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17 December 2009
Galileo Galilei's place and importance in the book of anti-Catholic mythology - my continuing reply to 3AW's Tom Elliott (2)
Back in June I made a comment on businessman and radio personality Tom Elliott's views on the proposed amendments to the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act which he had aired on Radio 3AW. A month later he sent me a point by point reply. I responded to all points except the final one (5) about science, the Galileo case and diversity. In this comment I will restrict myself to the Church's view of science and Galileo, and deal with the meaty PC virtue of diversity at a later date. This is his point five:
5. Re. my personal views on religion, just because plenty of clever people also believe(d) in religion doesn’t mean that its worth cannot be challenged. And there are also plenty of historical examples of established churches trying to hold scientific enquiry back, e.g. Catholicism and its persecution of Galileo. So rather than argue this point by example, I’d simply say that if we subjected religion to the same sort of scientific inquiry that most other subjects receive, then belief via faith alone wouldn’t stack up. I know you’ll disagree with this, but it’s the core of what I think – and it’s based upon observation, not blind faith. As an aside, do you believe in the animistic gods (plural) followed still by certain tribes in Africa? And if not, why not?
For a start, I never once said here on this website or anywhere else that because there were clever (I said intelligent) people of religious faith, their religious beliefs were above challenge. Religious belief of any sort can and should be challenged. Christianity has nothing to fear from people of goodwill challenging it. Unfortunately, as history shows there were (and are) plenty of people without a skerrick of goodwill (Republican Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and those mega-persecutors of people of faith the USSR and The Peoples Republic of China) who as soon as they gained some power went about murdering first the clergy and then the lay faithful. The crudest and most abusive of the atheistic political movement (Dawkins & Co) have a self-serving blind spot on this.
It was quite a different claim that I challenged, that is, the claim that people who believe are necessarily stupid. For a person who on his own account passes all claims through the rigour of the scientific method that claim must be patently false - even ignorant and silly. The empirical evidence is overwhelming. As I pointed out, many of the great scientists have been Christian, including Galileo and Copernicus. Indeed, Copernicus was a cleric. I named several others in my reply. Again, there is a blind spot on this inconvenient contradiction of an essential tenet of the atheist political gospel.
Oblivious, you go on to produce another clanger. I was inclined before I wrote up this comment to email you for a few examples among 'the plenty' of when and where the 'established churches' held back scientific inquiry. You name Galileo as the pre-eminent example, so I think you especially have the Catholic Church in mind, as most of your atheist confreres do. I did not send the email because I know you cannot name a case other than Galileo, martyr and hero for the faith - of scientism and atheism, I mean. At least, you cannot name another case if you go by the academic literature - which you must do if you are to be serious about rigour and objectivity in inquiry. Sadly for you, the evidence is so clear and plentiful and the conclusion so unanimous among specialist historians in the field that you and your atheist friends have not a leg to stand on. Fantasising for propaganda purposes is another case, of course.
My sources for this comment are the Catholic Encyclopaedia, an article in AD2000, Galileo: Hero or Heretic? What are the fact? by Dr Noel Roberts*, and a chapter on Galileo in Dinesh D'Souza's excellent book, What's So Great About Christianity (no question mark). The entry in the Catholic Encyclopaedia and D'Souza's chapter draw on the wide research quoting Catholic and non-Catholic sources alike. Dr Roberts' article is a result of his own academic research. Below I have listed D'Souza's references. So, you have a wealth of literature to go through if you don't believe what I am saying here.
Chapter Ten in D'Souoza's book is entitled 'An Atheist Fable: Reopening the Galileo Case'. Under the chapter heading he has a quote from Arthur Koestler. I think we can safely take it that Koestler was no apologist for religion or the Catholic Church.
I believe the idea that Galileo's trial was a kind of
Greek tragedy , a showdown between blind faith and enlightened reason, to be
naively erroneous.
(The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Vision of the Universe)
D'Souza opens the chapter with a Stars Wars send-up of the conflict between the fraternity of downtrodden pure minded scientists and the evil Empire, the Catholic Church, who persecutes and frustrates the struggle for freedom and truth. He reproduces the wild claims peddled about martyrs for science being slaughtered and locked in dungeons etc. etc. No need to go further. We have heard it all before, just about daily in the media, it seems, from professional atheists who appear to be making a very nice living slandering Catholics and the Catholic Church in their books and conferences. The trouble is that it is all rubbish. D'Souza nominates the origins of that rubbish.
This thrilling drama [the Stars War conflict] suffers from only one limitation: it is not true. Historian David Lindberg writes: 'There was no warfare between science and the church.' Indeed, historians are virtually unanimous in holding that the whole science versus religion story is a nineteenth-century fabrication. [D'Souza provided references.] The names of the fabricators are known. The first is John Draper, who introduced the 'warfare' model in his popular 1874 book History of Conflict between Religion and Science. This book is full of whoppers and lies, and is today read mostly as a case study in fin de siecle anti-religious prejudice. The second source is Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, whose 1896 two-volume study History of the Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom is a more sophisticated warfare account but no less misleading than Draper's.
Tom, I think your reading - indeed, if you have read anything substantial at all on the subject - is more than a century behind. But instead of repeating the detail of my references, which are easy reading and accessible, let me go to the essentials of the issue.
Not only did the 'Church' not persecute scientists or block their scientific enterprises, their establishments led and encouraged scientific inquiry - as they did in all intellectual activity. Many of the foremost scientists were churchmen, as I have said. The pope who had to deal with Galileo's conflict with the Holy Office was a friend and admirer of Galileo's. He was even motivated to write an ode to him because his outstanding work!
Second, on the key issue of heliocentrism versus geocentrism, which on the surface brought Galileo before Holy Office, what one would these days call the scientific community was split over Copernicus's heliocentric theory, most rejecting it at that time. To be brief, there was no conclusive scientific evidence to reject geocentrism in favour of heliocentrism until after Galileo's death, nor to override the Ptolemaic system. The most famous astronomer of the day, Tycho Brahe, rejected Copernicus's arguments.
Third, what really caused Galileo's problem with the Holy Office of the Inquisition was his determination to make the issue a Scriptural one in addition to a scientific one. After all, Copernicus did not suffer the same fate. Nor did any other scientist. It was only Galileo.
Fourth, Galileo's difficult abrasive temperament, his failure to meet his undertakings to the Church's authorities, his mocking of the pope in his Dialogues of the the Two Chief World Systems when heliocentrism remained a hypothesis, and his dishonesty when he appeared before the tribunal, should not be underestimated when assessing the right and wrong of the way the Holy Office conducted itself in this affair.
What was the Church's authorities to do when faced with an unsubstantiated challenge to the truth of Scripture, and the scientific consensus was against the science of the challenge? Whether you like it or not it is fact that the Scriptures were an essential pillar of European Civilisation at that time. There were possible social consequences in the undermining of Biblical truth, and thus the threatening of the existing social fabric. Dr Roberts writes:
Cardinal Bellarmine, the most influential member of the Sacred College and head of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, was more than willing to consider Galileo's position provided that "a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun."
Bellarmine conceded that "it would then be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and admit that we have misunderstood them rather than pronounce false what has been demonstrated. But this is not a thing to be done in haste, and as for myself, I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me."
The Cardinal had raised the very important question: What constitutes proof or demonstration of a scientific claim? It is a question that is hotly debated to this day.
Cardinal Bellarmine's response seems to me eminently reasonable. In fact, you seem to be adopting the same procedure when you refuse to give assent to any claim that is not scientifically provable. Furthermore, Dr Roberts raises here what your naive view of science and the scientific method is oblivious to: the philosophical issue of what constitutes scientific proof. More about the key philosophical issue of knowledge acquisition and its ratification in a following comment. Dr Roberts went on:
Paul Feyerabend**, one of the most famous and intriguing philosophers of science of the 20th century, had this to say about the Galileo case: 'The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too.'
When a community of people takes up a particular religious belief into state affairs, as has happened through history, and is legitimate as much in a democracy as it is in any other form of government, it becomes a question of state, like any other element in the fabric of the state. The state is obliged to protect the fabric of the state, and apply penal measures where appropriate. The central issue in the Galileo case, it seems to me, shifted because of Galileo's imprudent and intemperate behaviour from a scientific issue to an issue of state, as Feyerabend recognised. The social consequences were also clearly central to Cardinal Bellarmine's judgement of the case.
Dr Roberts ends his article - apparently approvingly - by quoting Paolo Galluzzi, head of the Florence museum, and two representatives from the Vatican. Their final view, saying the Holy Office had erred in their sentence condemning Galileo, was that 'even if Galileo had been wrong, you cannot judge scientific errors in an ecclesiastical court'. I agree that you ought not to judge scientific matters in a ecclesiastical court, but the scientific element in the Galileo case was not the central issue, as I have explained. If it had been, there would have been many more scientists appearing before the Inquisition. There were not. And the Church would not have admitted the irrefutable evidence for heliocentrism, surely, so soon after after Galileo's death when it became available.
Finally, just what happened to Galileo after the Holy Office of the Inquisition judged him guilty? Was he cast into a deep dark dungeon and starved? Was he beaten from morning to night to force him to recant? Was he water-tortured? All according to the colourful fantasies of the international atheist cabal? Hardly. Galileo was celebrated and admired among clergy and lay alike: despite the dire sounding sentence he suffered the equivalent of being thrashed with a feather. Dr Roberts:
On 22 June 1633 Galileo was condemned to penance and prison for life; but his friend, Pope Urban VIII, ordered that he could immediately return to the residence of the Florentine ambassador, and in December 1633 he was allowed to retire to his villa outside of Florence.
It must be shocking to learn the Pope was actually a friend of Galileo's and, I suggest, did his best to protect him from himself.
If you adhere to the standards you set yourself, you would readily accept the literature of serious research and not the bigoted fantasies that are found on the shelves of the local library. I fear, though, that the political impulse of the atheist cause is too strong an element for the sober-minded acceptance of historical fact. Richard Dawkins, for example, will continue to claim that Hitler was Catholic in the religious sense, no matter how much evidence there is to contradict such an intellectually outrageous proposition.
Dinesh D'Souza'd references on the Galileo case:
William Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003
Richard Westfall, Essays on the Trial of Galileo, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1989
Maurice Finocchiano, ed., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, University of California Press, Berkley, 1989
Owen Gingerich, 'The Galileo Affair', Scientific American 247 (1982), pp. 132-43
*Dr Noel Roberts, formerly Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tasmania, has an Honours Bachelor of Divinity degree, specialising in Hebrew, and is expert in Greek, German and other languages. He wrote the book 'From Piltdown Man to Point Omega: The Evolutionary Theory of Teilhard de Chardin' (Peter Lang, 2000), and has written many articles on Newman and several on Galileo. He recently contributed a chapter to a history of Christianity.
** It's a coincidence here that Dr Roberts has chosen to quote a philosopher of science who wrote influential works on science method. I recommend you read the Paul_Feyerabend entry in Wikepedia to get an idea of how naive your views on science method are.
Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com
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