Impossible Monsters. Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War between Science and Religion (Bodley Head)
These were serious questions and the penalties for spreading blasphemous ideas were very real. Not long before a court had sentenced the elderly schoolmaster, Peter Annet, to the pillory and a year’s hard labour – which killed him. His crime was to have translated Voltaire into English. However, more and more dinosaur remains were coming to light and the public was fascinated by these “impossible monsters” which were often thought to be the dragons of myth. Yet it was dangerous to suggest that perhaps the Biblical account was wrong.
The earliest attempts at what was to become the science of geology met with furious resistance for they hinted at a time scale far longer than 6,000 years and they were accepted only if they were based on the assumption that the world had known only one major physical change, the Flood. But in 1829 Charles Lyell brought out his Principles of Geology which not only asserted that the Earth was many millions of years old but that geological change from the beginning of time was quite continuous and that these same forces were still operating today.
There was no room for the Flood in Lyell’s account and he scoffed at the idea that the whole of the Earth could have been flooded at the same time. Cunningly, Lyell’s publisher priced the book so that it could only be bought by the monied elite – so that Lyell could avoid the accusation of spreading blasphemy among the masses, but even so, orthodox churchmen railed against this new science, claiming it was the work of the devil.
This was certainly not the impression of the young Charles Darwin who devoured Lyell’s first volume with great excitement, for the idea of evolution was already stirring in his mind and he had realised that if his notion of evolution was correct it would need extremely long periods of time in which to work – not thousands but millions of years. So excited was Darwin by Lyell’s work that he arranged for Lyell’s second volume to be delivered to him in South America when he arrived there on The Beagle. But Darwin was only too aware of the hostile reception his own ideas were likely to meet which was why he waited so many years to produce the Origin of Species.
Meanwhile, Mary Anning had been turning up more fossils, more dinosaurs – including the pterodactyl and the climate of opinion began gradually to change, especially since dinosaur remains began to be found in many other parts of the world. Despite the frantic efforts of churchmen to insist on Uusher’s chronology, the idea took root that dinosaurs were a long extinct species from millions of years ago.
However, when the Origin of Species appeared there was uproar with particular emphasis on the implication that Man had descended from the family of apes. (This had not been Darwin’s main point – he tackled the question only later in The Descent of Man – but his opponents fastened on it since it was both the most “upsetting” notion to many and also the most blasphemous since the Bible said Man had been created in the image of God.) His opponents typically tried to refute evolution by reference to a tableau of a white Man, a black man (representing “the lowest form of man”) and an ape, for of course the anti-evolutionists were usually complete and unthinking racists.
Adrian Desmond and James Moore in their book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, stress the fact that Darwin had been reared in a family passionately devoted to the cause of slavery abolition. They would all declare that “the slave is my brother”. This too was of great significance for there was a widespread theory of polygenesis – creating two quite separate family trees of descent for white men and black men. Darwin wholly rejected this and insisted that there was a single line of human evolution. The colour of a person’s skin was a merely superficial factor and could not be held as having any biological explanatory power.
The Origin of Species appeared in November 1859. Barely a year later the American Civil War began. Word had already spread across the Atlantic of Darwin’s sensational theory and it greatly disturbed the Confederacy which, of course, believed firmly in polygenesis. Indeed, many rationalised the practice of slavery by insisting that just as men had domesticated animals like cows and dogs, that black people serving whites as slaves was an analagous adaptation of the “natural” order. The Confederacy was worried enough to dispatch a spy to London – in the midst of war – whose job it was to infiltrate Darwin’s circle and report back on this new and concerning heresy.
By the 1860s, however, the tide had begun to turn. As the industrial revolution spread across the whole Western world more and more mines, canals and tunnels were dug and more large cities were built – and all these excavations revealed many more fossils of extinct species. Moreover the weight of more recent geological research only confirmed Lyell’s conclusion that the Earth was many millions (indeed, billions) of years old. Despite the continuing and fierce resistance of traditional churchmen the progress of science was increasingly viewed as crucial to the growth of civilisation.
Thomas Huxley had always been Darwin’s greatest supporter and he preached the gospel of evolution with enormous fluency and power. Darwin shrank from public debate but Huxley positively sought it: indeed Huxley referred to himself as “Darwin’s bulldog”. Inevitably, he, more even than Darwin, was regarded with hostility and almost with horror by the conservative defenders of the Mosaic explanation and chronology of human history. But when Prince Albert suggested that South Kensington should become the site of great museums and educational institutions Huxley was chosen to head what became the science-based Imperial College, London – today one of the top three universities in the world. And in 1881 all London flocked to see the institution for which Huxley had long campaigned, the Museum of Natural History, replete with giant dinosaur skeletons.
Today, of course, the idea that prelates or theologians should attempt to dictate the course of science or human knowledge seems merely preposterous. As one looks back at the way the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant his view that the planets, including the Earth, revolved around the sun – poor Galileo was threatened with torture and even after recanting spent the rest of his life under house arrest – let alone the way in which the Christian churches resisted (and in some cases still do resist) evolution, it is hard to believe that religion has ever been anything other than a brake on human progress.
But one should remember that Darwin was stumped by the question of how plants or animals passed characteristics down from one generation to the next. In fact the answer was being discovered even as Darwin wrote, by Gregor Mendel a Moravian Augustinian monk (and later abbot) at St Thomas’s Abbey in Brno (in today’s Czech Republic). Mendel experimented with pea plants for five years and published his results in an obscure journal in 1865. No one noticed and Mendel died in deepest obscurity in 1884. Only in 1900 was his work rediscovered when it became the basis of modern genetics. One sometimes feels that history loves irony. For neither Darwin nor Thomas Huxley would ever have dreamed that the science of heredity, the great missing piece in the theory of evolution, was, even as they laboured, already being decoded and explained in a Catholic abbey by a monk…..
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