THE AGE OF THE EARTH IN NIELS STENSEN'S GEOLOGY

Congratulations to geologists for the Earth celebrates its birthday during the days of this conference, according to the story attributed to Bishop Ussher (1581 - 1656). This introduces the subject of this discussion. Niels Stensen also believed that the Earth had been created less than six thousand years ago. Was Niels Stensen sincere in making his new science and Holy Scripture agree? Or did he pretend so out of fear of suffering a fate similar to Galileo Galilei's? Did Niels Stensen act as he did in the face of geological evidence of a much longer time scale than the Biblical one?

There is no evidence that Niels Stensen made his time scale agree with Holy Scripture out of fear of suffering Galileo's fate. On the contrary he dared to honor Galileo, even though Galileo had been condemned and punished by Rome, not only in his student notebook, ”Chaos,” compiled in 1659 but also in his ”Prodromus,” published in 1669 after he had become a Catholic. Stensen was convinced of the agreement between his new science and Holy Scripture and in his situation he had good reason to believe so. Jesuits had found concrete evidence from genealogies in China for a longer stretch of time than that derived from the Bible. However, Niels Stensen's new science of geology was not exact like astronomy but rather qualitative and in that sense agreed with the Biblical chronology. Only later did sedimentation and slow changes in sea level create a problem for the Biblical view. Moreover speculations about the history of the Earth were freely allowed during Stensen's time because they were no danger for Christian dogma. In conclusion Stensen was not a creationist. A creatonist is someone who in spite of overwhelming evidence from modern science keeps to a literal interpretation of the Bible's time scale. If Niels Stensen had lived in our days, he would surely have accepted the geological time scale.