May
14
Galileo vs. the Roman Catholic Church: What You Don’t Know
“The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.” — Johannes Kepler, 16th/17th-century mathematician and astronomer, known for his Laws of Planetary Motion
If you are at all familiar with science/faith issues and debates (and even if you aren’t), you have probably heard or read stories about ignorant or dogmatic religionists that are anti-science. I have written elsewhere about the demonstrable falsity of this claim in many cases. But, it’s a favorite canard of many skeptics and atheists. One popular story taken from actual history is about how the Roman Catholic Church punished Galileo Galilei for daring to defy the accepted dogma of the Church with his discoveries. With the poor scientist locked away (and possibly tortured) for his troubles, it was a clear case of religion vs. science.
Except it really wasn’t.
I recently began reading God’s Undertaker by John C. Lennox, the esteemed Oxford mathematics professor, and he has a brief section in the first chapter about this very topic. He provides a few facts (and clarity of thinking) that tend to be left out of the typical Galileo-vs-the RCC story. I had read most of this information before but lost track of the source. So, I figured I’d quote Lennox’s account for your edification…
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“One of the main reasons for distinguishing clearly between the influence of the doctrine of creation and the influence of other aspects of religious life (and, be it said, religious politics) on the rise of science is so that we can better understand two of the paradigmatic accounts from history that are often used to maintain the widespread public impression that science has been constantly at war with religion — a notion often referred to as the ‘conflict thesis’. These accounts concern two of the most famous confrontations in history: the first, just mentioned above, between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church; and the second, the debate between Huxley and Wilberforce on the subject of Charles Darwin’s famous book The Origin of Species. Upon closer investigation, however, these stories fail to support the conflict thesis, a conclusion that comes as a surprise to many, but a conclusion, nonetheless, that has history on its side.
First of all we note the obvious: Galileo appears in our list of scientists who believed in God. He was no agnostic or atheist, at loggerheads with the theism of his day. Dava Sobel, in her brilliant biography, Galileo’s Daughter, effectively debunks this mythical impression of Galileo as ‘a renegade who scoffed at the Bible’. It turns out in fact that Galileo was a firm believer in God and the Bible, and remained so all of his life. He held that ‘the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics’ and that the ‘human mind is a work of God and one of the most excellent’.
Furthermore, Galileo enjoyed a great deal of support from religious intellectuals — at least at the start. The astronomers of the powerful Jesuit educational institution, the Collegio Romano, initially endorsed his astronomical work and feted him for it. However, he was vigorously opposed by secular philosophers, who were enraged at his criticism of Aristotle.
This was bound to cause trouble. But, be it emphasized, not at first with the church. At least that is the way that Galileo perceived it. For in his famous Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615) he claims that it was the academic professors who were so opposed to him that they were trying to influence the church authorities to speak out against him. The issue at stake for the professors was clear: Galileo’s scientific arguments were threatening the all-pervading Aristotelianism of the academy.
In the spirit of developing modern science Galileo wanted to decide theories of the universe on the basis of evidence, not of argument based on an appeal to a priori postulates in general and the authority of Aristotle in particular. And so he looked at the universe through his telescope and what he saw left some of Aristotle’s major astronomical speculations in tatters. Galileo observed sunspots, which blemished the face of Aristotle’s ‘perfect sun’. In 1604 he saw a supernova, which called into question Aristotle’s ‘immutable heavens’.
Aristotelianism was the reigning worldview, not simply the paradigm in which science had to be done, but it was a worldview in which cracks were already beginning to appear. Furthermore, the Protestant Reformation was challenging the authority of Rome and thus, from Rome’s perspective, religious security was under increasing threat. It was therefore a very sensitive time. The embattled Roman Catholic Church, which had, in common with almost everyone else at the time, embraced Aristotelianism, felt itself unable to allow any serious challenge to Aristotle although there were the beginnings of rumblings (particularly among the Jesuits) that the Bible itself did not always support Aristotle. But those rumblings were not yet strong enough to prevent the powerful opposition to Galileo that would arise from both the Academy and the Roman Catholic Church.
But, even then, the reasons for that opposition were not merely intellectual and political. Jealousy, and also, it must be said, Galileo’s own lack of a sense of diplomacy, were contributing factors. He irritated the elite of his day by publishing in Italian and not in Latin, in order to give some intellectual empowerment to ordinary people. He was committed to what later would be called the public understanding of science.
Galileo also developed an unhelpfully short-sighted habit of denouncing in vitriolic terms those who disagreed with him. Neither did he promote his cause by the way in which he handled an official direction to include in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Principal Systems of the World the argument of his erstwhile friend and supporter Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Berberini) to the effect that, since God was omnipotent, he could produce any given natural phenomenon in many different ways and so it would be presumption on the part of the natural philosophers to claim that they had found the unique solution. Galileo dutifully obliged but he did so by putting this argument into the mouth of a dull-witted character in his book whom he called Simplicio (‘buffoon’). One might see this as a classic case of shooting oneself in the foot.
There is, of course, no excuse whatsoever for the Roman Catholic Church’s use of the power of the Inquisition to muzzle Galileo, nor for subsequently taking several centuries ‘rehabilitating’ him. It should, however, be noted that, again contrary to popular belief, Galileo was never tortured; and his subsequent ‘house arrest’ was spent, for the most part, in luxurious private residences belonging to friends.
There are important lessons to be gleaned from the Galileo story. First a lesson for those who are disposed to take the biblical account seriously. It is hard to imagine that there are any today who believe that the earth is the centre of the universe with the planets and sun revolving around it. That is, they accept the heliocentric Copernican view for which Galileo fought and they do not think that it conflicts with the Bible, although almost everyone at and before the time of Copernicus thought with Aristotle that the earth was at the physical centre of the universe and they used their literalistic reading of parts of the Bible to support that idea.
What has happened to make the difference? Simply that they now take a more sophisticated, nuanced view of the Bible, and can see that when, for example, the Bible talks of the sun ‘rising’, it is speaking phenomenologically — that is, giving a description as it appears to an observer, rather than implying commitment to a particular solar and planetary theory. Scientists today do just the same: they also speak in normal conversation of the sun rising, and their statements are not usually taken to imply that they are obscurantist Aristotelians.
The important lesson is that we should be humble enough to distinguish between what the Bible says and our interpretations of it. The biblical text just might be more sophisticated than we first imagined and we might therefore be in danger of using it to support ideas that it never intended to teach. So, at least, thought Galileo in his day and history has subsequently proved him right.
Finally, another lesson in a different direction, but one not often drawn, is that it was Galileo, who believed in the Bible, who was advancing a better scientific understanding of the universe, not only, as we have seen, against the obscurantism of some churchmen, but (and first of all) against the resistance (and obscurantism) of the secular philosophers of his time who, like the churchmen, were also convinced disciples of Aristotle.
Philosophers and scientists today also have need of humility in light of facts, even if those facts are being pointed out to them by a believer in God. Lack of belief in God is no more of a guarantee of scientific orthodoxy than is belief in God. What is clear, in Galileo’s time and ours, is that criticism of a reigning scientific paradigm is fraught with risk, no matter who is engaged in it. We conclude that the ‘Galileo affair’ really does nothing to confirm a simplistic conflict view of the relationship of science to religion.”
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Did you learn anything? I did. 🙂
Btw, I’ll excerpt Lennox’s comments on the Huxley-vs-Wilberforce account in a future post.
