The Peaceable Kingdom of Footnotes

Asimov built this book the way a translator builds a facing-page edition: King James verse on one side, numbered commentary on the other, the numbers accumulating like sediment. By the time he reaches the Flood he is cross-referencing two separate source documents — J and P, the Yahwist and the Priestly strands identified by nineteenth-century German scholars — and pointing out where the Bible's own editors spliced them together badly enough to leave the seams showing. "The Biblical editors, finding the tale in both documents, included both, interweaving the P-document and the J-document in an attempt to tell a single story. Actually, they managed to introduce repetitions and self-contradictions." That sentence is the whole method in miniature: not attack, but audit. He treats the text as a document with a paper trail rather than a claim to be refuted, and the paper trail turns out to be the more durable argument.

What holds up, almost eerily, is the confidence with which he handles unsettled physics as settled. He writes of an expanding universe "about fifteen billion years ago," coalescing from an "infinitely thin scattering of matter and energy" into a "cosmic egg" — language that reads like popularization more than prophecy, except that fifteen years later COBE would map the cosmic microwave background and confirm the broad shape of exactly this story, tightened to 13.8 billion years. Asimov wasn't guessing; he was reporting consensus cosmology with the same evidentiary caution he demanded of Genesis — "different people repeating the observations and measurements with different instruments at different times and in different places should come to the same conclusion." The book's real bet was that this kind of convergent, repeatable evidence would keep winning arguments simply by being harder to dismiss than authority. On the physics, the bet paid out.

What dates badly is more instructive than what doesn't. Arguing against the J-document's implication that woman is derivative of man, Asimov reaches for the chromosome count — women have two functioning X's, men "an incomplete and imperfect female" with a Y "stub" — and builds a small edifice of biological determinism to counter a small edifice of theological determinism. It's the same move in a different register: essentialism defeated by essentialism, using 1970s genetics as confidently as the Priestly author used cosmogony. He also assumed, reasonably enough for a man writing in a decade of ecumenical scholarly détente, that Genesis literalism was a rear-guard position losing ground to evidence. A decade later, Edwards v. Aguillard would strike down a Louisiana law mandating "creation science" in public schools, and two decades after that Kitzmiller v. Dover would do the same to intelligent design — not because literalism had retreated, but because it had gone to court. Asimov wrote for an argument conducted in good faith between colleagues who read the same footnotes. What actually develop