Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Having grown up in the tamed, rolling hills of lowland Germany, Luther was unaccus-
tomed to and intimidated by alpine topography. To his eye, the ragged nature of mountains
mirrored mankind's spiritual deterioration. Mankind had been in decline since the chaos of
the Flood resurfaced the world and left mountains tarnishing the face of creation.
Luther's fellow reformer John Calvin also endorsed a literal interpretation of the biblical
flood but did not fill in the kind of detail that Luther offered up. Noting a lack of consensus
on such matters, Calvin did not offer fossils as evidence of a global flood. In contrast to
Luther, he maintained that after the Flood the world remained in roughly its former state.
Rather than a catastrophic reshuffling of the physical world, Calvin's version of Noah's
Flood served as a quiet reset button.
Unlike Luther, Calvin lived much of his life in and around the Swiss Alps. He loved
nature and could not believe God would create a world that was not beautifully rugged.
Neither could he believe that God would curse the world itself on account of humanity's
sins. Just as reason elevated men above beasts, nature was a lens through which to behold
God. And if Earth did not share in God's curse, then how could mountains have been cre-
ated during Noah's Flood?
These two traditions that trace back to the roots of the Protestant church essentially stake
out different ways of dealing with the relationship between science and religion. The Prot-
estant followers of Calvin encouraged study of the natural world in seeking to understand
the universe and humanity's role in it, an approach paralleled in the Jesuit tradition of Cath-
olic scholarship in natural philosophy. While Calvin's accommodating views fostered a
spirit of scientific inquiry, Luther's cultivation of more literal followers led to a less flex-
ible understanding of the natural world. Although the two great reformers differed on how
to interpret Noah's Flood, they both thought Nicolaus Copernicus heretical to challenge the
conventional view that the Sun circled us.
Copernicus announced his radical theory that we circled the Sun as a visiting scholar in
Rome around 1500. At first he cast the idea as an intellectual curiosity, a novelty to exercise
the mind. Later, after decades contemplating the matter, he became convinced that this was
indeed how the world worked. And although Pope Clement VII reacted favorably to the
idea in the gardens of the Vatican, Copernicus returned to his hometown in Poland rather
than tangle with the papal censors in Rome when he dedicated his
On the Revolutions of
