Widely discussed and debated in medieval and Renaissance Europe, it was an Enlightenment rediscovery rather than discovery. This superb account of the history of the earth's eternity and the biblical Flood compellingly argues that the earth's antiquity is a very old idea. " On the Edge of Eternity is an ambitious and provocative rethinking of our understanding of the earth's history from the Middle Ages till the age of Darwin.
Dal Prete brilliantly reveals the peaceful coexistence of multiple theories about the age of the earth from the Middle Ages up through the seventeenth century, then their politicization as the new ideology of science asserted eternal war between science and religion, a fable, as Dal Prete lays bare, that has endured up to the present." - Pamela H. "Calling upon a massive reservoir of evidence that has been hiding in plain sight, this deeply researched and engrossing book not only overturns a long held historical narrative that deep geological time was discovered in the eighteenth century, but also chronicles the formation of that narrative in the crucible of intellectual and political change at the end of the eighteenth century. Largely unchallenged for almost three centuries, that account solidified over time into a still dominant truism.īased on a wealth of mostly unexplored sources, On the Edge of Eternity offers an original and nuanced account of the history of deep time that illuminates the relationship between the history of science and Christianity in the medieval and early modern periods, with lasting implications for Western society. Enlightenment thinkers, however, created a myth of a Christian tradition that uniformly rejected the antiquity of the world, as opposed to a new secular science ready to welcome it. While the appeal of theories centered on the biblical Flood and on a young Earth gained popularity over the course of the seventeenth century, their more secular alternatives remained vital and debated. Neither the authors nor their numerous readers thought that holding such views was incompatible with their Christian faith. Religious authorities did not regard these notions as particularly problematic, let alone heretical. From the late Middle Ages, these notions spread freely not only in universities and among the learned, but even in popular works of meteorology, geology, literature, and art that made them easily accessible to a vernacular and scientifically illiterate public. He argues that the chronology of the Bible always coexisted with alternative approaches that placed the origin of the Earth into a far, undetermined (or even eternal) past.
In this book, Ivano Dal Prete radically revises the commonplace history of deep time in Western culture. The old age of the world is regarded as the offspring of a secularized science. Historians of science, mainstream geologists, and Young Earth creationists alike all share the assumption that the notion of an ancient Earth was highly heterodox in the pre-modern era.
It is commonly assumed that the creation story of Genesis and its chronology were the only narratives openly available in medieval and early modern Europe and that the discovery of geological time in the eighteenth century came as a momentous breakthrough that shook the faith in the historical accuracy of the Bible.
#Edge of eternity series#
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