Liar, Liar, Word on Fire?

Christian Bergsma Reviews a Children’s Book by Word on Fire

In my article published on the feast of Blessed Nicolas Steno last year, I set out to very briefly set the record straight on a man whose legacy is too often misconstrued by nonbelievers. When I saw that Bishop Barron’s ministry Word on Fire had published a new children’s book about Steno, I knew I had to buy it and see how the man was being treated from a Catholic perspective. I assumed from the outset that Steno’s apologetic defense of the global Flood and frequent appeals to Scripture and God’s power in his scientific work would either be sheepishly downplayed or framed as an embarrassing but forgivable artefact of his 17^th-century ignorance. After all, as the Benedictine Fr. Martin Gander pointed out nearly 130 years ago already, in the wake of Hutton and Lyell’s irreligious paradigms, many Catholics have become ashamed to even approach the biblical Flood in geological terms out of pure fear of losing their scientific reputation, even in cases where such a catastrophe affords better explanatory power than the alternative. Unfortunately, the way this book treats Steno’s methodology is actually much worse than I expected. Rather than presenting a more-or-less accurate account of Steno’s methods under a lens of historical snobbery, Mr. Salerno instead presents Steno in a way that one would expect of someone who had not actually read Steno’s work and had only superficially skimmed some secondary literature. However, it does not seem likely that the author was unaware of Steno’s real positions given the detail with which this book is otherwise written. Whatever the degree of willfulness involved in this misrepresentation, suffice it to say that this book does not paint an accurate picture of its subject.

Before discussing this further, I should note that there are a few positive elements to the book. The illustrations are skillful, and the physical design and layout of the book evokes a pleasantly antiquated feeling. The pacing and narrative style are not bad either, and the second half of the book, which focuses on Steno’s personal conversion and ecclesiastical career, is quite appreciable (at least until the conclusion). I think the author has a genuine and commendable desire to draw attention a less known yet very important figure in Church history, but they go about it in the wrong way. The main issue with the work concerns its treatment of Steno’s two main geological treatises.

Blessed Steno and the Explanatory Power of Noah’s Flood

When reviewing a children’s history book, nit-picking the accuracy of every detail is fruitless. Rather than providing the resolution of an academic dissertation, the book only needs to provide an engaging general summary of the source content to be good. However, the summary given still has to paint a truthful picture, and this is where the book fails, especially as a work marketed to inspire devotion to Steno both as a scientific figure and as a saint. After a fair summary of Steno’s education and work as an anatomist, the book begins to address Steno’s famous dissection of a shark in 1666 and his subsequent identification of the “tongue-stones” as real petrified shark teeth. It frames the topic on pages 18-20:

The origin of tongue-stones and other fossils had puzzled thinkers since ancient times. Fossils that resembled shark teeth and seashells were commonly found in places miles inland and high above sea level, even on mountaintops! How could this be? Since fossils bore an uncanny resemblance to the petrified remains of living creatures, some scholars believed that’s exactly what they were. But this was not a popular theory, because it didn’t seem to explain how shells and shark teeth became embedded in solid rock far from the ocean. Some people speculated that fossils fell from the sky, but the most common opinion was that the strange rocks simply grew in the earth, sprouting up from the ground like plants.

The author represents the inland location an elevation of marine fossils as having been an unanswerable mystery to those of the first opinion. However, those Christians who viewed the fossils as buried remnants of real organisms did have an explanation for how they ended up so far inland and on top of mountains: the biblical Flood! Since the early centuries of the Church, Christians like St. Isidore of Seville, Procopius of Gaza, Eusebius of Caesarea, Pseudo-Eustathius, and Tertullian pointed to marine fossils on mountaintops as proof of the world’s catastrophic burial under water and silt. This was, for the most part, a uniquely Christian notion amidst the pagan ancient world: among the pagan Greeks, the followers of Plato believed the primordial Flood had not covered all the mountaintops, and the followers of Aristotle, or Peripatetics, believed that fossils were generated by the innate power of the earth. Among the pagan Romans, Pliny the Elder recorded the folk belief that the “tongue-stones” had rained from the sky.

The unique position of the Church Fathers and ecclesiastical writers held firm in the Christian world through the Middle Ages and early post-reformation period. However, by Steno’s time, the Renaissance humanists had spurred a renewed interest in the peripatetic doctrines within the sciences, and several notable Christian scholars were once again wondering if the hidden forces of the earth could produce such facsimiles. Steno, however, favored the view of the ancient Church, as we will see.

The book continues on page 23:

At this time, there were no detailed theories about the origin and history of the earth… Almost no one had any clear idea how mountains or valleys or continents were formed. It was assumed that the Earth had remained largely static since the beginning of time. Any changes that had occurred since then were thought to have been caused by chaos and disorder that spoiled God’s originally perfect creation. But when Steno looked at the hills and valleys of Tuscany, he didn’t see ruin at all. His keen anatomist’s eye saw how the rock formations and features of the landscape all fit together in a logical sequence – a narrative sequence. He saw order: the kind of order that exists in a well-told story!

The first sentence is true insofar as there were no commonly accepted naturalistic theories among Catholics about the origin of the Earth: The Church viewed the Earth as having been created in its entirety by God at once in the beginning. But as for the surface of the Earth, there was no commitment to geography remaining static since the beginning. Quite the opposite: the medievals had no problem with a changing surface, molded by catastrophic upheavals. St. Albert the Great, rejecting the peripatetic doctrine that the mountains were formed by ancient seas which moved from place to place over immensely long ages, posited that mountains were formed during dramatic seismic upheavals. Far from taking a novel, gradualist departure in this regard, as the book would have us believe, Steno actually reiterated St. Albert’s position on mountain formation, though he admitted that it was not clear to him which mountains were formed in this way after the Deluge, and which were formed by it or before it. To him, the geological features that had not been shaped by Noah’s Flood had been formed in the roughly 4,000 years afterwards by natural disasters:

But since the authors whose writings have been preserved report as marvels almost every year, earthquakes, fires bursting forth from the earth, overflowings of rivers and seas, it is easily apparent that in four thousand years many and various changes have taken place.

Steno points out in the full passage that many of these great events in the ages shortly after the Flood would likely have not been recorded by such primitive societies, or else the records were lost to time, but this does not prevent us from attributing to them a catastrophic origin. He makes a good point: there are many geological wonders that could have been explained as products of slow development if their sudden formation had not been recorded. Take the massive Eldgjá Canyon in Iceland, for example, which might have been attributed to slow erosion by a stream if we did not know that a fissure eruption carved it out rapidly around 939 AD.

the ultimate flaw with The Riddle of the Tongue-Stones: it makes absolutely no mention of Steno’s treatment of the Deluge and the history of Genesis, which factored so heavily into his work and cannot be missed by anyone who reads it. Mr. Salerno may be uncomfortable with Steno’s inclusion of biblical events in his theory of geology, but by conspicuously omitting one of Steno’s most fundamental concepts in a book that is supposed to provide an informative summary, he is doing the man a huge disservice. For my part, I am not claiming that all the details of Steno’s theories square with a modern understanding of geophysics, or that his particular applications always line up with how a 21^st century “creationist” (if I must use the term) might describe the Flood depositions. We do not need to wind geology back to its 17^th-century state to believe in the global Flood, nor should we. Still, it is clear that Steno confidently allowed Scripture and Tradition to dialogue with natural science on the topic of the earth’s history, and he did not introduce any sort of gradualist or “uniformitarian” theory, which is not the impression you would get from reading this book.

Some might claim that Steno’s use of Genesis and the Deluge in his work was merely incidental due to the religious climate of the time, and that his core, distillable concepts were simply about the natural processes of sedimentation, regardless of their particular history. Andrew Dickson White even went so far as to claim that Steno merely paid Genesis lip-service to escape the Church’s censure, while actually putting forward a fundamentally secular theory of geology. Aside from the fact that this view does not agree with the clear diction and structure of Steno’s work, as has been demonstrated, it also contradicts his expressed intentions. Gottfried Leibniz, who knew Steno well, recalled:

I remember hearing him tell us about this often, and that he rejoiced in contributing, through natural arguments, and not without benefit for piety, to a belief in the sacred history and the universal Flood.

Clearly, Steno was passionate about the sacred history of Genesis and the Deluge and wanted his scientific work to help inspire faith in these events. After his conversion in 1667, Steno’s focus in life was apologetics, and he led many of those he met to conversion. His scientific career was no exception. Steno’s commitment to the tradition of the global Flood was more than incidental in the late 17^th century; faith in the miracle was under attack in the climate of enlightenment rationalism, especially in Steno’s home turf of Holland. In 1661, the Dutchman Isaac Vossius published De Septuaginta Interpretibus, in which he argued, against the consensus of the Fathers, that the Deluge had only been a regional flood limited to Palestine. The Sacred Congregation of the Index condemned the book in 1686, the same year Steno died. In 1670, Steno’s former classmate Baruch Spinoza published Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in Amsterdam, in which he also asserted that the flood was limited to Palestine, and that it had not destroyed the entire human race, despite what God allowed Noah to believe in his ignorance. The Congregation of the Index condemned this book in 1679, after Steno had publicly corrected Spinoza’s philosophy and privately denounced him to the Holy Office.

In summary, The Riddle of the Tongue-Stones fails to do justice to Steno’s legacy. The book obscures this great Catholic’s approach to the intersection of faith and science, in a manner that is hard to excuse for a work claiming to be historical nonfiction. Regardless of one’s particular viewpoint, only the pure, undistorted truth of history redounds to the glory of God, who is Himself the Truth. Let God be true though every man be false, as it is written, “That thou mayest be justified in thy words, and prevail when thou art judged.” (Romans 3:4).