How old is the Earth? At first glance, this seems like a question that can be answered with a number. However, the question involves social, political, and historical layers: can we speak of the origin of the Earth (for example, a creation)? Which conceptions of time are involved in the question? On the Edge of Eternity masterfully explains what is at stake when we inquire about the history of the Earth's history. Until recently, it was commonplace knowledge that the antiquity of Earth did not receive scientific consideration until the Enlightenment. This story claimed that before science was freed from religion, the account of Genesis remained the standard view and hindered any scientific considerations. However, Enlightenment secularization opened the path to geology, settling the foundations of a new scientific discipline. Science, uncontrolled by religion, throve.
Anyone interested in history finds this account at least suspicious, and scholars know it is simplistic and erroneous. Still, until now, we did not have a substitute for this story. Dal Prete's book offers a compelling argument establishing three significant things. First, that there were serious and sustained intellectual debates and traditions of thought on the antiquity of Earth well before the eighteenth century. Second, religion, particularly Christianity and Islam, were not an obstacle but an important intellectual space of moral, physical, and theological considerations on the history of the Earth. Paradoxically, it was the use of science in the Enlightenment that came to produce the conflict between science and religion, projecting it onto the past. Third, this idea of conflict was a point of coincidence in the political and intellectual agendas of eighteenth-century intellectuals, especially in France and Venice, gaining in this way a momentum capitalized on by biblical literalists against Darwinism and, more recently, by American creationism.
The book starts with an overview of medieval debates on the world's eternity, providing a background of the intellectual endeavors of Christian and Muslim scholars to reconcile the Mosaic creation with Natural Philosophy. Next, the book explores medieval ideas on the physical changes on Earth and how the Bible was a source among other Greek and Roman authorities. The argument here shows that attempts to explain changes in the landscape implied an ancient Earth compatible with these physical accounts and religions. These views were not restricted to scholarly elites; with impressive evidence, Dal Prete shows how these views were present in the wider social life of Renaissance Tuscany. Artisans and engineers portrayed the current landscape as the result of changes over time, revealed by studying what lay under the surface, including ancient ruins.
The colonial expansion of Europe and the emergence of Protestantism had significant consequences for debates on the antiquity of Earth and the boundaries between natural philosophy and theology. The new natural and ethnographical knowledge produced by colonization depended on medieval debates on physical mechanisms of change and the explanation of human history. At the same time, the radicalization of biblical literalism eroded the boundaries between natural philosophy and religion to the point of demanding a Christianized science of nature. Thus, some biblical episodes, such as Noah's Flood, became “the ideological pillar of European imperialism” (12) by guaranteeing the universality of Christian revelation.
These views were weaponized in the eighteenth century by influential French thinkers as a classic example of the presumed historical conflict between science and religion. Not only those against the ancien régime were sympathetic toward this tension: ruling elites, such as those in Venice, were afraid of revolutionary changes and considered Christian chronology as a long-established intellectual tenet only recently put into question. The book concludes by projecting these debates onto the twenty-first century, particularly in those aspects concerning the so-called conflict between science and religion in Western societies, including the challenges introduced by the emergence of Darwinism and biblical literalism in the nineteenth century and the most recent Young Earth creationism in the United States.
Dal Prete's is a well-researched book of history and, most importantly, proof of how and why good and nuanced history is necessary to revisit invisible tenets of our contemporary societies, such as secularism and the connections between science and social life.
