Medieval Faith and Fossils

One of the sad products of contemporary post-Enlightenment thinking is the failure to recognise just how scientifically sophisticated the Middle Ages could actually be. In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages are simply a space between the glories of ancient Greek rationalism and philosophy and their rediscovery in the Renaissance, which is when science got back on its feet. Between those two points, so the popular wisdom goes, science was dead, suppressed by Christian theology and the tyranny of the Church. You can’t imagine Adam Hart-Davis of the BBC’s What the Romans/ Stuarts/Victorians/ Aztecs/Islam/ Chinese/ Did For Us ever doing a comparable series on what the Medieval’s actually did for us.

Yet despite of the loss of much Classical learning in the military chaos of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages was a time of intellectual adventure and scientific advancement, and medieval scientific theories can strike the modern reader as surprisingly modern.

Take the issue of fossils, for example. The contemporary scientific attitude which sees the emergence of Darwinism as the acme of the scientific investigation of the emergence of terrestrial life can lead to an attitude which looks down on the Medievals as so ignorant, due to their acceptance of the Biblical account of the Earth’s creation that they had no idea about geology and fossils until Lyell and co. in the late 18th and early 19th centuries put them right. It’s an attitude that’s profoundly, utterly wrong.

The great Muslim philosopher Avicenna had some very sophisticated ideas about geology and fossil formation, and his book De Mineralibus was immensely influential when translated into Latin. Avicenna and his Christian followers considered that the world had indeed been covered by water, as suggested by some ancient Greek philosophers, but also that dry land and mountains had emerged through the deposition of sediments and the eruption of submarine earthquakes. The mud thus raised hardened into rock through the action of the sun’s heat and the ‘congelation’ of water, in the same way that stalactites and stalagmites were formed, though he also believed that some form of precipitation was also brought about by heat and there was an unknown ‘mineralising virtue’ which caused the clay to petrify. Fossils were merely the plants and animals caught in this mud.

Avicenna’s ideas were taken up and extended by Albertus Magnus in his De Mineralibus et Rebus Metallicis of c.1260., in which he states:

‘There is no-one who is not astonished to find stones which, both externally and internally, bear th eimpressions of animals. Externally they show their outline and when they are broken open there is found the shape of the internal parts of these animals. Avicenna teaches us that the cause of this phenomenon is that animals can be entirely transformed into stones and particualrly into salt stones. Just as earth and water are the usual matter of stones, he says, so animals can become the matter of certain stones. . If the bodies fo these animals are in places where a mineralising power (vis lapdidficativa) is being exhaled, they are reduced to their elements and are seized by the qualities peculair to those places. The elements which teh bodies of these animals contained are transormed into the element which is the dominant element in them: that is the terrestrial element mixed with the acqueous element; then the mineralising power converts the terrestrial element into stone. The different external and internal parts of the animal keep the shape which they had beforehand. ‘

(De Mineralibus et Rebus Metallicis, book 1, tract 2, chapter 8, quoted in A.C. Crombie Augustine to Galileo: Science in the Middle Ages – Vol.1 5th-13th Century (London, Mercury Books 1952) p. 125).

Such fossils and their petrified remains could clearly be found around some of the world’s great cities, like Paris:

‘Evidence of this is that parts of aquatic animals and perhaps of naval gear are found in rock in hollows on mountains, which water no doubt deposite there enveloped in sticky mud, and which were precipitated by the coldness and dryness of the stone from petrifying completely. Very striking evidence of this kind is found in the stone of Paris, in which one very often meets round shells the shape of the moon.’ (Crombie, op. cit., p. 126, quoting De Causis Proprietatum Elementorum, book 2, tract 3, chapter 5).

Despite being based on the theory of the four elements, and seeing the process of petrification as far more rapid than modern geologists consider, the theory of fossilisation outlined there is surprisingly modern.

This could lead to some surprisingly rational, even scientific interpretations of the Genesis account of the Creation. Thierry of Chartres, who died c. 1155, in his De Septem Diebus et Sex Operum Distinctionibus, on the account of the Creation in seven days in Genesis, declared that to correctly understand the account of creation one needed a training in the quadrivium, the ancient and medieval school syllabus, and particularly mathematics, which provided the basis for all rational explanations of the universe. Thierry believed that in the beginning, God created space or chaos and the four elements. Some of the water was vapourised by fire to create the firmament above the Earth from the waters under the Earth. The reduction in water covering the Earth produced dry land, and the interaction of the Earth’s moisture and the air’s warmth produced plants and trees. The stars appeared as conglomerations in the waters above the firmament, and the heat developed by their motions hatched out birds and fishes from the terrestrial waters, and animals from the Earth itself. These animals included humanity itself, made in the image of God.

Although the process of Creation stopped at the end of the sixth day, this did not mean that new creatures did not subsequently appear. Following St. Augustine’s acceptance of the doctrine of ’seminal causes’ proposed by Anaxagoras and the Stoics in the 5th century BC, Thierry believed that the germs of plants, animals and humanity had all been created in the first stage of creation, but that these germs later blossomed into the appearance of new creatures at the appropriate time.

Although this view is naturally wildly divergent from the contemporary scientific account, it does share with them a strong rationalist attitude to Creation, in which Creation is seen as a continous process of one cause generating its successor. However, although rationally considered, each cause is part of a divinely ordained and directed process.

Medieval theologians and philosophers had a subtle and sophisticated attitude towards God’s action in the natural world. Instead of the contemporary materialist attitude which sees a natural action as excluding divine agency, the Medievals saw the operation of the natural world occurring from both natural and divine causes.

The great 12th century philosopher and scientist, Adelard of Bath, who was one of the first to bring Arabic science to Europe, stated that the springing up of plants from the Earth should be attributed both to the will of the Creator, and to natural reasons. When his nephew asked him if it would be better to attribute all actions to God, because some phenomena did not seem to have a natural explanation, Adelard replied that:

‘I do not detract from God. Everything that is, is from Him and because of Him. But [nature] is not confused and without system and so far as human knowledge has progressed it should be given a hearing. Only when it fails utterly should there be recourse to God.’ (A.C. Crombie, op. cit., p. 26). The attitude of these medieval philosophers was strongly rationalistic. Adelard himself was contemptuous of those who relied on authorities, and stated firmly: ‘Those who are now called authorities reached that position first by the exercise of their reason … Wherefore, if you want to hear anything from me, give and take reason’. (Crombie, pp. 26-7).

This is very far from the image of the Middle Ages as anti-scientific and credulous, even though the science there had to conform to a literal interpretation of the Bible. Even so, it’s in stark odds to the charicatured image of Christian attitudes to science and faith presented as fact by evangelical atheists such as Dawkins and the late Carl Sagan.

Contemporary historians and scientists are rediscovering the vital role of the medieval period in the formation of modern science. Recently there have been reissues of the works of Robert Grosseteste, who, according to A.C. Crombie, the great historian of medieval science who I’ve quoted above, was of paramount importance in establishing the tradition of experimental science. However, the basis of contemporary science in Christian theology is regrettably still little recognised. The mighty Bede, whose blog Bede’s Journal and associated website, Bede’s Library, are excellent resources for anyone wishing to explore science from a Christian perspective as written by an historian of science, has had immense trouble getting his book, God’s Philosophers, published. One publisher who rejected his book told him that he wasn’t going to accept it because he was an atheist, though he wished him good luck in finding another publisher elsewhere. This is a sad indictment of the state of contemporary popular science publishing, and the apparently deliberate neglect of the Christian origins of modern science.

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