Darwin Climbs a Cathedral

When I started making a video on the platform halfway up the cathedral in Strasbourg (which is the highest point that is open to the public and which can be reached on foot), I wondered how I could possibly tie it in with science. My YouTube channel, after all, is about science. I cannot simply post nice tourist videos showing the cathedral spire and the roofs of new and old Strasbourg.

But it didn’t take me long to come up with a science angle for the video. When they started building the cathedral in 1015, no one knew how old or big the world, or certainly the universe, was. People, especially the laborers who built the cathedral, lived in a cloak of darkness. Any question that could not be answered by the church was not worth asking. Scholars knew the world was not flat, but it might as well have been.

The builders kept adding to the height of the cathedral, and it reached its current height in 1439. This was before Copernicus was born. For over a century afterwards, people believed the sun, moon, and stars orbited around the Earth which was the center of God’s attention. From 1647 to 1874, the cathedral in Strasbourg was the tallest structure in the world. It is still the tallest building that was constructed entirely in the Middle Ages.

When Copernicus died, the idea that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system was still heresy. But within a century, all of that changed. By the time the current Horlogue Astronomique (astronomical clock) was installed on the ground floor of the cathedral in 1843, everyone knew the planets orbited around the sun and that Copernicus was right. The giant clock even had the planets that were known at the time moving around the sun, and even had a portrait of Copernicus, the man the church would have killed in 1543 except that he was already dead. Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Copernican view of the universe. The Vatican even has an observatory and an official astronomer.

 

But by the time the cathedral had already reached its full height, the church and world were still in scientific darkness.

Another thing you can tell by looking at the roofs of Strasbourg from the cathedral is that Strasbourg has existed for a long time, at least since Roman times, when it was called Argentoratum (city of silver). Everyone is aware of the ancient legacy of Europe, Asia, and even Africa and Central and South America. But North America also had an ancient legacy of civilization. As I explain in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes, the big cities of North America (such as Cahokia and Spiro) have been forgotten by nearly everyone. Cahokia is now just some mounds of dirt, and Spiro not even that. The historical legacy of my Native American ancestors has been effaced from the surface of the planet.

The Evolutionary Functions of Religion

Something as pervasive as religion, which is found in every human cultural group, must have an evolutionary explanation. I assert this without proof, but I trust that most scientists agree with me. Even though religion must have served a useful function to enhance fitness in the past, today it might serve no useful function.

Or does it?

I will present three functions of religion.

First, it facilitates altruism. This is a good thing. Altruism is an instinct in animals, especially in humans. But how can you be altruistic? Religious groups provide ways of doing so. Give them your time and money, and they can direct it toward people who need help. It certainly beats walking the street and looking for people who need help. One example is that poor rural villages in Africa need clean drinking water even more than they need advanced medicines. Civil engineers can join a religious organization that sponsors them to install wells in rural villages. (You can’t just dig a hole in the ground. Surface water would contaminate it. Rural villages need civil engineers from advanced countries to help them have healthier lives.) As far as I can see, this is pure altruism. Thank God for this kind of religion.

Second, it impedes the discovery of truth. Throughout history, religions have suppressed truth. So far, it has always been temporary. The Catholic Church persecuted Galileo, but they now celebrate him. By 1843, the cathedral at Strasbourg had an astronomical clock (Horlogue Astronomique) that celebrated the Copernican system it had condemned three centuries earlier.

Religions eventually embrace truth but only after sometimes centuries of resistance. I used to be a member of the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of Christians in the sciences who meet together to confront scientific and social issues from a Christian perspective. After immense angst, they usually end up embracing concepts that other scientists had long before accepted. Never has the ASA presented any new perspective on science. I finally left because I got tired of the endless angst that these fine people put themselves through (usually internal, rather than external, conflict) for reasons that were ultimately unimportant. Thus, I conclude, even good religion impedes the discovery of truth. 

Third, it makes money for religious leaders. This cannot explain the origin of religion, for it only works when altruistic and other instincts are already in place. Charismatic leaders who use religious devices can brainwash people into following them, giving them lots of money, and ignoring the times when they are discovered to have moral failings that they condemn in others. Examples have filled books. This continues because people still have an instinct for credulity, to believe religious leaders, even after repeated proof that many of them are frauds, and there is so much money to be made that there is a big intake of new fraudulent leaders. I used to be in one such cult, and know what it feels like to slowly and painfully extract myself from it.

Religion is part of our nature and will not go away. We need to be aware of it and allow only its good functions to operate.

Bursting Out of the Cathedral

I now begin a short series of essays about my trip to France. This is why my blog has been silent for a while. Nobody wants to read about “my trip to France” so I am writing essays about science-related themes for which I found dramatic examples in France.

One thing France does better than America is cathedrals. Of course, they’ve had centuries to get ahead of us (the Notre Dame cathedral in Strasbourg just celebrated the 1,001^st anniversary of the beginning of its construction), and also the great era of cathedral-building, anywhere in the world, is over. Yes, I am going to post some pretty pictures of cathedrals, but for a very specific purpose.

Note: This is the Notre Dame cathedral in Strasbourg, not in Paris.

At the time the Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg was built, it encapsulated the entire world view of the people. The lofty ceiling reached to heaven, and the windows were stained glass, which were brilliant in the photons of sunlight but which totally blocked any photons of information from the outside world. When the peasants were inside the cathedral, they could see nothing of the poverty or injustice forced upon them by their society, nor could they see the beauty of trees or skies. And when the rich people were inside the cathedral, everything they saw around them made them think that they were chosen by God to dominate the vast majority of people. To both rich and poor, the world of the cathedral represented all that there was to know, or that was worth knowing. All they needed to know was Biblical history presented in stained glass pictures, such as the story of Jesus asleep in the boat, visible in one of the windows in this photo:

Meanwhile, high in the mountains of the Muenster Valley just southeast of Strasbourg there is a little parish chapel. Instead of stained glass, it has windows with full views of the beautiful mountains and green fields and trees. The priest of that parish does not enforce a view of the world, but lets the reality of the world shine in, and praises God for it.

The Strasbourg cathedral might, during the summer, have been the only cool place in town, to which people retreated from the stress, dust, and heat of everyday life. You could sit, or kneel, and feel at here, at this place, all was right in the world.

And the cosmos too. The Earth was the center of the universe, and everything in all of Creation revolved around us. Not only was all right in the world, but in the cosmos as well. The Strasbourg cathedral had an Horloge Astronomique, an astronomical clock, that celebrated what we now call the Ptolemaic (earth-centered) view: the first clock was built in the 14^th century, the second in the 16^th century.

This calm assurance changed toward the end of the middle ages. Polish astronomer Mikolaj Koppernigk (Nicolaus Copernicus) showed that astronomical observations could be neatly explained, without miracles or special effects, by putting the sun in the center of what we now call the solar system. The idea that the Earth was not the center of all of reality was a very disturbing thought to late medieval people, and probably no ordinary person in the cathedral had heard about it. But eventually everyone knew Copernicus was right. While many Catholic astronomers merely admitted the fact, at least a few others embraced it with enthusiasm. In 1843 the church hierarchy modified the Horloge Astronomique, making it in effect a little shrine to Copernicus and the new view of the universe!

The centerpiece of the 1843 clock is a sort of astrolabe, showing the planets known at the time and their circular (unfortunately not elliptical, it appears) orbits. Complicated gears keep the planets in their correct relative locations. Off to the side is a painting of Copernicus. At the top is a mechanical clock in which, every quarter hour, a death’s-head figure strikes chimes and a figure representing somebody from every corner of society advances across the front and disappear into the maw of mortality. (Every day at 12:30 tourists can purchase tickets to see the clock go through all of its movements at once, but you can stand around and watch some of them at any time during your free visit.)

This clock represents a major advance, all too rare in religion, in which new discoveries about the universe are incorporated nearly as doctrine and treated as if they had always been obvious. Too bad they don’t yet have a shrine to Darwin. I’d be glad to send them some ideas for such a shrine if they would like. Amoebas at the base, a panoply of dinosaurs in the middle, and each hour a disc rotates with flying monkeys. A portrait of Darwin off to the side, not at the top. On the top would be a line of humans, not the old and incorrect progression of monkey to white man that you can still find in lots of books and websites, but a range of equal humans, standing side by side, all races and genders, looking confidently at the world, arms interlocked in peace.