A Brief History of Creation Read Online Free Page B

question the wisdom and learning of the Greeks.
    The Christian Bible contains many warnings against being swayed by secular learning. In the apostle Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, he states, “Be on your guard; do not let your minds be captured by hollow and delusive speculations, based on traditions of man-made teaching centeredon the elements of the natural world.” Hypatia’s fellow North African Tertullian, sometimes known as the father of Christian theology, echoed this antiscientific theme in his own writings. He recalled a famous story about Thales, in which the philosopher fell into a well while stargazing. It was, for Tertullian, a metaphor for those “who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose . . . [and] indulge a stupid curiosity of natural objects.”
    But some Christian contemporaries of Hypatia did share her thirst for understanding and love of classical knowledge. One was Augustine of Hippo. By the time of his death, he had become a far more important figure in the formation of the early church than Tertullian or anyone else, save the apostle Paul. He was probably the most important thinker and writer in the first two millennia of the church’s history. And he espoused a very different strain of thought than Tertullian did—one in which the knowledge and learning of the Greeks was to be cherished and not discarded.
    Augustine came from modern-day Algeria, and he spent most of his life on the North African frontier of the Roman Empire, first as a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage and later as the bishop of Hippo. As a young man, he always seemed to be in search of something. He turned to Manichaeism, losing himself in the mystical teachings of the Iranian prophet Mani, who borrowed from Christianity and Buddhism. For a short time, Augustine became a Neoplatonist as Hypatia had been, absorbing himself in Greek classics that would leave a lasting impression on his young mind. Eventually, he converted to Christianity, the religion of his mother.
    Augustine’s early writings, those penned most recently after his conversion, were closer to the inflexibility of theologians like Tertullian. But as he matured in his faith, his writings became more open to the classical teachings he had been exposed to in his youth. By the time he wrote one of his most famous works, Literal Commentary on Genesis , he was urging his fellow Christians back to the study of the natural world:
    Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, aboutthe kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. . . . If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use.
    Augustine was intrigued by the mysteries of nature and wrote prolifically about them. He was a keen observer of plants and trees, which he looked at with the eye of a natural philosopher. He noted the medicinal qualities of hellebore, and he observed that hyssop could be used as a respiratory purgative. He noticed the seasonal growth patterns of plants, wondering why trees shed their leaves with the season, and why the leaves later grew back. He hinted at an understanding of osmosis that went beyond what most people understood for the next