Free Rocks of Ages by Stephen Jay Gould Page A

who had just read his friend’s
Sacred Theory of the Earth
, wrote to Burnet in January of 1681, stating his praise but also raising a few critiques. In particular, Newton argued that the problem of fitting God’s initial creative work into a mere six days might be solved by supposing that the earth then rotated much more slowly, producing “days” of enormous length. Burnet wrote an impassioned letter in immediate response:
    Your kindness hath brought upon you the trouble of this long letter, which I could not avoid seeing you have insisted upon … the necessity of adhering to Moses his Hexameron as a physical description … To show the contrary … hath swelled my letter too much. [A hexameron is a period of six days, and Burnet uses the charmingly archaic form of the genitive case, “Moses his Hexameron,” where we would now employ an apostrophe and write Moses’ Hexameron.]
    Burnet himself did not find the days of Genesis troubling because he had long favored an allegorical interpretation of these passages and held, in any case, that the concept of a “day” could not be defined before the sun’s creation on the fourth day of the Genesis sequence. But he rejected Newton’s exegesis for a different reason: he feared that Newton would not be able to devise a natural explanation for the subsequent speeding up of the earth’s rotation to modern days of twenty-four hours—and that his friend would therefore want to invoke a supernatural explanation. Burnet wrote to Newton: “But if the revolutions of the earth were thus slow at first, how came they to be swifter? From natural causes or supernatural?” (Burnet also raised other objections to Newton’s reading: those long early days would stretch the lives of the patriarchs even beyondthe already problematical 969 of Methuselah; moreover, although animals would have enjoyed the long, sunny hours of daylight, the extended nights might have become unbearable: “If the day was thus long what a doleful night would there be.”)
    Newton responded directly to Burnet’s methodological concerns, for he knew that his friend wished to avoid all arguments based on miracle in science—an issue far more important than the particular matter of early day lengths. He therefore wrote, confirming Burnet’s worst fear:
    Where natural causes are at hand God uses them as instruments in his works, but I do not think them alone sufficient for the creation and therefore may be allowed to suppose that amongst other things God gave the earth its motion by such degrees and at such times as was most suitable to the creatures.
    Newton also responded to Burnet’s worry about those long nights and their impact on early organisms: “And why might not birds and fishes endure one long night as well as those and other animals endure many in Greenland?”
    Newton, one of the smartest of men in all our history, surely scored a point over Burnet in his retortabout life above the Arctic Circle. Mark one for the polar bears (and another for the little-known penguins at the other end). But I think that we must grant Burnet the superior argument for a methodological claim now regarded as crucial to the definition of science: the status of miracles as necessarily outside this magisterium. The cleric, not the primary icon of modern science, offered a more cogent defense for basic modes of procedure in achieving fruitful answers. Mark one for NOMA.
    2 The rest of this section on papal views about evolution has been adapted from an essay previously published in
Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
(Crown, 1998).
    3 Interestingly, the main thrust of these paragraphs does not address evolution in general, but lies in refuting a doctrine that Pius calls “polygenism,” or the notion of human ancestry from multiple parents—for he regards such an idea as incompatible with the doctrine of original sin, “which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which,