"The Galileo Affair"

Galileo (1564-1642) is most noted for his challenge to the Church’s position on geocentrism (a Earth-centered universe) with heliocentrism (a sun-centered Solar System). An ugly battle took place where Galileo was eventually placed under house arrest. In the long run, however, the Church lost prestige and was relegated to addressing only religious matters henceforth.

This is the generally-accepted view of Galileo’s role in history as understood by the man on the street. As it turns out, few, if any, historians of science still believe this to be an accurate accounting of the facts.

Probably the most important challenge to this thinking is the fact that Copernicus (1473-1543) had already proposed heliocentrism without any such trouble from the Church. Kepler (1571-1630) continued his work, again without any trouble from the Church. (It should be noted here that Kepler was a Lutheran and not a Catholic in contrast to Galileo.) So, challenging the position of the Earth in the universe was not a new idea. That couldn’t have been what provoked the Catholic church – at least not that alone.

Also, although Aristotle’s ideas were highly regarded by intellectuals of the day, many people still disputed them. So, Galileo’s challenge to Aristotelian ideas is nothing new either.

Interestingly, we hear little about Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who was burned at the stake by the church and is often portrayed as a martyr for science because of his belief in heliocentrism.[1] In reality, Bruno was a Neo-Platonist and “was a magus[2] who traveled across Europe preaching a pagan gospel rooted in mystical hermetic[3] texts.”[4] He is probably not as popularly known as Galileo because his views had relatively little impact on Western thought. He was more of a proponent of certain existing ideas rather than a pioneer of new ideas.

By way of background, there were few scientists[5] of that day, if any, who were not professing Christians of some sort, though often they held to other pagan and occult ideas at the same time. In fact, all higher education in Europe was associated with Christianity in some way, whether the Catholic church or the Lutheran church. So, there was no separation between Christianity and science as there is today.

So, what provoked the Catholic church to react so strongly? Lawrence Principe gives a good overview of what he calls “The Galileo affair” that I’ll recap here.[6]

The first conflict between Galileo and the Catholic church came in 1613. Instead of Galileo presenting the ideas of Copernicus as an alternative view worthy of serious consideration, he had been teaching it as absolute truth. The Catholic church, probably intellectuals in general, objected to this. By 1616, the church agreed to allow him to teach heliocentrism, but forbid him to teach it as truth, and Galileo reluctantly agreed.

From 1631 to 1633, Galileo was tried of “vehement suspicion of heresy” and sentenced to house arrest. Why?

Intellectuals of the day, both Catholic and Protestant, started with the Scriptures (and other ideas, as I’ve begun to show) and worked their way toward science. Regarding the Earth moving through space, which Aristotle said was impossible, intellectuals cited the following:

Joshua 10:12-13 – “¹²Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. ¹³And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”

Psalm 93:1 – “The LORD reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; the LORD is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.”

Psalm 104:5 – “Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever.”

Ecclesiastes 1:5 – “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.” They believed this implied that the Earth stood still.

But Galileo held to Augustine’s belief that any interpretation of the scriptures must accord with current scientific belief. Galileo, therefore, undertook to reinterpret those passages, and any other scriptures needing it, according to his new ideas. Again, he probably did so without qualification but rather as truth. In so doing, Principe says, Galileo laid out boundaries for theologians saying, “Y’all back off – get out of my sandbox.” Galileo said, “Scriptures tell us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go.”[7]

Lastly, Galileo was known for provoking his friends in arguments, sometimes staunchly defending views he didn’t subscribe to. Apparently, he just liked a good fight, much to the irritation of his friends. Pope Urban VIII (1568-1644) was a friend of his, the one who finally tried and sentenced him, for this very reason.

In Galileo’s work Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), he compared the Ptolemaic (geocentric) system to the Copernican (heliocentric) system. The Pope said he could publish his views as long as he did not challenge either God’s omnipotence and he included the Pope’s viewpoint. The latter he did in an very inappropriate way.

Such works in that day were presented as dialogues between sometimes fictional characters. This form of presentation is called dialectic. In this way ideas could be posited and the author would argue against them and defend his ideas in writing, much as was done in person between scholastics.

In his work, Galileo chose a character who was obviously a fool to clearly represent the Pope and present his ideas. In so doing, Galileo not only provoked a good friend of his, but he also challenged the church’s highest authority. Given also the great conflict due to the Reformation, Galileo shouldn’t have been surprised to find out he’d crossed the line.

Principe acknowledges that there are many other complexities and other details surrounding “The Galileo Affair,” but these facts mitigate the popular belief that Galileo was a victim of Christian obstinacy, entrenched in arcane ideas it had no business holding to. The Catholic church did not, in fact, demonize science, but Galileo’s ideas – even beyond his science – had a significant impact on the scientific revolution.

Kepler, Galileo and Newton were significant figures in changing the approach to nature from Aristotelian to more Pythagorean. Aristotle was more interested in qualities and purpose (teleology). Kepler, Galileo and Newton ignored qualities and purpose. They did not care about the purpose achieved by objects falling, for example. They cared only about mathematically describing how they fall. Newton identified gravity without any description of it, except the mathematical description of the sun’s gravitational effects on the planets. Any concept of purpose was considered irrelevant.

What was the result of this change of thinking? Walter T. Stace makes the following comment:

European man before Galileo – whether ancient pagan or more recent Christian – thought of the world as controlled by plan and purpose. After Galileo European man thinks of it as utterly purposeless. … If the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too.[8] [Boldface mine]

Stace, Carver T. Yu (in Being and Relation) and Francis Schaeffer (in Escape from Reason) go on to describe the downward path toward despair, individualism and postmodernism today - not solely attributed to Galileo, of course. But I’ll pick up that discussion in more detail later.

Basically, the popular view of “The Galileo Affair” is sorely lacking in details and gives an inaccurate view of the history of science and the Church. It also probably masks the more important issues of what his new views significantly contributed to in Western culture in general – a contribution that should be of concern to Christians.

More later,
Rob

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[1] Hunt, Lynn, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia, Bonnie G. Smith, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2^nd edition, 2005), p 612. These authors reluctantly admit there may have been more to his execution.

[2] Remember that a magus is a magician or wizard who practiced natural magic. The plural, by the way, is magi.

[3] The hermetic texts are old books on the topic of alchemy. The writings of Hermes Trismegistus are the most famous of the hermetic literature.

[4] Pearcey, Nancy R. & Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), p. 43. His article in Wikipedia calls him an occultist.

[5] Remember, the term science was not used then as it is today. Those we think of as scientists of that period called themselves natural philosophers and had a different approach to their work. More on that in later postings.

[6] This information comes from Principe, Lawrence, The History of Science: Antiquity to 1700, Parts 1-3, (Chantilly, VA: Johns-Hopkins University, Teaching Company, 2002) (lectures series), lecture 29.

[7] As Schaeffer put it, in Escape from Reason, in regard to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, artists and philosophers after him, nature was made autonomous from grace – from God and theology. I’ll discuss the consequences of this in a future posting.

[8] Stace, Walter T., “Man Against Darkness” in The Essayist by Sheridan Baker (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1972), pp. 67-68.

Origin of ideas - is there a problem?

Let me propose a hypothetical situation. A professing Christian, who is a scientist, is enamored with Buddhism and immerses himself in studying it. He takes an important idea from Buddhism and develops a scientific theory based on it. Only his peers who are Buddhist scientists see any value in it because there’s no other support for the idea. Fifty years from now, another professing Christian is determined to make the theory work using information from a Hindu temple finds real empirical evidence to support the theory. Later, other scientists build a whole new system of scientific thought based on the proposed theory from Buddhism and Hinduism, and that theory begins to shape our view of reality.

Is there any problem with this? As it turns out, it actually happened in history at least once, although the idea and empirical evidence didn’t come from Buddhism or Hinduism.

Have you ever wondered where we got our current view of the Solar System? Most people would say that it came from observations, logical inferences to form hypotheses, and testing of those hypotheses until we arrived at the truth that the planets orbit around the sun. That’s not how it happened. The primary motivation was a concept from Neo-Platonic mysticism.

Neo-Platonism is the result of Plotinus’ (c. 205-270 AD) update of Plato’s (c. 427- c.347 BC) philosophy with a very mystical bent. Among other things, Neo-Platonism holds that all objects in the universe have a soul, even the rocks in your yard.[1] Neo-Platonists practiced magic with the aid of “beneficent” spirits.[2]

Most of us know that at one time people believed the Earth was at the center of the universe with the planets, the Sun and the stars orbiting the Earth. This is known as the geocentric model.

Copernicus (1473-1543) came along and proposed that the Sun was at the center of the Solar System with the planets orbiting the Sun – the heliocentric model. The idea wasn’t popular at first but eventually took hold. [More on Galileo later.]

Where did these two models of the Solar System come from? The geocentric model came from Greek philosophy.[3] The Pythagorean “cult”[4] was apparently the first to propose the idea. They proposed that the planets were attached to great spheres because spheres fit their concept of perfection in Nature. They believed these spheres made music[5] (this idea seems to have made it into the hymn “This is My Father’s World”). Plato added his strong support to this, as well.[6] Aristotle (384-322 BC) nailed it home for more than a millennium. Ptolemy (c. 90- c. 168 AD) brushed up the model to make it more accurate, but it was a very complex model.[7]

Copernicus started changing all that. But what gave him the idea? Here’s what Pearcey and Thaxton say:

But where did Copernicus’s inspiration come from? Not from any new empirical data, the records show, but from his commitment to neo-Platonism.

Copernicus came under the influence of neo-Platonism while studying in Italy. Kearney describes the encounter as ‘the equivalent of a religious conversion.’ … Neo-Platonism thus became linked to a kind of sun mysticism. Whereas Aristotle taught that the earth was the center of the universe, some neo-Platonist writers argued that the sun must be the center of the universe, as only that position was compatible with its dignity as a divine symbol.

Pearcey & Thaxton quote the following from Copernicus:

In the middle of all sits the Sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once? He is rightly called the Lamp, the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe. ... So the sun sits upon a royal throne ruling his children the planets which circle round him.[8]

Pearcey and Thaxton go on to say that Copernicus’ geocentric model gave no one any good reason to accept it. It didn’t significantly simplify the Ptolemaic model. Due to the limitations of astronomical measurements, there was no empirical evidence for his ideas.[9] There was no reason to consider it seriously, except that it fit the Neo-Platonists philosophy, so they promoted it.[10]

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was an astrologer and alchemist who collected a large amount of astronomical observations for prognostications, to foretell the future. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) worked with him for a while and later used his data to lend support for Copernicus’ system by introducing elliptical orbits and detecting star parallaxes.[11] The rest is history.

Now, consider this: neither the geocentric nor the heliocentric models came from a Biblical worldview. Both came from pagan philosophers and mystics. The Roman church felt there was Biblical support for the geocentric model due to two verses of scripture, [12] but the model itself was a far cry from having solid Biblical support.

You may be asking yourself, “If it bears out in the evidence, it must be true, so what’s the problem with where it came from?”

This begs the following questions:

Have there been any problems as a consequence of this scientific development? If not, is there still a problem? If so, what are they and are they important enough to raise concern?

Can rational thought take an occult idea and cleanse it of any taint so that Christians may use the results without any concern?

Does scientific evidence necessarily lead to truth?

You can probably see where I’m going with this and you may not see any practical value to the questions or the answers may seem obvious to you. All I ask is that you continue to read what I lay out before you decide.

Stay tuned!
Rob

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[1] Pearcey, Nancy R. & Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), p. 63.

[2] http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/theurgy

[3] For a good overview that’s easy to read, see Barry M. Casper & Richard J. Noer, Revolutions in Physics (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1972), chapters 2-4.

[4] Pythagoras lived from 582-507 BC and started a very mystical cult called the Pythagoreans that practiced sacrifice and saw all kinds of mystical qualities in Nature and number.

[5] Casper & Noer, p. 30.

[6] Pearcey & Thaxton, p. 48.

[7] For a nice presentation, see Principe, Lawrence, The History of Science: Antiquity to 1700, Parts 1-3, (Chantilly, VA: Johns-Hopkins University, Teaching Company, 2002) (lectures series), lecture 9. Casper & Noer have a more mathematical presentation in Chapter 4.

[8] Pearcey & Thaxton, pp. 63-64.

[9] The evidence uncovered for it later was the parallax of the stars.

[10] Pearcey & Thaxton, p. 65.

[11] Principe, lecture 28.

[12] The two verses are Joshua 10:12-13 where Joshua tells the sun to stand still in the sky, thus implying that it moved around the Earth, and Psalm 19:4-6 which says the sun runs a course through the heavens apparently around the Earth.