December 5 is the feast of Blessed Nicolas Steno (born Niels Steensen), who is known as one of the fathers of modern geology and paleontology. Quite a few revisionist and fallacious claims surround this great man of science and faith, to the point where some have claimed that he rejected the global deluge or sought to undermine the traditional concepts of Creation. To set the record straight, we'll examine both his words and his methods to see how Blessed Steno upheld the tradition.
Steensen was born and raised a Lutheran and was educated in Holland by early Enlightenment rationalists like Baruch Spinoza. He began his career as an anatomist at the same time that Rene Descartes' rationalism was gaining popularity in Europe and eclipsing the baroque Catholic scientific tradition. Steensen was not caught up in Descartes' sway, however, and his first major contribution to science was disproving Descartes' erroneous explanation for tear production.
In 1666, Steensen moved to Italy and latinized his name to Nicolas Steno. He became disillusioned with Protestantism and grew increasingly attracted to the beauty of the Catholic faith that surrounded him. In 1667, he converted to Catholicism and made his debut in geology. His first geological treatise, Elementorum Myologiae Specimen, published that same year, examined the anatomy of a shark and compared it to fossilized shark teeth, arguing that the fossil teeth were from a real shark that had been embedded and mineralized in the rock. The idea that the marine fossils found in high places where the soil was more eroded were real ancient animals buried by the flood had been held by Christians since ancient times, but in Steno's time some scholars, including his friend and fellow flood-defender Fr. Athanasius Kircher, had put forward the Aristotelian theory that the fossils were an inherent characteristic of the rock layers. Steno took the opportunity to defend the historicity and explanatory power of the global deluge in this treatise:
Nor would there seem to be any objection to the belief that this ground was once covered with waters... With regard to the first assumption, we learn from Holy Scripture that all things, both when Creation began and at the time of the Flood, were covered with waters. Of this Tertullian writes elegantly: 'A change occurred in all the world when it was covered with all the waters; even now mussel shells and conches range about the mountains seeking to prove to Plato that the very peaks have been under water.' And the arguments set out by people of the opposite opinion carry no weight when they say that bodies of this sort ought to be found everywhere, if these bodies are due to the waters covering all places, or at least that these bodies, when they are found, should not be found in high places only. For it will be easy to answer either objection: since every kind of waters will not carry everything, and if we should see plains at the feet of the mountains being filled with something like the scourings scraped from the mountains by the force of the rains, what wonder that in the high places those bodies appear uncovered, which are hidden in the lowlands, covered by fresh soil?[1]
Steno also thought it was possible that the fossils in high places were once buried at a lower elevation when that surface was covered with water, and raised to a higher elevation during a catastrophic incident later, which would be equally plausible under the global flood paradigm. Nowadays we know Steno's guesses were correct: marine fossils can be found at all elevations, and the fossils in the mountains were simply more likely to be exposed and easier to find.
In 1669, with the approval of the Holy Office, Steno published his second and last geological work, the Prodromus, intended to be a preface to a longer future dissertation. The complete work never came: Steno forsook the worldly fame of his scientific career and joined the priesthood in 1675. From then on he devoted almost all of his energy to apologetics, missionary work, and pastoral activities. He was consecrated as a bishop two years later and worked to combat the rising tide of Enlightenment rationalism while caring for his flock. He spurned worldly riches and gave so much to the poor under his care that he left barely any food for himself and often did not even keep adequate clothing to shield against the cold. After exhausting his body completely for the sake of the Church, he succumbed to illness and went to the Lord in 1686, aged only 48.
In the Prodromus, which has since been recognized as a seminal work of modern geology, Steno continued the themes from his last work without neglecting to uphold the global deluge and the traditional biblical chronology. He set out to describe "a process of the universal deluge which is not at variance with the laws governing movements of nature." Ironically, some in Steno's time were arguing that fossils must be formed at a constant rate throughout time under the assumption that if the fossils were formed during the catastrophic flood thousands of years beforehand, they would not have persisted until the present day without being destroyed by gradual processes, and thus must have been formed more recently. In other words, skeptics were challenging the explanatory power of the deluge by saying fossils must be too young to have been formed a few thousand years ago, whereas nowadays they argue that they are too old. Steno argued that fossils could survive for several thousand years, treating the flood as a historical fact:
There are those to whom the great length of time seems to destroy the force of the remaining arguments, since the recollection of no age affirms that floods rose to the place where many marine objects are found to-day, if you exclude the universal deluge, four thousand years, more or less, before our time. Nor does it seem in accord with reason that a part of an animal’s body could withstand the ravages of so many years, since we see that the same bodies are often destroyed completely in the space of a few years. But this doubt is easily answered, since the result depends wholly upon the diversity of soil; for I have seen strata of a certain kind of clay which by the thinness of their fluid decomposed all the bodies enclosed within them. I have noticed many other sandy strata which preserved whole all that was entrusted to them. And by this test it might be possible to come to a knowledge of that fluid which disintegrates solid bodies. But that which is certain, that the formation of many mollusks which we find to-day must be referred to times coincident with the universal deluge, is sufficiently shown by the following argument...[2]
Steno proceeded to show how marine fossils could be found in stones that were laid for walls in the Etruscan era thousands of years before his time, and thus had already been present when the ancient cities were built. If the fossils were present nearly three thousand years before his time, and still visible, he concluded that "we shall easily go back to the very times of the universal deluge." Steno's arguments for the flood did not just rest on the (relative) antiquity of the fossils, however, but also on the fact that many geological formations can be formed quickly without requiring long ages. He records how ancient accounts of devastating natural cataclysms changing the land suggest that the surface of the world could have changed quite dramatically in only four thousand years after the flood, against the assumption that the surface must remain relatively stable for long periods of time and be subject only to gradual processes. This appeal to common human experience resonates today, when we have contemporary examples like Canyon Lake Gorge and Burlingame Canyon, which were formed rapidly.
However, while showing that attributing geological phenomena to the flood in no way contradicts the laws of nature, Steno was careful not to detract from the miraculous power of God shown forth by the event:
If the movement of a living being can bring it to pass that places which have been overwhelmed with waters are arbitrarily made dry, and are again overwhelmed with waters, why should we not voluntarily grant the same freedom and the same powers to the First Cause of all things?
Steno went on to deliberate about the specifics of the flood, consistently aiming to show its reality and how Scripture does not contradict any observed facts of geology. While some of his earth-science descriptions here and there may be found outdated, he was doing what all Catholic scientists are called to do: using the best natural knowledge available in their time to explore nature without deviating a hair's breadth from Sacred Scripture and Tradition.
The "Law" of Superposition
Steno is credited with defining what is now known in geology as the Law of Superposition: that each successive strata was formed after the one below it. It is for this hypothesis that Steno is sometimes named as a father of uniformitarian gradualism and said to have undermined the basis for the global flood. However, there is nothing in this hypothesis which demands long ages or gradual depositions. As the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology points out:
It should also be remembered that Steno's law is a statement of relative time, not absolute time: two rock layers, in principle, could have formed millions of years apart or a few hours or days apart. Steno himself saw no difficulty in attributing the formation of most rocks to the flood mentioned in the Bible.[3]
For Steno, upper layers could represent rapid successive depositions during a global flood on top of lower layers from the time before the flood. While it is beyond the scope of this article to thoroughly examine this topic, it should be noted that in more recent times, some geologists have experimentally demonstrated that the principle of superposition does not always apply to strata formed in a current: several layers can be deposited in a stack rapidly and simultaneously.[4] These findings have generally been conveniently ignored and not engaged with, however.
The application of Steno's hypothesis into a uniformitarian "long ages" chronology began with the deist James Hutton. Due to his rejection of the Scriptures, Hutton had an a priori philosophical commitment not to admit any processes, natural, miraculous, or in-between, that were not observed in the present day:
The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now... No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.[5]
To satisfy this commitment, Hutton had to fit the same evidence that Steno had presented within the deluge paradigm into a new framework. He proposed that the same layers must have been deposited slowly from the top down at the bottom of ancient oceans over long ages, and not in a catastrophic flow. This was not an empirical development but an ideological one (it's not as though Hutton travelled to the bottom of the ocean and recorded how layers are deposited there and then proved a similitude with terrestrial layers). However, the tone for secular geology had been set, and Lyell later cemented this idea into the minds of the English-speaking world. It's important to remember that this was not at all a natural development from Steno's work, but a complete reworking of his methods.
Conclusion
Pope Pius XI, a defender of the traditional doctrines of Creation, approved Steno's cause for beatification in 1938, and Steno was beatified in 1988 by Pope John Paul II. Blessed Steno provides us with a perfect example of both a layman and a prelate. He operated without fear of ridicule from rationalist contemporaries in his scientific career, and rejected the rising Cartesian bifurcation of science and faith, boldly proclaiming the Sacred History of Genesis even in his scientific work. As a priest and bishop, he shunned political prowess and worldly affirmation, enduring ridicule from the heads of state for his simplicity and devotion to the poor. May Blessed Nicolas Steno always intercede for us before the throne of God, that the Church may finally overcome the pernicious infection of scientism and secularism that he fought so earnestly against.
Christian Bergsma
Feast of Blessed Nicolas Steno
December 5, 2024
References:
[1] Steno, N., The Earliest Geological Treatise - 1667, translated by Axel Garboe, MacMillan & Co., London, p. 17, 1958
[2] Steno, N., The Prodromus - 1669, translated by John Garrett Winter, MacMillan & Co., London, p. 258, 1916.
[3] University of California Berkeley Museum of Palaeontology, Nicholas Steno (1638-1686). https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/steno.html
[4] Julien, P.Y., Lan, Y., and Berthault, G., Experiments on stratification of heterogeneous sand mixtures, J. Creation 8(1):37–50, 1994; creation.com/sandstrat.
[5] Hutton, J., Theory of the Earth - 1785, found in Holmes, A., Principles of Physical Geology (2nd edition, Great Britain: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd. 1965), 43–44.
