Rocks of Ages Read Free Page A

Gordium, the capital of Phrygia, he encountered a famous chariot, lashed to a pole with a knot of astonishing complexity. He who could untie the knot would conquer all Asia. So Alexander, using raw power to circumvent the rules of the game, took his sword and severed the knot clean through. Some call it boldness; I, and apparently Burnet as well, call it anti-intellectualism.) Burnet wrote:
    They say in short, that God Almighty created waters on purpose to make the deluge, and then annihilated them again when the deluge was to cease; and this, in a few words, is the wholeaccount of the business. This is to cut the knot when we cannot loose it.
    Instead, Burnet devised a wonderfully wacky theory about a perfectly spherical original earth with a smooth and solid crust of land covering a layer of water below (the natural and eventual source of Noah’s flood). This crust gradually dries and cracks; waters rise through the cracks and form clouds; the rains arrive and seal the cracks; the pressure of water rising from below finally bursts through the crust, causing the deluge and producing the earth’s present rough topography. Wacky indeed, but fully rendered by natural law, and therefore testable and subject to disproof under the magisterium of science. Indeed, we have tested Burnet’s ideas, found them both false and bizarre, and expunged his name from our pantheon of scientific heroes. But if he had simply advocated a divine creation of water, such a conventional and nonoperational account could never have inspired Buffon, Vico, and a host of other scholars.
    Burnet followed the common view of a remarkable group of men, devout theists all, who set the foundations of modern science in late-seventeenth-century Britain—including Newton, Halley, Boyle, Hooke, Ray, and Burnet himself. Invoking a convenient trope of English vocabulary, these scientists argued that God would permit no contradiction between his
words
(asrecorded in scripture) and his
works
(the natural world). This principle, in itself, provides no rationale for science, and could even contradict my central claim for science and religion as distinct magisteria—for if works (the natural world) must conform to words (the scriptural text), then doesn’t science become conflated with, constrained by, and subservient to religion? Yes, under one possible interpretation, but not as these men defined the concept. (Always look to nuance and actual utility, not to a first impression about an ambiguous phrase.) God had indeed created nature at some inception beyond the grasp of science; but he also established invariant laws to run the universe without interference forever after. (Surely omnipotence must operate by such a principle of perfection, and not by frequent subsequent correction, i.e., by special miracle, to fix some unanticipated bungle or wrinkle—to make extra water, for example, when human sin required punishment.)
    Thus, nature works by invariant laws subject to scientific explanation. The natural world cannot contradict scripture (for God, as author of both, cannot speak against himself). So—and now we come to the key point—if some contradiction seems to emerge between a well-validated scientific result and a conventional reading of scripture, then we had better reconsider our exegesis, for the natural world does not lie, but words can convey many meanings, some allegorical ormetaphorical. (If science clearly indicates an ancient world, then the “days” of creation must represent periods longer than twenty-four hours.) In this crucial sense, the magisteria become separate, and science holds sway over the factual character of the natural world. A scientist may be pious and devout—as all these men were, with utmost sincerity—and still hold a conception of God (as an imperial clockwinder at time’s beginning in this version of NOMA) that leaves science entirely free in its own proper magisterium.
    I choose Thomas Burnet to illustrate this central