Medieval Christian Folk Science: The Antipodes

In the early days of the Christian Church, theologians were wrestling with the religious implications of Greco-Roman cosmology.  The discovery of a spherical Earth was challenging the once un-questioned structure of the Hebrew cosmos.  Evidence of Earth’s spherecity was readily accepted by most Church leaders, but what about the shape of heaven?  Was it spherical as well, or was it hemi-spherical, or dome/vault-shaped according to the Hebrew cosmos?  The Bible repeatedly refers to the heavens as a vaulted dome (Amos 9:6), or as stretched out like a canopy or a tent (Isaiah 40:22).  Moreover, there was no observational evidence that the firmament encircled the entire Earth.  St. Augustine wrestled with these issues in his book, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Chapter 9 Book 2: The Shape of the Material Heaven.

Another consequence of a sphereical Earth was the habitability of any lands that may exist on the opposite side: otherwise known as antipodes.  Clearly such questions are better left to the science of physical geography.  The question of whether or not there are lands down in the Southern Hemisphere, or whether or not these lands are inhabited by people should be solved by exploration.  To a modern person familiar with Earth’s geography, such questions have no theological implications, and we do not look to Holy Scripture to settle them.  However, this was not always the case.

You see, the idea of the habitable antipodes was theologically unacceptible for many reasons.  The first had to with the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.  If all men are physically descended from Adam, and thus Adam’s sin is credited to their account, then any people living on the opposite ends of the earth must have traveled there from the Ancient World after Noah’s time.  And since there was no record of any such journey, and the equatorial region was thought to be impassable by ship, it was absurd to think that descendants of Adam could inhabit such places.  St Augustine wrote:

“… it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.”  – St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Book XVI, Chapter 9 — Whether We are to Believe in the Antipodes, translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.; from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College.

Moreover, it was widely believed that no Christian missionaries had traveled to any such place as the antipodes, and since the Gospel had been preached to every creature, no such people exist.  And since God was a God of economy and not wastefulness, why would He create lands that were uninhabited?  The Spanish Monk Tostatus wrote the following:

“The apostles were commanded to go into all the world and to preach the gospel to every creature; they did not go to any such part of the world as the antipodes; they did not preach to any creatures there: ergo, no antipodes exist.”  – Spanish Monk Tostatus, quoted in: Zockler, vol. i, pp. 467, 468; Quoted from White, Andrew D., A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 1895.

But the main problem had to with the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion.  If that world “down under” was entirely isolated from this world, then the entire Gospel would have to repeated for the sake of those distant inhabitants.  Procopius of Gaza wrote: 

“…if there be men on the other side of the earth, Christ must have gone there and suffered a second time to save them; and, therefore, that there must have been there, as necessary preliminaries to his coming, a duplicate Eden, Adam, serpent, and deluge.” — Procopius of Gaza, quoted in: Kretschmer, p. 55. See also, on the general subject, Peschel, Geschichte der Erdkunde, pp. 96-97; Quoted from White, Andrew D., A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 1895.

The absurdity of habitable antipodes was demonstrated by the absurdity of a duplicate Gospel.  In other words, a question of physical geography that could have been solved by direct observation, was instead solved by philosophical appeals to Holy Scripture.  Ladies and gentlemen: this IS Christian folk-science.  Why wait for empirical analysis to resolve a scientific question if we have decided beforehand what the “correct” answer should be?  If the possibility exists that the answer provided by mainstream secular science will not support our traditional theological understanding, we simply manipulate reason and logic to exclude that possibility — and apparently we’ve been doing this for quite some time. 

The reason I like this historic example of Christian folk-science is this: what are the doctrines today that drive us to reject the scientific consensus of biological origins?  For most evangelicals, it all comes back to the Garden of Eden.  We take important theological ideas such as death before the fall and all men being descended from Adam and turn them into scientific models used to answer questions of natural history.  But if these doctrines failed miserably to answer questions of physical geography, what makes us think that they will be of any use to investigate questions of common ancestry?  Was that the intended purpose of the biblical narrative — to provide 5th century Christians with a scientific paradigm capable of answering questions of physical geography; or to provide 21st Christians with a scientific paradigm capable of answering questions of biological descent?

The Medieval Church was clearly in error, and there is no shame in getting the science wrong.  It happens to the best of us.  But mainstream secular science, being loosly held truth, is able to change and adapt to new information.  Christian folk-science, on the other hand, forces us to dogmatically defend the tentative against the obvious.  We unknowingly prop up bad science with religious fervor — sometimes with devastating consequences.

In the case of the faulty antipode dogma, those consequences were felt in the 15th century when the great explorer Ferdinand Megellan discovered the natives of South America.  Many Christians were unwilling to revisit their theological presuppositions when faced with the obvious existence of human-like creatures south of the equator.  Perhaps all men are not descended from Adam?  These indigenous people had no knowledge of the Fall, of original sin, or of the person and work of Christ.  Rather than concede the obvious point that our theological understanding is sometimes just as limited as our scientific knowledge, many Christians simply assumed that since these people could not have been descended from Adam, they did not bear the image of God.  They were considered animals, and treated accordingly.  Now obviously this attitude was not universal.  Many Christians, after hearing of the unreached people of South America, immediately organized missions to spread the Gospel.  But the devastating results of Christian folk-science hindered their efforts.  I submit that Christian folk-science it still hindering the Gospel message!

Do Christians today lose any sleep over the humanity of distant poeple?  Why not?  Have the scriptures changed their meaning?  Did we toss out the doctrine of original sin?  Or did we make a few simple adjustments in how we apply these doctrines to the study of the physical cosmos?  Can we make similar adjustments today and get past this stumbling block of common ancestry?

In the next post, we’ll look at another historic example of Christian folk-science: the conflation of Aristotle’s cosmos with Christian theology. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 10:44 am and is filed under Christian Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.