St. Augustine on the Authority of Science

 

     Augustine of Hippo (354-430), the most influential Christian writer outside of the New Testament, is cited (with different emphases) by theologians East and West, Catholic and Protestant. His mother was a Christian, but the adult Augustine saw the teachings of the Persian prophet Mani as answering Christianity's failure to explain evil as well as the crude morality and the primitive God of the Old Testament. Manichaeans were dualists who bracketed evil as the work of a demiurge, the false god of the Old Testament who had trapped souls of light in a dark world of matter while the true god was a being of spiritual light. 

     For years, Augustine was repelled by the crudity of Hebrew scriptures revered by orthodox Christians. Reading that man was made in God’s image, he demanded, “Does God have hair and fingernails?” Grosser organs are implicit. Seeing polygamy and human sacrifice in the Pentateuch, he rejected a lawgiver less moral than a decent 4th-century Roman. Augustine, an eminent rhetorician who composed panegyrics to the Emperor in the capital, scorned the scriptures of Christianity as stylistically crude and illogical, inferior to the sophisticated myths of Mani.

     Interestingly, Augustine’s break with Manichaeism began with a conflict between religion and science. Mani described an elaborate system of astronomy (we’d call it astrology today), but Augustine saw that, in contrast to pagan astronomers who predicted “the eclipses of the sun and moon” (Confessions 5.4.6), Mani’s system predicted nothing. Scientific astronomy described verifiable fact. Therefore, as far as Mani contradicted it, he was wrong. Augustine parses this carefully. People of true faith may hold false opinions on subjects outside of that faith, such as astronomy, but Mani's mistake was mingling bogus science with the path to salvation as if they belonged together. Mani “thinks that his secular knowledge pertains to the essence of the doctrine of piety, or ventures to assert dogmatic opinions in matters in which he is ignorant—there lies the injury” (5.5.9). If a teacher claims as revealed truth statements that are obviously false because they contradict observation, there's no reason to trust his other revelations. Caught in a lie, he forfeits trust. 

     For Augustine, just as faith without works is dead, so is faith without evidence. Only a fool believes any old thing at random. When he was baptized in his thirties, Augustine had for years been a seeker and scholar. For him, as for nearly all his contemporaries, the existence of a supreme being was axiomatic. But, as he explains in the Confessions, he finally accepted orthodox Christianity because it didn’t contradict science, but also because he had learned to read the Old Testament as allegory and because neoplatonist philosophers—pagans putatively guided solely by the light of reason—had reached similar conclusions, so Christianity was reasonable. The philosophy of Plotinus supported the Gospel of John. For Augustine, only revelations broadly in harmony with the observable universe and natural reason were worthy of faith.

     Inspired religious writers embed their teachings in the world around them. Presumably, they describe experiences transcending those of ordinary people and, therefore, beyond what literal language can express. Therefore, much of their wording is metaphorical—gesturing offstage, as I’ve said before--but language is entangled with ordinary life. The lived-in world of observation and reason—i.e. science or scientia (Latin for “knowledge”)—is the shared background of prophet and disciple. Sometimes, as in John’s apocalypse, allegory encodes almost the entire message, but this is rare. More common are teachings that supplement rather than contradict secular experience. It's the business of religion to go beyond science and address the transcendent—morals and spiritual experiences—but prophets seldom intentionally contradict science. They rather assume and extend scientia into transcendence.

     So why the conflict between science and religion? It stems, I think, with the fact that teachings of religion survive the scientific revolutions described by Thomas S. Kuhn--the paradigm shifts that radically change our understanding of the physical world. Outdated secular knowledge that does not pertain to the essence of the doctrine of piety (to paraphrase Augustine’s critique of Mani) remains entangled with the the doctrine itself, and the faithful fail to distinguish between the two. Discredited science and history, paradigms once accepted as secular fact, are so intermingled with revelation that uncritical believers confuse them with sacred message. 

     When science changes—when the earth, for instance, is known to be billions of years old and not the stationary axis of the universe—this is conflict between scientific paradigms in which the winner becomes obvious. The outcome should be irrelevant to religion unless you expect Moses to have have known current science. The idea is absurd. If God had somehow revealed 21st-century physics to Biblical writers—or, better yet, 31st-century physics, which even we might not recognize—and they had written it into Genesis, their readers would have been confused. Hebrew terms for Big Bang, Black Hole, and the Copenhagen Effect would have been edited from the scrolls as errors. It is an open question whether religious truth, in its essence, changes with the passage of time, but humanity's understanding of the physical world certainly does—daily erosion climaxing in landslides of scientific and ideological revolutions that sweep away the paradigms of our ancestors. So interpretations of religious texts, if they are to continue making sense, must change to accommodate for this. Like Alice, exegesis must run to stand still.

     A lot of the bad science and history tangled up with religious writing still resist untangling. A 2004 poll found that 60% of Americans believe the Biblical story of Noah flood actually happened, that the whole globe was submerged to its mountain peaks barely six thousand years ago and Noah’s family were the sole survivors. This fanciful tale, which echoes an episode in the Epic of Gilgamesh written a thousand years earlier, was not fully falsifiable until the 20th century, but it makes claims that now contradict geology, anthropology, geography, biology, archeology, and common sense. Where did the water come from to rise a mile above sea level, the height of Mount Ararat? What about species of land animals unique to Australia, New Zealand, America, and all the sea islands? How did they trek two-by-two to Noah’s house? And then find their way back home? Why do archeologists and geneticists track uninterrupted migrations of people worldwide all through this period?

     Maybe the grossest quibble is the bugs, nearly all of which should have been killed off by a one-year mile-high flood. Obviously, they had two-by-two berths on the ark. There are over 350,000 known species of beetles and many more yet to be discovered, calling for an estimated million beetle berths sharing steerage with at least 70,000 spiders and 6,000 snakes (2,400 of those venomous)—a weighty and teeming menagerie even before the elephants, rhinos, hippos, and wildebeests boarded. And what did all the carnivores eat through ten months at sea (not to speak of the years until beasts reproduced enough for them to subsist on their offspring)? And waste removal? After ten months at sea, the gopher wood would be smeared with more than pitch. 

     The story is a self-exploding fable, a Babylonian one as it turns out, likely imported by Hebrew priests from the Babylonian captivity (the ark’s dimensions suggest the restored temple), and it seems to have originally been a myth of feuding gods, accepted as history but then revised in the light of monotheism. When the flood story was historic fact—internationally shared knowledge or scientia—the point in retelling it would be to demonstrate how Yahweh worked through Jewish history. “If there’s just one god, Levi, how the hell do you explain the flood?” But many Americans still swallow the the past-its-sell-date chaff with the wheat.

     The scientific revolution most disruptive to Christian theology was the shift from a geocentric universe to a solar system in a universe with no center. It was for good cause, theologically speaking, that the Inquisition arrested Galileo in 1633 and forbade him to publish after he confirmed the heliocentric solar system. Almost a century earlier,  Copernicus, for whom the revolution is named, had noticed that planetary movements were best modeled as concentric orbits around the sun, and this was accepted by professional astronomers, flying under the theological radar as only a method of calculation, not a literal description. The earth was still assumed to be the fixed axis of seven concentric crystalline spheres on which the “planets”—including the sun and moon—were hung like so many lamps. That’s how they stayed up. But, with a telescope little better than a toy today, Galileo saw (among other anomalies) moons orbiting Jupiter that would shatter any sphere the planet was attached to. Kepler improved Copernicus’ system with elliptical orbits, and Newton’s Principia, alongside the assumption of a frictionless vacuum, supplanted the crystalline spheres with laws of motion. The evidence became overwhelming. Earth, no longer the axis of God’s universe, was demoted to a rock orbiting a dwarf star—ultimately to an infinitesimal speck of dust on the scale of a universe expanding for billions of light years in every direction.

     The enormity of the Copernican revolution was brought home to me last year when I played Reverend Peters in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. In one scene, Peters tells Christopher, a math savant on the spectrum, that his mother is in heaven, and the boy asks, “Where in the universe is heaven?” Peters says that heaven isn’t really in our universe, but Christopher notes that the candidates for places outside the universe are Black Holes and they can’t be where Heaven is because, if rocket ships were launching all the dead into black holes, we’d notice. Reverend Peters, glancing at his watch, suggests that they talk later. Today, there’s no obvious answer to Christopher’s question. It’s common to suggest that heaven and hell are states of the soul after death, corresponding to union with or separation from God, but then where are those souls? God may be omnipresent, but a finite soul’s being everywhere sounds a lot like its being nowhere, so a non-local heaven opens up an existential abyss. But this is, in fact, a historically new enigma. 

     Christians before Galileo, unlike Reverend Peters, "knew" that Heaven was up there, in the Empyrean, an outer sphere beyond the stars—the dwelling-place of God and inhabited by eternal beings of pure light. It was the destination of Dante’s pilgrim in The Divine Comedy, a mappable locale at the edge of the spherical cosmos. As a created place, Heaven existed as part of (or at least contiguous to) the material world and was made up of fire, ether, or light—sublime, eternal material perhaps, but still material. Heaven was a physical place. So there was nothing necessarily figurative about saying that Elijah was lifted up to Heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11) or that Jesus was lifted into a cloud (Acts 1:9) and would return on a cloud (Matthew 26:64). For cosmologists before Galileo, Heaven was a concrete location above the clouds.

     Likewise, for most of its history, Hell was real estate in the opposite direction. This goes back as far as the Egyptian sun god who sailed through the underworld every night to rise in the east. This flat-earth cosmology easily adapted by wrapping a sphere around Hades after the Greeks understood that the earth was round. The underworld, what the ancient Hebrews called Sheol, was a dim cavern where the dead lingered vaguely as ghosts or memories regardless of how they had lived. Samuel (who after his death would have been a saint in Heaven if such an honor had existed in his day) is “a ghostly figure coming up out of the earth” when Saul summons him. Samuel demands, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” (1 Samuel 28:13-15). This scene recalls longer encounters by Odysseus at a pit in the earth (Odyssey, Book 11), and in the Aeneid (Book 6), where the hero enters Hades through “a deep stony cave, huge and gaping wide” (twin to the cave through which Virgil leads Dante’s pilgrim into Hell). 

     All over the ancient world, caves and lakes were considered entrances into Hades where Pluto ruled over the dead, and Christianity kept this geology, only changing the terminology to Hell and Satan and relocating the Christian dead upstairs. Belief in a subterranean Hell persisted through most of the Christian era, not only in Dante, but, for instance, in tradition that Mount Etna in Sicily was a gate of Hell. Like Heaven above the clouds, Hell under the dirt still inflames popular imagination, but nobody with a shred of geology believes in it any more. What was meant as gritty fact is now reconstructed metaphorically—understanding up as good, down as bad. It's literal sense has gone up in steam and condensed on a diaphanous moral plane.

     According to a Gallup poll reported in April 2019, barely half of American adults are church members, down from 70% in 1999, and membership is almost ten points lower among under-40s. Churches are aging toward obsolescence. This slide in organized Christian practice—and presumably in traditional belief—has gone farther in Western Europe, where as few as 20% of self-identified Christians attend church (Pew Research Center, May 29, 2018). I attribute this slide in part to the fact that traditional doctrines that were once reasonable have devolved into nonsense—not because the underlying life of the spirit has changed, but because science, custom, and language have shifted under it. The eternal, as far as it can be expressed, cannot inhere in the changeable. If living religion is stored too long in old wine skins, they will burst (Luke 5:37). Unless we disentangle religion from outdated science—set that science aside or read it figuratively—then people of Augustine’s education and honesty must reject our Christianity for the same reason that he did Manichaeism in 386, because antique “secular knowledge” has been mingled with “the essence of the doctrine of piety” (Confessions, 5.5.9).