Science and faith

The teaching

As the record of science set against the claim teaches it.

The claim

The claim in its full form is that modern science is not an honest search but a deception, built by people who wanted to drive God out of the world. It takes three main shapes: that the earth is flat and fixed, as some read the Bible, and its curve and motion were invented to discredit scripture; that the earth is young and the evidence of its age is faked; and that evolution is a lie kept alive by scientists who know better. Freemasons, Jesuits, atheists or a space agency are named as the authors, depending on the teller.

The flat earth and the canal

Its modern teller is Samuel Rowbotham, who from 1849 lectured in England as Parallax on what he called zetetic astronomy, holding that the earth is a flat disc with the North Pole at its centre and a wall of ice around its rim, and that the scriptures teach it. He claimed to have shown on a long straight canal in the fens, the Bedford Level, that water does not curve. In 1870 a follower, John Hampden, wagered five hundred pounds that no one could prove the curve there. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace took the bet, set marks at equal heights above the water along six miles of the canal, and showed the middle one standing higher than the line between the ends, as a curved surface requires. Hampden refused to accept it and pursued Wallace with abuse for years. The idea passed to a church at Zion, Illinois, in the 1920s, to a Flat Earth Society founded in England in 1956, and in 2014 and 2015 to online videos that carried it to millions.

The verses it reads this way, the four corners of the earth and the world that cannot be moved, speak in the language of appearance, as everyone still speaks of the sun rising. The facts against it are within anyone's reach. In the third century before Christ, Eratosthenes measured the size of the earth from the different shadows cast at noon in two Egyptian cities. In an eclipse of the moon the earth's shadow is always round. Travellers going south see new stars rise, the Southern Cross among them, and lose the Pole Star. Ships sink hull first below the horizon, and a sunset can be watched twice, lying down and then standing up. Aircraft fly direct routes across the southern ocean, between Australia and Chile or South Africa, that no flat map can hold, and the space agencies of rival nations all photograph the same curved earth.

The young earth and the charge of fraud

Many believers read the days of Genesis as days of twenty-four hours, and hold in good faith that the earth is some thousands of years old. That is a reading of scripture. The conspiracy claim is something else: that geologists and physicists know the earth is young and fake their dates to hide it. It grew out of the young earth movement of the twentieth century, whose founding books, the Adventist George McCready Price's New Geology of 1923 and The Genesis Flood of 1961 by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, charged geology with reasoning in a circle and read the rocks as the work of Noah's flood; the popular charge of deliberate fraud goes further than they did.

The age of the earth is not one measurement but many that agree. Rocks and meteorites are dated by independent radioactive clocks, uranium to lead, potassium to argon, rubidium to strontium, each decaying at its own measured rate; in 1956 Clair Patterson dated the meteorites, and with them the earth, at about four and a half billion years, and later work has held to it. Shorter clocks overlap with one another: tree rings counted year by year back some twelve thousand years, layers of ice in Antarctic cores going back eight hundred thousand years, yearly layers of mud on lake beds. A fraud would have to bind thousands of people in rival countries and every one of these methods at once.

And the old earth was not an unbeliever's idea. Clergymen built much of early geology: William Buckland, later Dean of Westminster, and Adam Sedgwick, an Anglican priest and professor at Cambridge, read an old earth from the rocks themselves before Darwin wrote, and the Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers proposed in 1814 a way of reading Genesis that made room for it.

Evolution as a plot

The third shape says that evolution is a fraud kept up to destroy faith, and adds a story to prove it: that Darwin renounced it on his deathbed. The story was told in 1915 by an evangelist, Lady Hope, and Darwin's daughter Henrietta, who was with him at the end, denied it in print in 1922. What the claim calls a fraud rests on independent lines that agree. Fossils can be predicted: a team searched rocks of the right age in the Canadian Arctic for a creature between fish and land animal, and in 2004 found Tiktaalik. The DNA of living things falls into the same family tree the fossils show. And change is seen directly, in bacteria that become resistant to drugs, or the laboratory population of E. coli reported in 2008 to have evolved the ability to feed on citrate.

Many believers have accepted it. Asa Gray, Darwin's friend and his champion in America, was a devout Christian; Theodosius Dobzhansky, an Orthodox Christian, wrote that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution; Francis Collins, an evangelical, led the project that read the human genome. Pope Pius XII allowed in 1950 that the origin of the human body by evolution was open to study, and John Paul II said in 1996 that evolution was more than a hypothesis.

The theologians' own rule

The churches themselves long ago warned against using scripture as a textbook of nature. Augustine wrote that it is a shameful and dangerous thing for a Christian to talk nonsense about the earth and the heavens before an unbeliever who knows better, for it brings scripture into contempt. Thomas Aquinas took it as plain that the earth is round, and gave it as his example of a truth proved by two sciences in two ways, by the astronomer through mathematics and by the natural philosopher through matter. Galileo, defending himself, quoted a saying he had from Cardinal Baronius: that the Holy Spirit means to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

Fraud, and who catches it

Science has had its frauds, and the way they end answers the claim. Piltdown Man, a skull and jaw dug up in Sussex in 1912 and hailed as a missing link, troubled anatomists for decades because it fitted nothing else that was found. In 1953 scientists at the British Museum and at Oxford showed by new tests that it was the skull of a modern human and the jaw of an orangutan, stained and filed. The fraud was exposed by science, as its frauds usually are, because each scientist's work tests the work before it.

When the claim names a people

One form of the charge named a people. In Germany in the 1920s and 1930s two winners of the Nobel prize, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, campaigned against relativity and the new physics as Jewish physics, a fraud by Jews against German science, and under the Nazi state Jewish scientists were driven from their posts. It was an antisemitic smear and nothing else. Relativity had been tested by observation, first by the British expeditions that measured starlight bending around the sun in the eclipse of 1919, and it is tested every day: the clocks on navigation satellites must be corrected for it, or the positions on every phone would drift by kilometres a day.