Creation Moment 2/27/2021 -- Jesuit Influence on Deep Time

But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies... 2 Peter 2:1

"There were a number of factors involved in the development of deep-time thinking in France. 

Following René Descartes’ (1596–1650) method of skepticism and doubt, the Biblical account of creation and the Flood were denied a place in science, and fallen human reasoning became the arbiter of scientific knowledge.

However, when Jesuit missionaries brought knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism from South India and China back to France, this was allowed to feed into discussions about the age of the earth.

 

The Jesuit role

 ....their willingness to accept various aspects of eastern religious

philosophies from India and China into their thinking was disturbing even to many of their fellow Catholics, who saw it as compromising the Catholic faith itself. This was reflected in the so-called Chinese rites and Malabar rites controversies within Catholicism in 17th- and 18th-century France. Jesuit missionaries were blending certain traditional religious practices with Catholic rites, the purpose being to make Catholicism more acceptable in China and South India in order to gain converts.

This accommodationism was criticized by other Catholic orders, and at one point by Rome. The ‘Chinese rites’ practice was also strongly criticized by mathematician and Catholic theologian Blaise Pascal (1623–1662).

The Jesuit Order had worked hard in establishing prestigious schools in the country, some of their students later becoming leading opinion-formers in France. Returning Jesuit missionaries, who brought knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism with them, often taught in those schools. As a result, Hindu-derived ideas of ‘deep time’ were allowed to gain influence in western science, especially geology.

French thought 

Amongst the most notable French voices against scriptural authority and belief in the Flood in the 18^th century were: Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757), Benoît de Maillet (1656–1738), Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), and Denis Diderot (1713–1784).

 

Bernard de Fontenelle

Fontenelle was trained at the Jesuit Collège de Bourbon, and for decades (1697–1740) he held the prestigious position of Secretary to

the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. This allowed him to influence the development and direction of geological science in France in a way that undermined belief in the Biblical Flood.

He had earlier written a book (1686) entitled Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. Effectively a science fiction dialogue, it discussed space travel and the possibility of life on the moon and other planets. Fontenelle envisioned gradual alterations in nature occurring over hundreds of thousands of years, and his book was influential in preparing the French imagination for a different worldview over the subsequent century.

....the respected scientist René Réaumur, in the Academy’s Mémoires (1720), discussed the Falun layers of the Province of Touraine in France, consisting of numerous shells and shell fragments. However, Fontenelle used the occasion to deny evidence of the Flood, and argued instead for geological changes over longer periods of time. He thought the 7 m thickness of shelly layers required successive floods involving a gradually receding ocean over an extended period, and that life on Earth had long preceded mankind. None of these floods, he argued, could be attributed to the Mosaic account.

Benoît de Maillet

Another significant influence of the middle of the 18^th century was de Maillet’s edited book Telliamed (a reversal of his name). It was first published posthumously (1748) by the Jesuit priest Abbé Jean Baptiste le Mascrier, although draft copies had been circulating in

Paris for a couple of decades. De Maillet had become a French diplomat, allowing him to travel to the Middle East where he became acquainted with other cultures and beliefs.

Telliamed argued the case for millions of years of change from the perspective of a Hindu sage against a French missionary. Earlier clandestine drafts had argued that the earth was at least two billion years old, correlating roughly with half a day of the Hindu creator god Brahma; the 12-hour day of Brahma is said to last for 4.32 billion years (during which period Brahma is awake), followed by a night of similar length.

 

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 

The Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire also claimed that deep time was required for geological change. He commented in an anonymous letter to the Academy of Bologna in 1746 that:

Revolutions of thousands of millions of years are infinitely less in the light of the Great Architect of Nature, than to us that of a wheel which compleats [sic] its round in the twinkling of an eye.

Voltaire also argued that fossil fish found on Alpine mountains were in fact food dropped by Christian pilgrims! 

Voltaire even began to argue that the Hindu writings were more ancient and authentic than the Bible. However, again he misrepresented the truth. He praised the Ezour Veda (or Ezourvedam) as a valuable gift to Western nations, saying they were indebted to this eastern religion. But in reality, this was a latter-day forgery; the work of Jesuits, not an ancient text. It was in the form of a dialogue between two supposed Vedic sages, one a monotheist and the other a polytheist who conclude that Hindu polytheism is more or less monotheism in disguise.

Denis Diderot

Diderot was an agitator against the political and religious authorities and, at one time, was imprisoned for sedition. In his Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (1754), he wrote:

… may not a philosopher, left to his own conjectures, suspect that, from time immemorial, animal life had its own constituent elements, scattered and intermingled with the general body of matter, and that it happened that these constituent elements came together … [and] that millions of years passed between each of these developments … ?

The Jesuit-trained Diderot was well acquainted with Voltaire and gradually lost his faith, becoming a deist, then an atheist. He was tasked with editing a French Encyclopédie, a comprehensive work published from 1751 to 1772 to explain the world from the perspective of naturalism, and aimed at changing the thinking of French society." CMI