God did not give us the Bible to satisfy our curiosity about nature. He gave us another book for that, the one described in Psalm 19:1: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” In the 16th century, a friend of Galileo put it this way: “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”
But what if the two books disagree? What strategies can be used to settle their difference? Are certain disciplines in a privileged position to adjudicate between knowledge claims or are all on equal grounds? These questions were thrust to the fore after the publication of Nicholas Copernicus’ On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. Could the sun be at rest if Joshua commanded it to stand still?
Until recently, the ensuing discussion was interpreted in the light of the warfare model of science and religion advocated by two 19th-century American historians, John Henry Draper and Andrew Dickson White, in works with the resounding titles of A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science and History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. For White in particular, the opposition to Copernicanism was overwhelming evidence of the incompatibility of Christian theology with science. Reliance on authoritative texts and ecclesiastical control could only produce a mindset that precluded a genuine knowledge of nature. War between science and religion was not only inevitable, it was a “sacred” duty for anyone who loved truth.
In the post-World War II growth of the history of science, the situation was re-examined in terms of the categories that were used at the time of the Scientific Revolution rather than those that were imposed by the assumption that a battlefield was being described. It soon became apparent that the pioneers of the new science, with hardly an exception, believed that God had written two books—and that it would be foolhardy to ignore either of them. The issue was not which book to read but how to understand the different languages in which they were written. According to Galileo, “philosophy” (by which he meant “natural philosophy”)
is written in that grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is not humanly possible to comprehend a single word.
But what about the language of Scripture? Although it is written in ordinary language, it had long been recognized that it must sometimes be interpreted in a non-literal way. This suggested that a more appropriate model to understand the relationship between science and religion was that of a debate (admittedly a very passionate one) over the literal vs. the nonliteral meaning of Scripture. Some wanted to read the biblical passages that mention the motion of the sun as offering a straightforward account of the way things are, while others considered them as accommodated speech—that is, instances of everyday language where the delivery of our senses rather than physical laws governs the way things are described. Since no one took the words “God hears” or similar anthropomorphic descriptions as implying that God has a body, might this not be extended to passages where physics rather than ethics is concerned?
This literal vs. nonliteral model had the considerable advantage of emphasizing that discrepancies between what the Book of Nature teaches and what the Bible appears to say were not settled by two warring factions. It was a real debate, and it went on in the minds of the scientists themselves. It was not imposed from the outside. It answered a genuine need to come to terms with the fact that the two books were written by the same Author, who clearly intended them to be complementary.
Kenneth J. Howell, who is professor of religious studies and director of the John Henry Newman Institute of Catholic Thought at the Universilty of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, argues in God’s Two Books that we must take a further step. The literal vs. nonliteral model is too simplistic and, more seriously, it lumps a wide variety of players into two distinct camps.
The sensus literalis had been discussed by Saint Augustine in his De Doctrina Christiana, which was the most influential manual of hermeneutical theory and practice for many centuries. Augustine did not draw a simple distinction between the literal and the nonliteral sense but often glossed the sensus literalis as sensus historicus to stress that the meaning intended by the biblical author should be interpreted according to the rules of grammar and the facts of history as they were known at the time.
The notion of the author’s intention became central to subsequent hermeneutical theory, and this raised the question of how to discern what the divine author intended behind the human words. Ambrose of Milan, Augustine’s mentor, had read the first chapter of Genesis as a journalistic account of what actually happened during the first six natural days. Augustine held a more subtle view and maintained that the language of Genesis was adapted to the weak understanding of humans, who could not easily grasp that the totality of the material world was created in an instant of time at the beginning. For Augustine, there is an underlying inscrutability of the created order, and all the interpreters of Genesis can do is offer plausible readings of the text. What is important is to show what interpretations are not acceptable—for instance, the error of portraying God as an incompetent laborer who needed six days to finish his job.
Historians have attended too exclusively to the Galileo affair, a tree with endless ramifications, to see the forest as a whole. The contribution of scientists who belonged to the Protestant Reformation has not received the attention it deserves, and it is one of the great merits of this book to show how rich and varied it was. Thus, instead of focusing exclusively on the effects of the new astronomy on biblical hermeneutics, Howell explores the role biblical interpretation played in the emerging cosmologies. As a model for this exercise he proposes convergent realism, an approach that suggests that the story is best told not as an instance of warfare between science and religion or opposition between fundamentalists and nonliteralists, but as the gradual recognition that the status of science had changed.
It is important to realize that the Protestant editor of Copernicus’ book, Andreas Osiander, as well as the Catholic cardinal, Robert Bellarmin, still relied on the ancient view that astronomy had fulfilled its task when it properly predicted the motion of celestial objects. It was assumed that it did not and could not explain how celestial bodies actually move. Until Johann Kepler, no astronomer sought the physical cause of planetary movements. We miss something crucial if we do not recognize the transformation that occurred in the goals of astronomy from merely computing where the planets can be observed in the sky to accounting for the real cosmic system. Without the adoption of a realistic goal for astronomy, the question of the moving Earth would not have created such a stir. This added a theological dimension to astronomy, and Kepler speaks of portraying the glory of God by demonstrating the grandeur and precision of the celestial clockwork.
The Lutheran Christoph Rothmann took the bold step of asserting that astronomy was capable, alone, to yield the true system of the universe, but he was in a small minority. Kepler and the Dane Tycho Brahe saw the need of a physical explanation of the mathematical elegance with which God had endowed the world, and they believed that theology had a positive role to play in the elaboration of a comprehensive world system. Indeed, Kepler saw himself as an exegete of nature, a theologian whose task lay in opening up the Book of Nature. Howell offers a subtle and persuasive analysis of this great thinker, who hoped that the study of the celestial harmonies in the Book of Nature could serve as a model for a more harmonious reading by the Book of Scripture.
Both Catholic and Protestant astronomers believed that the universe embodies divine presence and meaning, and the division between Catholics and Protestants does not correspond to the division between adherents to the older and the new orders in science. The Lutherans and the Reformed were as much at variance among themselves over the new astronomy as they were from Catholics over strictly theological issues such as the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Nonetheless, there are interesting differences in outlook that stem from the spirit in which individual reading of the Bible was considered.
Copernicanism heralded a great change in the way people read the Book of Nature, and it stimulated a vigorous debate on how to read the Book of Scripture in a scientific age. Howell’s assessment of hermeneutical strategies that cross the Catholic-Protestant divide is a major contribution to both the history of science and the history of theology, but it is not only relevant to an understanding of the past. His model of convergent realism holds out the promise of gaining a better insight into more recent tensions between science and religion. The Author of the two books would surely be glad to know that they can be read with pleasure and profit by every human being who uses two kinds of lenses or (without stressing the metaphor unduly) is willing to put on Howell’s bifocals.
William R. Shea is professor of the history of science at the University of Strasbourg. In the spring he will begin his appointment to the Galilean Chair of History of Science at the University of Padua.
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
