Dinosaur in the Haystack - Mysteries and Oddities in Natural History is a collection of articles published by the late biologist Steven J. Gould and which Dvir Publishing would do well to do when it publishes his writings that have not yet seen the light of day in Hebrew
Stephen J. Gould
Chapter 4 - The late birth of the flat earth
The mortal remains of the venerable Bede (735-673) are laid to rest in Durham Cathedral, under her statue which bears the inscription worthy of all the awards for her "no nonsense" approach to death. In Latin columns written in a romantic rhyme, the burial cave announces: "In this grave rest the bones of the honorable Bede."
In the books of Western history that I studied as a child, Bede shines alone in a rare light in the darkness of the Middle Ages between Roman greatness and the slow medieval recovery culminating in the renewed glory of the Renaissance. Bede's publication was based on his interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and his book The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin and completed in 732. Chronology provides a foundation for good history, and Bede preceded his great work with two essays on the calculation and order of organization of time: On the Times in 703, and "On Measuring Time” at 725.
Bede's chronology had the greatest influence on the popularization of the inconvenient system according to which we divide time between before the Christian era and after the Christian era (see Essay 2), before and after the supposed birth of the Christian Jesus (probably a wrong dating, since Herod had already died in Menah the periods, and could not see the "wise people" and slaughter innocents at the beginning of one year AD). In his timetables, Bede sought to bring order to the events of Christian history, but the primary motive and purpose of his calculations was centered on another problem, which repeats and disturbs the ecclesiastical chronology - the calculation of the exact date of Easter. The use of the complex definition of this holiday - the first Sunday after the full moon beginning on or after the vernal equinox - requires a great deal of sophistication in astronomy, as it requires accurate knowledge of both the cycles of the seasons and the dates of the moon.
These calculations include the theory of the heavens, and Bede clearly presented his conception of the earth as a sphere located in the center of the universe - "a wheel placed as the center of the world". And lest people misunderstand his intention, Bede specifically said that he meant a three-dimensional ball, not a flat bowl. Furthermore, he added, our planet can be considered a perfect sphere because even the highest mountains are no more than an invisible wrinkle of such a large diameter.
I also once learned that almost all other church scholars of the ignorant Middle Ages refuted Aristotle's opinion that the earth was a sphere, and described our home as a flat plane, or at most concave. Haven't we heard the legend about Columbus trying to convince the learned priests of Salamanca that he will reach India and not fall off the edge of the land?
The human mind probably works as a sorting device (perhaps even, as many French structuralists claim, as a dichotomy machine, always dividing the world into raw-and-cooked [nature and culture], male-female, material-spiritual, and so on), and habits of thought ingrained in us encounter It is hardly possible that the nineteenth century invention of the flat earth, as we will see, came to support another dubious and dangerous separation that was married to another legend of social progress - the alleged war between science and religion.
The classical scholars did not doubt the sphericity of the earth. This sphericity was central to Aristotle's cosmology, and Artosthenes' calculations of the circumference of the earth - made in the third century BC - were also based on it. The myth of the flat earth claims that this knowledge was lost when the darkness of the church descended on Europe. During the thousand years of the Middle Ages, seemingly all scholars held the opinion that the earth must be flat - like the floor of a tent held by the canopy of heaven, to quote a simple biblical metaphor. The Renaissance rediscovered the classical views on the sphericity of the earth, but the proof needed the courage of Columbus and other explorers who were supposedly supposed to fall off the edge of the earth, but (starting with Magellan's mission) returned home from the opposite direction, after circling the entire earth.
The inspiration for the children's version of the myth centers on Columbus, who supposedly overcame whistle-blowing at a meeting of priests in Salamanca and managed to win an opportunity from Ferdinand and Isabella. Give your opinion on this version of the legend. which Russell quotes from a textbook for elementary school children written around 1887, right after the invention of the myth (and which differs but slightly from the report I read as a child, in the XNUMXs):
"But if the world is round," said Columbus, "hell is not beyond the stormy sea." That's where the eastern bank of Asia should be, Marco Polo's Cathay"... In the monastery hall the dignified group was gathered - shaven priests in their robes... Hesmani in complete perfection... "You think the earth is round... You don't know anything that the holy fathers of the church condemned the believers for this belief... this theory Yours sounds like heresy." Columbus could tremble in his shoes at the word heresy; The new Inquisition has just begun to operate as a series, and has sophisticated installations for breaking bones, for combing the flesh with iron combs. Thumbs up. For hanging, burning and pressing in presses, of the heretics.
Dramatic story not true, but completely fictional. There was never a period of "darkness of the flat earth" among the scholars (one is the large number of the uneducated then and now who saw the picture of the earth this way). The Greek knowledge about the sphericity of the earth never disappeared. And all the important scholars of the Middle Ages accepted the sphericity of the earth as an established cosmological fact. Ferdinand and Isabella did submit Columbus's plans to the review of a royal commission headed by Hernando de Talveda, Isabella's confessor, and after the fall of the Moors, the Archbishop of Granada. This committee, which was composed of advisers who were both priests and non-priests, also met in Salamanca, among other places. They raised some sharp intellectual objections to Columbus, but they all assumed the earth was round. Their main criticism was that Columbus would not be able to reach India in time, because the diameter of the Earth is too large. Moreover, the critics were absolutely right. Columbus "cooked" his calculations so that they would produce a much smaller globe, which would prove that it was possible to reach India. It is needless to say that he did not, and could not, reach Asia, and so the original inhabitants of America are still called Indians [Indians, Indians] as a result of his error.
Almost all the important scholars of the Middle Ages recognized the sphericity of the earth. I opened this essay by looking at the venerable Bede of the eighth century. The translations into Latin from the twelfth century of many books written by Greeks and Arabs greatly expanded among scholars the general appreciation of the natural sciences, especially astronomy - and the conviction of the earth's sphericity spread and increased. Roger Bacon (1292-1220) and Thomas
Aquinas (1274-1225) also inherited the fact of sphericity from Aristotle and his Arab commentators, as did the great scientists of the late Middle Ages, including John Briren (1358-1300) and Nicholas Orsma (1382-1320).
If so, who claimed the right to the flat earth, if all these respectable persons believed in its sphericity? Wicked persons must be found in every story of wrongdoing, and Russell shows that the great English philosopher of science William Yewell first discovered the great culprits in his book History of the Experimental Sciences, which appeared in 1837 - two types of minor importance named Lactantius (325-245) and Cosmas Indicoplastes (who wrote his book Christian Topography about 547- 549. Russell points out: "Yaval pointed his finger at the guilty... as evidence of the medieval belief in the flat earth, and almost every historian who followed him imitated him - they could only find a few other examples."
Lactantius brought the absurd statement to its climax by believing that the people in the Antipodes, which are on the other side of the earth, walk with their feet above their heads, the crops of the field there grow downwards and the rain falls upwards. Cosmas enthusiastically supported the biblical metaphor - "the heavens are stretched out like a sheet" [Psalms Ked], according to which the earth is like a flat floor under the convex arch of the sky above. But both played marginal roles as the scholarly community of the Middle Ages. Only three complete manuscripts of Cosmas (and another five or six fragments) are known, and they are all written in Greek. The first translation into Latin is from 1706 - so that Cosmas remained hidden from the eyes of the readers of the Middle Ages in the language accepted by them.
The purveyors of the flat earth myth could never deny the existence of the simple testimony of Bede, Bacon, Aquinas and others - and so they claimed that these figures acted as brave beacons in the surrounding darkness. Who created the orthodoxy that represented the ignorance of this general consensus? Two zeros called Lactantius and Cosmas Indicoplastes? Bede, Beacon, Aquinas and their ilk were not brave statue breakers. They were the establishment, and their belief in the sphericity of the earth was the canon, while Lactantius and his colleagues remained completely marginal. Aquinas's designation as a brave revolutionary because he spread the opinion that the earth is a sphere, like the labeling of Fisher, Haldane, Wright, Robzzensky, Mayer, Simpson, and all the great evolutionists in the twentieth century as extreme fixers because of their marginal creation, Dwayne Gish, his name, wrote in those years a small and unfortunate book called "evolution? The fossils say no"
When, then, and why, did this myth emerge about the medieval belief in the flat earth? Russell's historiographical work gives us a good reference point for both the time and the people. Not one of the great anti-clerical rationalists of the eighteenth century—Kondiak, Condorcet, Diderot, Gibbon, Day, or our own Benjamin Franklin—accused the scholastics of believing in the flat earth, though these men did not spare Bozem for the medieval versions of Christianity. . Washington Irving gave the story of the flat earth a decent boost in the largely fictional history of Columbus, published in 1828 - but his version had no moves. The toll that developed during the nineteenth century, but did not enter the essential realm of the porridge for daffodils and the jargon of the tourist guides. Russell conducted an interesting review of secondary school textbooks in the nineteenth century, and found that very few mentioned the myth of the flat earth before 1870, but almost all texts after 1880 contained this legend. We can determine the exact date of the invasion of the myth of the flat earth into the fields of general culture for the period between 1860 and 1890.
An intellectual movement based on the second error in the sorting categories examined in this essay - the presentation of Western history as a constant struggle, if not really a "war", between science and religion - spread among those small groups. in which the introduction involved the victory of science and the retreat of theology that followed it. Such movements needed Tamir as scapegoats and legends to spread their claims. Russell claims that the myth of the flat earth reached its canonical status as the main sermon on the triumph of science within the false dichotomization of Western culture. How was it ever possible to concoct a better story than this for the service of the armies of science? The darkness of religion destroys Greek knowledge and weaves around us a web of fear, based on its adoption, and contrary to both logic and experience. Our ancestors lived in anxiety, the official irrationality limited them, and they were full of fears that any challenge would lead to their falling from the edge of the Utz into the victorious Saul-underground. An action suitable for a deliberate purpose, but a complete lie because few scholars in the Middle Ages ever doubted the sphericity of the earth.
I was particularly drawn to this topic because the myth of the dichotomy and war between science and religion - an important theme in the nineteenth century and with unfortunate consequences that continue to our time - received its greatest impetus in two books that I have and hold dear because of their firm commitment to rationality (as much as the model of dichotomy in history presented in them is misguided and ultimately harmful), and because of an interesting Darwinian connection with each of their authors. (I have often said that I write these essays as a craftsman rather than as a multidisciplinary scholar, and my business is evolutionary theory.) Russell identifies these two books as the main promulgators of the flat earth myth: John Draper's "History of the Religion and Science Conflict," which appeared for the first time in 1874; and the history of the conflict between science and Christian theology) by Andrew Dixon White who appeared in 1896- (and significantly expanded a small book first written in 1876- called The War of Science.
Draper (1882-1811) was born in England and immigrated in 1832 to the United States, where he eventually became head of the School of Medicine at New York University. His book from 1874 is one of the greatest literary successes of the nineteenth century - fifty editions in fifty years, like the best-selling volume of the International Scientific Series, the most successful popular science publication of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of his book, Draper presents his thesis:
“The history of science is not just a list of isolated discoveries; It is a narrative about a conflict between two forces that claim power, the broad power of the human intellect on the one hand, and the pressures arising from traditional faith and human interests on the other... Faith by its nature cannot be changed, and it is fixed and the position of science is by its nature progressive; Sooner or later, a kind of contrast that cannot be hidden must grow."
Draper elevates the myth of the flat earth to the status of the main example of the obstacle that religion presents to the power of science to create progress: "The visible circular horizon and its immersion in the sea, as well as the gradual appearance and disappearance of ships passing it, cannot but convince wise sailors of the convex shape of the earth. The writings of Mohammedan astronomers and philosophers spread this teaching throughout Western Europe, but, as expected, it encountered the enmity of theologians... Tradition and policy forbade [the papal government] to admit any other form of the earth than the flat one, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures.”
Russell comments on the success of Draper's essay: "The book The History of the Conflict is known to be of enormous importance, because for the first time an influential personality explicitly declared that there was a war between science and religion, and it succeeded as few books have ever succeeded. He established in the minds of the educated the idea that "science" supports freedom and progress against the superstitions and oppression of "religion". His view became conventional wisdom.
Andrew Dixon White (1918-1832) grew up in Syracuse, New York, and in 1865 founded Cornell University, as one of the first prominent secular educational institutions in America. He wrote about the goals shared by him and his main donor, Ezra Cornell: "Our goal was to establish in New York an institution for advanced studies and research, so that science, pure and useful, would have a place equal to the study of literature, ancient and new, and it would be freed as much as possible from rigidity. In particular, we determined that the Mossad would not be under the control of one political party or one religious sect."
White assured that his decision to found a secular university does not carry with it any hostility towards theology, and it is determined solely by his desire to encourage the spirit of religion that is not connected to a particular church: "It certainly never occurred to any of us that in all this we are doing anything that is irreligious or anti-Christian … I was brought up to belong to the Church, I was not already elected to the board of trustees of an ecclesiastical college, and became a professor in another… I derive the greatest pleasure from church architecture, from religious music, and from the more religious forms in poetry. So far from us is the desire to harm Christianity, we both hoped to encourage it, but in our eyes it is not limited to the class matter."
But the conservative clergy's attacks deeply displeased him and fueled his fighting spirit: "The resistance began immediately... from the good Protestant bishop who declared that all professors must be members of one of the Holy Orders, because only the Church was commanded, "Go forth, preach to the people," up to the priests The zealots who published the accusation that... a scholar who at heart is a faithful Christian came to Cornell to indoctrinate heresy... from the furious theologian who traveled from city to city to condemn the "atheistic and pantheistic tendencies" of the proposed curriculum, to the passionate priest who claimed in the audience of a church conference that Agassi, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a devout believer, "preaches Darwinism and atheism" in the new institution."
These experiences brought White to a different view of the "war of science and theology". Draper was a genuine anti-theist, but reserved his hostility almost entirely to the Catholic Church, as he felt that there was room for the coexistence of science and the more liberal forms of Protestantism. White, on the other hand, did not show any hostility to religion. but only for some kind of dogmatism - while his struggles proved to him that the Protestants are capable of setting up obstacles like all the sites. And so he wrote: "As much as I admire the way Draper handled the questions involved in this matter, his view and perspective on history is different from mine. I believed, and I am still convinced, that it is a struggle between science and dogmatic theology." White therefore argued that the victory of science in the war against dogmatism would benefit true religion just as it would benefit science.
He expressed his belief in a paragraph printed in bold letters in the introduction to his book: In all of modern history, the intervention in science for the supposed interests of religion - and it is not important to question how conscientious this intervention was - has always directly harmed both religion and the scientist, and on the other hand, any scientific research that has not been attempted For Seigo - and the question of how dangerous to religion some of his members seemed in the meantime - his result has always been good for both religion and science."
Despite the aforementioned disagreements, White's and Draper's descriptions of the interplay between science and religion in Western culture were not very different. Both tell a story about the alarming progress that science is making all the time. And they both develop the same myths and use them to support their narrative, in which the legend of the flat earth has a prominent place. Regarding the flat earth theory of Cosmas Indicoplastus, for example, White wrote, "Some of the elders of the church testified themselves to strengthen it with new texts and surrounded it with walls of theological explanations; Whereas all the believers saw it as a direct gift from the Almighty."
Another interesting side of similarity is that these two personalities developed their fundamental model of science versus theology in the cross-cutting context of the contemporary struggle that is too easy to see in this light - the war over evolution, especially over Darwin's secular version that relies on natural selection. No matter, certainly not since the days of Galileo, has posed such a challenge to the traditional views on the deep meaning of human existence, and therefore also comes into contact in this way with the field of religious study (see Essay 25). We would not go so far as to say that the Darwinian revolution set in motion this influential nineteenth-century conception of Western culture as a war between two sorting categories called science and religion. Wright made an explicit connection to this in his statement referring to Eggsy (the founder of the museum where I now work, and a visiting lecturer at Cornell). Furthermore, the first chapter of his book deals with the evolution polemic, while the second opens with the myth of the flat earth.
Draper puts the Darwinian cloak on him more tightly. At the end of his introduction, he mentions five episodes in the war between science and religion: the lowering of classical knowledge from its greatness and the decline of darkness; the flourishing of science in early Islam; Galileo's War in the Catholic Church; The Reformation (a positive point for an anti-Catholic like Draper) and the struggle for Darwinism. No one in the world had a more valid personal license for such a view, because Draper was an involuntary witness - one might even say the originator - of the most famous incident in the open struggle between Drorinism and the Hertian view. We have all heard the famous story about Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley arguing at the meeting of the British Society in 1860 - (more details about this incident can be found in Essay 26 in my earlier book Hail to the Brontosaurus).
But few people know that their verbal fireworks were not part of the meeting's agenda, and that on the agenda was a lecture by the same Dr. Draper on "intellectual developments in Europe discussed in connection with Mr. Darwin's views." (I love surprising cases like this. Sociologists say you can touch any person no more than six degrees of separation, given the density of the human network. But the thought of Draper receiving his first degree within inches of Hooker, Huxley Wilberforce, can only be seen as a godsend for the Merchant Essay in contexts.)
This essay discusses the double myth found in the history of our bad habit of misclassification: first, the legend of the flat earth as the basis of the biased order that we introduce in Western culture as a story of redemption that continues from the classical period, to the Dark Ages, to the Middle Ages and to the Renaissance; And secondly, the invention of the myth of the flat earth to support a false dichotomization of the history of Western culture as another story of progress, a war between the victorious science and religion.
These errors would not upset me if they only led to a mistaken view of the past without practical results in relation to our modern world. But the orphaning of the war between science and religion remains too topical, and it continues to stop the proper connection and complementarity between two institutions that are different and the most important in human life. How can a war be waged between two essential subjects, each of which has its own path - science as an enterprise dedicated to discovering and explaining the factual basis of the world through experience, and religion as an examination of morals and values?
I understand, of course, that this territorial separation is a modern decision - and the various past disputes involved a conflict that resulted in an adjustment of the borders between them. In the end, when science was weak or almost non-existent, religion spread its wings also in areas that are now rightfully considered part of the realm of knowledge of the natural sciences. But should we blame religion for this over-expansion? As thinking beings, we feel inwardly the necessity to reflect on the great issues of man's origin and his relationship with the earth and with other beings: we have no alternative to ignorance. If science once had no concept of these things, they fell, by default, albeit inconveniently and illegally, into the domain of religion. No one willingly gives up his lot, and the late expansion of science into the territory which is rightfully his and which was temporarily subject to the conquest of religion, indeed provoked some vigilante quarrels and ominous wars. These tensions were even exacerbated due to special circumstances dependent on history - including the decisive and courageous materialism of Darwin's personal theory, and the tenure (at that time) of one of the most fascinating enigmatic figures in the nineteenth century: the strong, resentful Pope, whose conservatism was increasing and increasing, Pio Nuno ( Pius IX).
But these adjustments, painful as they were, are not grounds for painting a simplistic picture of history as an ongoing war between science and theology. The exposure of the myth of the flat earth should teach us about the error of such a view and help us recognize the complexity of the interrelationships between these institutions. Irrationality and dogmatism are always the enemies of science, but they are also not true friends of religion. Scientific knowledge has always helped more generous views of religions - just as the preservation of classical knowledge about the shape of the earth among scholars from the church helped the religious need for accurate tablets, for example.
I began this essay with a story about the use made by the venerable De in cosmology in establishing the calendar according to which the date of Easter was determined. I will end with another story cast in the same mold - and another example of the interesting and complex relationship between science and religion. Two days before my visit to the tomb of the venerable Bede in Durham, I was amazed at the sight of an elaborate astronomical device prominently displayed in the Church of Saint Sulpice in Paris. Every day, exactly at noon, the sunlight penetrates through a small hole in the window located at the top of the south wing, and illuminates a copper strip that lies on the longitudinal line of the floor of the wing and ends in an obelisk standing on a ball near the north wall.
The copper strip and the obelisk are placed so that the long and short days of the year and the equinoxes can be accurately determined, according to the position of the noonday light. Why would such a scientific facility be found inside a church? The inscription on the obelisk gives the answer in Latin: "To determine the date of Easter". This determination requires the calculation of the exact date of the vernal equinox. It is interesting, as another example of the complex relationship between science and religion, that Saint Sulpice was made the hall of humanism during the French Revolution, and most of the statues and inlaid windows with religious significance were smashed. The names of the kings and princes, once engraved on the obelisk, were completely obliterated, but these enthusiastic revolutionaries preserved the beautiful blue marble podium of the choir, because a copper longitudinal line ran through it and they did not want to damage a scientific facility.
I would not choose to live in any other period but in our time; The progress in medicine alone, and as a result the survival of children who have access to it, negates any temptation to exchange with the past. But we won't be able to understand history if we build on the past derogatory things based on our bad habits in dividing the sequence of time into sections whose value increases as we get closer to the present. These errors are found in the extensive paleontological history of life, just as they are found in the marginal chronology of man's time. I cringe every time I hear that this failed business, or this defeated group, has become a dinosaur in their submission to the front. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not of insult. Dinosaurs ruled for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is not yet a million years old, and its chances of a long geological life are limited.
Respect the past as its value. New York City is home to the second largest cathedral south of Durham. Just as Derham used amusing Latin rhymes to honor her venerable Bede, so New York presents a rhyme to demonstrate the principle of honoring the past in the service of understanding. On the wall of the student dormitory is written a rhyme in Latin that means: "Just as the rose is the flower of flowers, so this house is the house of houses."
