Eternity is no longer an issue for us (in discussing the earth’s duration). We all assume that our planet had a determinable beginning. Since we have not entertained this alternative for several centuries, we lack a context for grasping Halley’s last paragraph. We read right through his words because they make no sense to us. We, as veterans of several creationist waves from Scopes to Arkansas, fully understand the threat to science of biblical literalism. We are therefore led to read Halley falsely in our light and see him as a fighter for expanded time rather than, as he insists, a measurer who would fix an actual date in order to eliminate the possibility of infinite existence.
Fortunately, I chose to dust off Halley’s article while I was busy reading the protogeologies of late seventeenth-century British savants (primarily Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth) for another project (see my book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle). I was therefore predisposed to read Halley as he intended.
We can grasp why eternity seemed an even greater danger than biblical literalism only when we understand Halley and his generation as struggling to find the basis for a science of historical events (both Burnet and Halley were friends of Newton and members of a scientific generation with common goals). Burnet, for example, rails on and on through 400 pages against the idea of eternity, and he fights this great battle, or so he says, because eternity precludes the possibility of meaningful history defined as a sequence of distinct and recognizable events linked by ordinary ties of cause and effect. Burnet identifies, as his main enemy:
…this Aristotelian doctrine, that makes the present form of the earth to have been from eternity, for the truth is, this whole book is one continued argument against that opinion.
If the earth is eternal, then no event can be distinctive. All must occur again and again, and we fall into incomprehension, for our struggles and dreams lose any meaning as unique events in finite time. Eternity destroys history; it “takes away the subject of our discourse,” as Burnet writes.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his uniquely exquisite way, expressed the incomprehensibility of infinity in The Book of Sand. In this story, Borges procures an infinite book. He cannot find its end, for no matter how furiously he turns the pages, as many remain between him and the back cover. The book contains small illustrations, spaced 2,000 pages apart. None is ever repeated, and Borges fills a notebook with their sequence, never coming any closer to a termination. Finally, he understands that this precious book is actually monstrous and obscene, and he loses it permanently on a shelf deep in the stacks of the Argentine National Library. He has understood the dilemma of eternity: “If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.”
Halley sought to disprove this most unthinkable of systems by resolving Borges’s dilemma and setting a definite point—an actual age in years—for the earth’s beginning. Halley, in short, was fighting for history. If we view him as a great historical scientist who advanced his proposal for dating the earth as a blow for rationality itself, then we can understand the last paragraph and its message for us.
Halley fights for history from both sides; his short article is both a specific proposal for measuring the earth’s age and a beautifully crafted defense of historical science in general. He does argue against biblical literalism—to gain enough time so that ordinary causes may shape geological history. Without time in abundance, we will need miracles to cram such richness into just a few thousand years. The traditional reading of Halley stops here.
But Halley insists that his struggle for a comprehensible history proceeds primarily from the other end, by stealing time from eternity—for the bias of his method can only justify its employment against a claim for greater ages than he might measure. I think that we must take Halley at his word, for he was too astute a methodologist to misuse the primary criterion of bias. Halley believed that he had set a maximal age for our planet. Surely, the earth could not be eternal, for biases in Halley’s method could only make it younger than his own measured maximum.
When we understand what Halley really sought, we can also grasp the reason for his failure. He was trying to establish a rational science of history. To do this, he needed a criterion that would change constantly in a recognizable way through time—so that each moment would be distinctly different from every other, thus avoiding Borges’s dilemma. He thought that the accumulation of salt in oceans and lakes, linearly increasing through time, would provide such a criterion. The primary struggle of historical science ever since Halley has centered upon the search for phenomena that change constantly and therefore mark the passage of time. Halley knew exactly what history needed, but he chose the wrong criterion for interesting reasons.
Halley may have burst the bonds of biblical literalism, but he had no inkling whatever of time’s true immensity. (The 100-million-year age so often attributed to him is Joly’s nineteenth-century date using Halley’s method. Halley himself never dared to think in more than thousands.) The clearest evidence for Halley’s limited perspective, a notion shared by all contemporaries who tried to date the earth (see next essay), lies within his argument about salt, when he laments that ancient Romans and Greeks did not measure the salinity of oceans:
It were to be wished that the ancient Greek and Latin authors had delivered down to us the degree of the saltness of the sea, as it was about 2,000 years ago; for then it cannot be doubted but that the difference between what is now found and what then was, would become very sensible.
If Halley had recognized how infinitesimally tiny a fraction of earth history these 2,000 years actually represented, he would not have been so confident that the increment between then and now could set a metric for determining the beginning itself. Two thousand years was an appreciable part of the tens of thousands that his wildest fancies could conceive.
An earth as young as Halley imagined might have provided criteria for history in such simple physical processes as the influx of salt from rivers. But, as I argued above, simple systems generally equilibrate or reach some completed state over truly great durations. Components of atmospheres and oceans reach equilibrium; they do not change steadily over billions of years. Unless we can find something truly big (fuel of a star) or numerous (number of atoms subject to radioactive decay) relative to time available, physical objects make poor criteria of history.
The best signs of history are objects so complex and so bound in webs of unpredictable contingency that no state, once lost, can ever arise again in precisely the same way. Life, through evolution, possesses this unrepeatable complexity more decisively than any other phenomenon on our planet. Scientists did not develop a geological time scale—the measuring rod of history—until they realized that fossils provided such a sequence of uniquely nonrepeating events.
When I began these essays in 1974, I chose for my general title a phrase from the last paragraph of Darwin’s Origin of Species—“this view of life.” I selected this passage because I love the science of history. Darwin used this phrase to contrast the richness of life’s history with the timeless cycling of simpler physical systems, in particular planets in their orbits. Halley knew what a science of history required, but he could not grasp why simple systems did not provide good criteria because he dared not even imagine how old the earth might really be. Darwin sensed the scope of time and knew that only life’s complexity could map its richness:
There is grandeur in this view of life…. Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Postscript
Although this is one of the few articles on Halley written during the season of his celebrated eponymous object, but not treating the subject of comets at all, I must nonetheless report briefly on my viewing experience, because I saw something so touching and learned something important thereby.
I had been waiting all my conscious life, and I wasn’
t going to miss it. Views from Boston were especially lousy (low on the horizon and therefore invisible from just about everywhere), and the comet was putting on a crummy show anyway (and anywhere). Further south meant higher in the sky and a better shot at seeing something. I had to visit the Smithsonian Tropical Research Station in Panama anyway, so I timed my trip for an optimal view. A staff scientist at the Institute picked me up at 3:00 A.M., as the best time for sighting came just before dawn. We drove far way from the city of Panama and set up a telescope in a dark field.
That night and morning provided two special pleasures. First, Halley’s comet made quite a surprising impression on me. I had been told many times to expect nothing interesting or exciting, so I came prepared for disappointment (and only because a lifetime’s promise to oneself cannot be easily canceled in the mind). I hoped for little, but saw quite a bit. The comet looked so different from everything else up there—from all the pinpoints of light that I know so well as a lifelong stargazer. The comet was faint, but fuzzy rather than concentrated. Everything else, however bright, was a point; Halley’s comet formed a broad line subtending nearly ten degrees of celestial arc. If you know the night sky as a friend, something so different amidst all your buddies can be awesome, if smallish.
Second, I was moved far more by a human scene. As we drove back to the city of Panama along the causeway by the sea just as the sun began to rise, I noticed crowds of Panamanian people, ever denser the closer we got to town (for the majority had to walk, even though viewing improved with distance). Most were family groups. Fathers and mothers pointed to the sky, showing the comet to their young children telling them perhaps that they might live to see it again. As the dawn broke, these people appeared as silhouettes against the brightening sky—parents pointing upward towards their once-in-a-lifetime view. Hundreds of poor and carless citizens had bustled their children out long before dawn and walked away from the city lights to line the causeway with human curiosity. Who will dare to say that people do not have a sense of wonder, or do not care about science and nature, if a little fuzzy line, properly publicized, can make us all citizens of the universe, at least for a short morning?
12 | Fall in the House of Ussher
I AM UNCOMFORTABLE ENOUGH in a standard four-in-hand tie; pity the poor seventeenth-century businessmen and divines, so often depicted in their constraining neck ruffs. The formidable gentleman in the accompanying engraving commands the Latin title Jacobus Usserius, Archiepiscopus Armachanus, Totius Hiberniae Primas, or James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland. He is known to us today almost entirely in ridicule—as the man who fixed the time of creation at 4004 B.C., and even had the audacity to name the date and hour: October 23 at midday.
Let me begin with a personal gloss on the caption to this engraving, for my misreading embodies, in microcosm, the entire theme of this essay. I confess that I have always been greatly amused by the term primate, used in its ecclesiastical sense as “an archbishop…holding the first place among the bishops of a province.” My merriment must be shared by all zoologists, for primates, to us, are monkeys and apes—members of the order Primates. Thus, when I see a man described as a “primate,” I can’t help thinking of a big gorilla. (Humans, of course, are also members of the order Primates, but zoologists, in using the term, almost always refer to nearly 200 other species of the group—that is, to lemurs, monkeys, and apes.)
But my amusement must be labeled as silly, parochial, and misguided. The title comes from the Latin primas, meaning “chief” or “first.” In the mid-eighteenth century, Linnaeus introduced the word to zoology as a designation for the “highest” order of mammals—the group including humans. But the ecclesiastical usage has an equally obvious claim to proper etymology and substantial precedence in usage (the Oxford English Dictionary traces this meaning to 1205). Thus, we zoologists are the usurpers, not the guardians of a standard. (I wonder if preachers laugh when they see the term in a zoological book and think of a baboon running about in a neck ruff.) In any case, the archbishop of Armagh is titular head, hence primate, of the Anglo-Irish church, just as the archbishop of Canterbury is primate of all England.
This little tale mimics the forthcoming essay in miniature for two reasons:
1. I shall be defending Ussher’s chronology as an honorable effort for its time and arguing that our usual ridicule only records a lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past—just as our current amusement in picturing a primate of the church as a garbed ape inverts the history of usage, for the zoological definition is derivative and the ecclesiastical primary.
2. The mental picture of a prelate as a garbed ape reinforces the worst parochialism that scientists often invoke in interpreting their history—the notion that progress in knowledge arises from victory in battle between science and religion, with religion defined as unthinking allegiance to dogma and obedience to authority, and science as objective searching for truth.
James Ussher (1581–1656) lived through the most turbulent of English centuries. He was born in the midst of Elizabeth’s reign and died under Cromwell (who gave him a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, despite Ussher’s royalist sentiments and his previous support for the executed Charles I). As a precocious scholar with a special aptitude for languages, Ussher entered Trinity College, Dublin, at its founding in 1594, when he was only thirteen years old. He was ordained a priest in 1601 and became a professor at Trinity (1607) and then vice chancellor on two occasions in 1614 and 1617. With his appointment as Archbishop of Armagh in 1625, he became head (or primate) of the Anglo-Irish church—a tough row to hoe in this preeminently Catholic land (“Romish” or “papist” as Ussher always said in the standard deprecations of his day). Ussher was vehement and unrelenting in his verbal assaults on Roman Catholicism (he wasn’t too keen on Jews and other “infidels” either, but the issue rarely came up). His 1626 “Judgement of the Arch-Bishops and Bishops of Ireland” begins, for example:
The religion of the papists is superstitious and idolatrous; their faith and doctrine erroneous and heretical; their church…apostatical; to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion…is a grievous sin.
One may cringe at the words (and no one can take Ussher as a model of toleration), but he was, in fact, regarded as a force for moderation and compromise at a time of fierce invective (read Milton’s anti-Catholic pamphlets sometime if you want to get a feel for the rhetoric of those troubled years). Despite his opinions, Ussher continued to espouse debate, discussion, and negotiation. He preached to Catholics and delighted in meeting their champions in formal disputations. His own words were harsh, but he believed in triumph by force of argument, not by banishment, fines, imprisonment, and executions. In fact, even the hagiographical biographies, written soon after Ussher’s death, criticize him for lack of enthusiasm in the daily politics of ecclesiastical affairs and for general unwillingness to carry out policies of intolerance. He was a scholar by temperament and, at best, a desultory administrator. He was in England at the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 and never returned again to Ireland. He spent most of his last decade engaged in study and publication—including, in 1650, the source of his current infamy: Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti, “Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origin of the world.”
Ussher became the symbol of ancient and benighted authoritarianism for a reason quite beyond his own intention. Starting about fifty years after his death, most editions of the “authorized,” or King James, translation of the Bible began to carry his chronology in the thin column of annotations and cross-references usually placed between the two columns of text on each page. (The Gideon Society persisted in placing this edition in nearly every hotel room in America until about fifteen years ago; they now use a more modern translation and have omitted the column of annotations, including the chronology.) There, emblazoned on the first
page of Genesis, stands the telltale date: 4004 B.C. Ussher’s chronology therefore acquired an almost canonical status in English Bibles—hence his current infamy as a symbol of fundamentalism.
To this day, one can scarcely find a textbook in introductory geology that does not take a swipe at Ussher’s date as the opening comment in an obligatory page or two on older concepts of the earth’s age (before radioactive dating allowed us to get it right). Other worthies are praised for good tries in a scientific spirit (even if their ages are way off—see previous essay on Halley), but Ussher is excoriated for biblical idolatry and just plain foolishness. How could anyone look at a hill, a lake, or a rock pile and not know that the earth must be ancient?
One text discusses Ussher under the heading “Rule of Authority” and later proposals under “Advent of the Scientific Method.” We learn—although the statement is absolute nonsense—that Ussher’s “date of 4004 B.C. came to be venerated as much as the sacred text itself.” Another text places Ussher under “Early Speculation” and later writes under “Scientific Approach.” These authors tell us that Ussher’s date of 4004 B.C. “thus was incorporated into the dogma of the Christian Church” (an odd comment, given the tradition of Catholics, and of many Protestants as well, for allegorical interpretation of the “days” of Genesis). They continue: “For more than a century thereafter it was considered heretical to assume more than 6,000 years for the formation of the earth.”
Even the verbs used to describe Ussher’s efforts reek with disdain. In one text, Ussher “pronounced” his date; in a second, he “decreed” it; in a third, he “announced with great certainty that…the world had been created in the year 4004 B.C. on the 26th of October at nine o’clock in the morning!” (Ussher actually said October 23 at noon—but I found three texts with the same error of October 26 at nine, so they must be copying from each other.) This third text then continues: “Ussher’s judgment of the age of the earth was gospel for fully 200 years.”
Eight Little Piggies Page 18