Doubting Thomas is a play on Caravaggio's 'The Incredulity of Saint Thomas'. The man inserts his fingers into the crack in the road as if he does not believe it exists, as Thomas does with Jesus’ wound. The scale of geologic time is beyond his human comprehension, just as Jesus’s resurrection is a divine event beyond Thomas’s human understanding. The article discusses the relationship between the world and the earth, and how the modern human world takes its triumph over the earth as given. Tansey's painting renders the artificial distinction between earth and the human world as absurd.