But these adjustments, however painful, 

 do not justify a simplistic picture of his- 

 tory as continual warfare between science 

 and theology. Exposure of the flat earth 

 myth should teach us the fallacy of such a 

 view and help us to recognize the com- 

 plexity of interaction between these insti- 

 tutions. Irrationality and dogmatism are 

 always the enemies of science, but they 

 are no true friends of rehgion either. Sci- 

 entific knowledge has always been helpful 

 to more generous views of rehgion — as 

 preservation, by ecclesiastical scholars, of 

 classical knowledge about the earth's 

 shape aided rehgion's need for accurate 

 calendars, for example. 



I began this essay with a story about the 

 Venerable Bede's use of cosmology to set 

 a chronology for the determination of 

 Easter. Let me end with another story in 

 the same mold — and another illustration 

 of science's interesting and complex po- 

 tential bond with rehgion. Two days be- 

 fore my visit to the Venerable Bede's tomb 

 in Durham, I marveled at an intricate as- 

 tronomical device prominendy displayed 

 in the Church of Saint Sulpice in Paris. 

 Each day, precisely at noon the sun's light 

 shines through a tiny hole in a window 

 high in the south transept and illuminates a 

 copper meridian laid into the floor of the 

 transept and ending at an obelisk sur- 

 mounted by a globe at the north wall. 



The line and obelisk are appropriately 

 marked so that the days of solstices and 

 equinoxes can be determined with preci- 

 sion by the position of noon light. Why 

 should such a scientific instrument be con- 

 tained within a church? The inscription on 

 the obehsk gives the answer — ad certam 

 paschalis (for the determination of 

 Easter), a calculation that requires precise 

 reckoning of the vernal equinox. Interest- 

 ingly, to further spin out the complexities 

 of relationship between science and reh- 

 gion. Saint Sulpice became a temple to hu- 

 manism during the French Revolution, 

 and most of the religious glass and statu- 

 ary was smashed. The names of kings and 

 princes carved on the obehsk were thor- 

 oughly obliterated, but the beautiful blue 

 marble balustrade of the choir was pre- 

 served because the copper meridian passes 

 through it, and the revolution did not wish 

 to disrupt a scientific instrument. 



I would not choose to live in any age but 

 my own; advances in medicine alone, and 

 the consequent survival of children with 

 access to these benefits, should preclude 

 any temptation to trade for the past. But 

 we cannot understand history if we saddle 

 the past with pejorative categories based 



on our bad habits for dividing continua 

 into compartments of increasing worth to- 

 ward the present. These errors apply to the 

 vast paleontological history of life as 

 much as to the temporally trivial chronicle 

 of human beings. I cringe every time I 

 read that this failed business or that de- 

 feated team has become a dinosaur in suc- 

 cumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be 

 a term of praise, not of opprobrium. They 

 reigned for 100 million years and died 

 through no fault of their own; Homo sapi- 

 ens is nowhere near a million years old and 

 has limited prospects, entirely self-im- 

 posed, for extended geological longevity. 

 Honor the past at its face value. The city 



of York houses the next great cathedral 

 south of Durham. As Durham displays an 

 amusing Latin rhyme to honor the Venera- 

 ble Bede, so does York feature a verse to 

 illustrate this principle of respect for the 

 past in the service of understanding. On 

 the wall of the chapter house, we read: 



Ut rasa flos florum 



Sic est domus ista domorum. 



As the rose is the flower of flowers, so is 

 this the house of houses. 



Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, geol- 

 ogy, and the history of science at Harvard 

 University. 



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