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Once upon a time the Catholic Church dominated every area of life, particularly the life of the mind. Free thought was suppressed, and the West's precious Greek heritage was rejected. Miraculous explanations for natural events were routinely invoked, and belief in a flat earth was universal. However, in the 16th and 17th centuries, a few plucky thinkers like Copernicus, Galileo, and Bacon threw off the chains of church hierarchy and scripturalism to offer bold new interpretations of the cosmos. Thus modern science was born. While medieval theories about nature were often circular and religiously biased, the new discipline relied solely on impartial experimentation and inductive logic.
What I have rehearsed here is, of course, a reductive and erroneous version of one of Western culture's most influential narratives, that of the so-called Scientific Revolution. Though this version may continue to dominate the popular mind, 20th-century historians of science have disputed many of its claims. For example, Thomas Kuhn famously argued that throughout history scientists have been predisposed to interpret data in various ways—to see some things and miss others—according to paradigms that influence them, usually unconsciously. Similarly, Michael Polanyi contended that even the most rigorous scientific knowledge involves a substantial element of belief, and demonstrated that scientists are often motivated as well by seemingly non-scientific notions like elegance and beauty. Jeffrey Russell has made the case that virtually no one, either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, believed in a flat Earth. (Washington Irving, creator of Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow, invented the error and read it back into Columbus' audience with Queen Isabella.) And Stanley Jaki has demonstrated that the Scientific Revolution may in fact be better viewed as an evolution, pointing out that Copernicus and Newton had important—though seldom acknowledged—medieval predecessors, most notably Jean Buridan, Nicholas Oresme, and Nicholas of Cusa, all of them churchmen.
The Word and the World , a splendid collection of essays, sheds light on these matters, approaching the religion-science debate in a fresh, even startling way. Rather than considering how religion in general may have nurtured or hampered the rise of science, this book examines the role of biblical exegesis in the formation of the early scientific method. Featuring twelve essays by a variety of American, English, German, and Swedish thinkers—two teach at Catholic universities, the other ten at secular institutions—The Word and the World is organized around the provocative thesis that the new science and biblical interpretation, "far from being implacable enemies … seem to have been inextricably intertwined." The opening essay is by Peter Harrison, whose seminal 1999 book The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science argued that "the Protestant call for a return to literal interpretation provided the intellectual conditions and the hermeneutic mode conducive to the development of science." By eschewing the elaborate, often abstract modes of allegory common in Roman Catholic discourse, Protestantism fostered a kind of scientific consciousness, one given to reading God's other book, nature, as attentively as it did the Bible.
At this point some readers might object that while general arguments for the consilience of science and religion are all very well, arguing that biblical literalism nurtured early science means turning a blind eye to history. Didn't the church try to suppress the emerging discipline on the basis of obstinately literal interpretations of passages such as Joshua 10, in which the sun supposedly stands still for a day, and Ecclesiastes 1:5, which claims that "the sun also rises, and the sun goes down"? One strength of The Word and the World is that it anticipates such objections. Indeed, not only is it an anthology, it is also a dialogue of sorts, with each contributor responding to Harrison, some extending his thesis, others refining it, still others contesting it. For instance, several essays point out that close readings of Scripture were not the sole province of Protestant commentators. One counter-example is the humanist Cornelius Valerius (1512-78), a Latin professor at the University of Louvain (Belgium) and a compiler of scientific textbooks. Irving Keltner argues that Valerius practiced a "Mosaic cosmology" based on a literal reading of Genesis and other biblical texts, which led Valerius to dispute key principles of Greek astronomy, including aether, the universe's eternal nature, the hardness and incorruptibility of the heavens, and a fifth ("quint") essence in space. Regarding the quintessence, Valerius maintained that Genesis assumes that earth and sky are composed of one substance, not five. And as for the allegedly eternal universe, he adduced Isaiah 51:6: "The heavens shall vanish like smoke,and the earth shall be worn away like a garment." Nonetheless, Valerius' literalism was double-edged and did not always lead to scientifically sound conclusions. For instance, it caused him to regard Ecclesiastes 1:5 as convincing evidence against heliocentrism.
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