Everybody should know that size doesn’t always appear constant when it moves. Even popes. Everybody knows that when you see someone in the distance, they look small, and that they grow bigger as they approach you, and that they grow smaller again as they go away. Even children know that.
For years most people thought that the sun and all the other planets revolved around the earth. Then the church came along and said it was so, and used the threat of punishment for heresy to make it so. After all, the Bible said: “God laid the foundations of the earth that it should not be moved for ever, ” (Psalm 104:5). And in the book of Joshua, God made the sun stand still (Joshua 10: 12,13). If, as some heretics dared to think, the planets moved around the sun, the earth would be moving and not still, the sun would be still and not moving, and earth would not be the centre of the universe.
The problem was, as Aristarchus in the third century BCE noted, if the earth was the centre of the universe with all the planets circling around it, the movements of the other planets should confirm to a regular pattern in relation to the earth, and they didn’t. (Sometimes they were big, sometimes they were small, suggesting that they were moving away or coming closer.) Ptolemy thought he had the answer. He suggested that each planet was also moving in a perfect circle around a theoretical point, which was itself moving around the earth.
Galileo Galilei, like Copernicus before him, was an observant man. His measurements made much more sense if the sun was the centre and not the earth. And what about the moon? If it was moving in some circle that was moving round the sun, as Ptolemy said, it should at times be closer to the earth than at others. And if this was so, sometimes it should be much larger in diameter and much smaller at others times, but clearly this was not so. The only solution seemed to be that the moon was actually orbiting the earth (which was, in turn, orbiting the sun).
But the church would not have it. Although Galileo enjoyed some freedom for parts of his life, towards the end, he was summoned to Rome in 1633 to face the Inquisition. A hundred years earlier he would probably have been burned. In this case, the arthritic and increasingly blind 69 year-old recanted. He was made to abjure and detest his errors that the earth moved. The judgment found that his view of the solar system was “absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures”. He was condemned to life imprisonment which was eventually commuted to house arrest.
Galileo Galilei was the Inquisition’s most high profile victim. But by recanting his view that the earth moved around the sun, he managed to pay for his defiance of Catholic teaching, not with his life, but his freedom. His work remained on the Catholic index on banned books until 1835.
One particularly appalling thing in this whole episode is that when the Copernican theory (which was substantiated further by Galileo) was declared heretical by the Inquisition some 17 years earlier in 1616, only the theologians were invited to give evidence. No one who knew anything about the science was aloud to submit evidence to the hearing. The established order did not wish to change. Like children, its guardians thought that if they closed their eyes, the reality would go away. But everybody should have known that size doesn’t always appear constant when it moves. Even popes.
So, why am I writing about Galileo? Two reasons.
First, I have been thinking a lot in the past few days about counterknowledge - misinformation and unsubstantiated rumours packaged to look like facts. At the end of a recent posting (Are You A Victim?) I expressed puzzlement that Damian Thompson, author of a new book on the counterknowledge, was ironically a Roman Catholic - an institution which seems to me, to specialize in packaging information to look like fact. The Roman Catholic’s persecution of Galileo in the face of compelling factual evidence to the contrary, and their desire to cling on to their own disreputable theory and back it up with spurious evidence just seemed to be a good example of that.
Secondly, both Galileo and the Pope have again been in the headlines together this week. Pope Benedict was planning a visit to Rome’s Sapienza University. The problem is that in 1990 Pope Benedict, or Cardinal Ratzinger as he was then known, declared that “At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.” And Pope Benedict hasn’t recanted.
Because of this, tutors and students protested, with 61 scientists signing a letter saying that the proposed visit was incongruous and that the Pope’s views on Galileo offended and humiliated them. In addition to the scientists’ letter, students organised four days of protest against the visit, which included hosting an “anti-clerical meal of bread, pork and wine” and plans to greet Benedict with loud pop music (he had declared that evil) and banners reading “Knowledge needs neither fathers nor priests” and “Galileo recanted. We shall hold out against the papacy.”
The protesters were also unhappy that the visit, during which the Pope would deliver a speech to open the university’s academic year, would undermine “the secular nature of science” and the institution’s acceptance of “students of every belief and ideology”. (In 2006 the Pope sacked the Vatican’s chief astronomer, George Coyne, after he criticised the Pope’s support for Intelligent Design.)
In the light of the protest the Pope has cancelled his visit. The Vatican announced it had been “considered opportune to postpone” it. I suppose that in order to criticise the Inquisition’s judgment of Galileo, Pope Benedict would have to accept the scientific evidence without interpreting it with a theological agenda: he would have to accept that a previous pope had been wrong, and that would challenge a piece of his own counterknowledge - the doctrine of papal infallibility.
In a passionate and moving new book about the struggles for liberty in the West, A.C. Grayling writes:
Central characteristics of a scientific attitude are scepticism and a preparedness to revise one’s own views when they are shown to be mistaken. Science requires liberty; it cannot march to a non-scientific agenda, whether political or theological, without soon going wrong. (Grayling, A.C. 2007, Towards the Light. London: Bloomsbury)
The Roman Catholic Church is not known for its scepticism or its ability to revise its own views. It is sad that in an age when science is growing at such a pace and opening up so much exciting truth about the world, that an institution that has distorted and held back science for so long is still resistant to facing some well-established facts and is still peddling counterknowledge.
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See also: Mark Steel’s If you think Islam is medieval, look at Catholicism.
It is always sad when representatives of an organization think it more important to save face, at the cost of telling transparent lies or lauding an obviously wrong judgement, rather than to recognize and embrace the truth. The professors and students of the university were right to protest at the Pope’s intended visit.
It seems that the politicians are now interfering and describing the protest as “intolerance”. I find this incredible: what was the Church’s action against Galileo if not the most extreme intolerance?
I think we must regard Ratzinger’s original statement as another own goal by a man who has shown himself to be very accident-prone. It seems that the Pope has decided to bring about a confrontation between science and religious mythology. This is disquieting in one sense, given the man’s influence, but it is a battle he cannot win. It may therefore turn out to be a good thing if it ends in a very public defeat of the Church’s out-of-date world view and philosophy.
Pope Benedict is not the right person to lead the Catholic Church in the early 21st century. His pronouncements highlight how irrelevant his religion is and should embarrass Catholics around the world.
I would simply ask you and your readers to as you claim be thinking men.
The assumption placed in full force over the past 200 years is that the church was the suppressor of science. This was IMO a political design to replace religion with science and allow the gov’t to become the moral authority and conscience for the individual.
Case in point:
TM:”The Roman Catholic’s persecution of Galileo in the face of compelling factual evidence to the contrary, and their desire to cling on to their own disreputable theory and back it up with spurious evidence just seemed to be a good example of that.”
QB: False, I’m not a scientist, I only have astronomy as a hobby, but the factual evidence at that time did not prove a heliocentric system. It disproved the Ptolemaic! It did not prove the Copernican system!
I didn’t really even want to address this issue on my blog but felt a need to do so, because there is as much trash being expressed by the Catholic bloggers bashing the university protest as there is the agnostic’s bashing the pope.
House arrest is alive and well, it’s done freely and it’s in the individuals mine on both sides.
Although somewhat tangential to your excellent post, you may find this article makes interesting use of much of the same material as yours.
It considers many issue challenging the temporal authority of the Church including the problems posed by the Black Death which lead to the scapegoating of women as witches, the Hundred Years War and Galileo considered in the context of social and climatic unrest in the Middle Ages.
Good reading!
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/147339-Wars-Pestilence-and-Witches
quickbeamoffangorn: You write: This was IMO a political design to replace religion with science and allow the gov’t to become the moral authority and conscience for the individual.
1) As you say, that is your opinion. I suspect that is a very unscientific statement without a shred of convincing evidence to back it up.
2) Why would any scientist, free from the restricting shackles of the church, suddenly want to embrace more restricting shackles from government? Science requires freedom to make mistakes and change its mind and ask awkward questions and works best when it is separate from a theological or political agenda.
3) If the church was concerned with knowledge rather than preserving existing dogma, why invite theologians and not scientists to present evidence in 1616? It feels like a closed mind to me.
4) Regardless of the reasonableness of Galileo’s case (and I suspect we could argue about that forever), surely the church is still wrong to condemn him for daring to believe something outside of a very literal interpretation of the bible? If the church had succeeded in enforcing its will on everybody who did that we would all still be back in the Middle Ages blogging on parchment with candles!
1) Indeed, which is why it an opinion.
2) I don’t know how the system works in Europe, but in the US the reason is money. You want tenure, you need to bring in funding to the university, which generally means you need to tap into the money of the gov’t. But the gov’t desires a particular result, which naturally shackles as you say the science.
3) Don’t understand are you refering to the minor corrections needed in De Revolutionibus or to Galileo? The latter wasn’t placed on the index yet. The issues were condemned in the field of philosophy & theology not natural science.
4) Of course, the interpretation while common wasn’t definitative and it was wrong to condemn him. As for the rest well everyone is entitled to their worldview.
“But the gov’t desires a particular result”
Slander. There are many parts of “the government” and the part that chooses science funding is not really controlled by the political branch. The best that the political branch can do is to try to water-down or suppress the findings that they don’t like. But the funding is there. And the scientists usually make a squawk to the media if there is an attempt to change their findings. Obviously the main focus of this probelm at the present time is “global warming”.
You seem to be quite clueless in your opinion.
[...] See also: A Failure to Recant [...]
[...] against collective communal knowledge may occasionally be historically important and justified (Galileo for example), especially when that communal knowledge lacks science and reason. However, when [...]
the shaackles you say are being put on by the government arent shackles its a gloden straight jacket that keeps this country running hows paying 9 dollars a gallon for gasoline in europe when in the us its four? also how do the catholics have a god damn nazi for the pope honestly seems pretty retarded i,m doing a school project on galileo and i,m bored the govt must supress alaming things bcause there would be histaria dont u ppl see how many weirdos there are out there who are unstable and get to run our country even