>The peasant believed the cleric had the word of God.
This ain't necessarily so. Carlo Ginzburg has shown how deep and wide the peasantry's own ideas about things could be rooted. Take Menocchio, the subject of Ginzburg's book The Cheese and the Worms. He had ideas about genesis that were formed largely independently of clerical guidance. This looks like as good an account as the canonical Genesis, but it still doesn't approach the level of proof we have that Jupiter exists:
>"That in my opinion all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and
>fire were all mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed -
>just as cheese is made out of milk - and worms appeared in it, and
>these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these
>should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels, there
>was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the
>same time, and he was made Lord."