Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [29]
Less literal readings of scripture helped avoid such conflicts prior to the seventeenth century. In a conversation over lunch, the scholar and historian of religion Karen Armstrong explained how the current conflict between religion and science didn’t really exist early on. Religious texts were then read on many levels, so interpretation was less literal and dogmatic and consequently less confrontational.
In the fifth century, Augustine made this viewpoint explicit: “Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.”13
Augustine, in his subtlety, went even further. He explained that God deliberately introduced riddles into scripture to give people the pleasure of figuring them out.14 This referred as much to obscure words as to passages that required metaphorical interpretation. Augustine seems to have had some fun with the logic and illogic of it all, and tried to interpret basic paradoxes. How could anyone completely understand or appreciate God’s plan, for example—at least in the absence of time travel?15
Galileo himself adhered closely to the Augustinian stance. In a 1615 letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, he wrote, “I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the Holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood.”16 He even claimed that Copernicus felt similarly, asserting that Copernicus “did not ignore the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not contradict the Scripture when they were rightly understood.”17
In his zeal, Galileo also wrote, quoting Augustine, “If anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken; for he opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible, which is beyond his comprehension, but rather his own interpretation; not what is in the Bible, but what he has found in himself and imagines to be there.”18
Augustine’s less dogmatic approach to scripture assumed the text always had a rational meaning. Any apparent contradiction with observations of the external world necessarily represented the reader’s misunderstanding, even if the explanation wasn’t manifest. Augustine viewed the Bible as the product of human formulation of divine revelation.
Construing the Bible, at least in part, as a reflection of the writers’ subjective experiences, Augustine’s interpretation of scripture comes close in some respects to our definition of art. The church wouldn’t need to backtrack in the face of scientific discoveries with the Augustinian cast of mind.
Galileo realized this. For he and others who thought similarly, science and the Bible couldn’t possibly be in conflict if the words were properly interpreted. Any apparent conflict lies not with the scientific facts, but with human understanding. The Bible might be incomprehensible to humans at times and might superficially appear to contradict our observations, but according to the Augustinian interpretation, the Bible is never wrong. Galileo was devout and didn’t think he had the authority to contradict scripture, even when logic would tell him to do so. Many years later, Pope John Paul II went so far as to declare Galileo a better theologian than those