"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
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
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,
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.
Kepler, Galileo and
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
[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, 2nd 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,
[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
posted by Rob Walsman | 10:46 PM
7 Comments:
Charlie: Thanks for your comments! What on earth kind of PhD program would fit this? I hope you’ll keep reading, even if I don’t get a Ph.D. :-)
Sorry to be so long responding to your comments. I have to say I was not sure how to respond until now. Here goes.
I agree with you that the interpretation of those scriptures does not force and acceptance of the geocentric model. But you are mistaken in saying that the church derived “from scripture a ‘scientific’ view of how the world ‘is.’” Actually, the church didn’t start with these verses and create a geocentric model, as you’ll see in my posting “Origin of ideas – is there a problem?” But the church retrofitted the interpretation of those verses to fit the prevailing science of the time which came from the Greeks philosophers and Ptolemy (an Egyptian). This is the same thing that Galileo did – retrofit those verses to fit his ideas – so he’s really no better off from that standpoint. The Church has a long history of fitting the Scriptures to her experience, rather than seeking to understand the Scriptures correctly by the Holy Spirit and fitting herself to that truth. That is the truly “bad theology.”
Actually, when you say “the church was embarrassed” you seem to be aligning yourself with the positivist view of history. It says, in brief, man has gone from complete ignorance to enlightenment through philosophy and science. That view believes that religion/superstition have been the enemies of enlightenment, and that religion/superstition should be relegated to handling only the metaphysical (read irrational) while science deals with the “real world.” Today, few if any philosophers and historians of science still hold this view. Rather, they are embracing the contributions of religion, superstition and even the occult to the development of science, but the man on the street is still under the positivist view for the most part.
So, in the current view, there is no embarrassment of the church at all. The account I presented in this posting is by someone who does not profess to be religious at all – not openly, at least. He and many others are defending the church’s stand and trying to shake us loose from the “embarrassment” viewpoint. I think he’s right, especially given that the church didn’t object to heliocentrism, just the teaching of it as proven truth – it hadn’t been proven at that time, not to everyone’s satisfaction. Galileo, despite his brilliance, could rather be characterized as an impertinent upstart who got what he was asking for. His friend the Pope drew a line in the sand and Galileo crossed it. This is more the prevailing opinion today.
Your comment that the Scriptures are “always [only] talking about God, human beings, or the relationship between the two” left me really unsure how to respond. My initial reaction was to say that’s a very narrow view of the Scriptures and God. If I understand it correctly, it seems to put God over His part of the world while humans live in their own – Christians having one foot in each. So are you saying that if science tells us anything that is contrary to our understanding of the Scriptures, then we need to reinterpret the Scriptures? Is there any limit to what that might include? If science tells us that the sun couldn’t possibly have stood still in the sky and that there is evidence to the contrary, does that mean we then have to take that passage allegorically? A more likely case - if science tells us that homosexuality is genetic and not a choice, then will we have to accept homosexuality as a God-given alternative and reinterpret the Scriptures? Doesn’t that potentially put all of our faith on a rather shaky footing? You can try to hold the faith-science duality, but science will encroach into the realm of faith and has already.
I finally looked up the book you recommended to me and it contradicts your thinking quite starkly. I’m not sure how you reconcile the two, since you recommended the book to me as the source of some of your views. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood your comments. Here’s the description of Schaeffer’s No Final Conflict from Amazon.com:
Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) was Presbyterian minister and one of the titans of 20th century reformed theology. Schaeffer attacks existential theology, which holds that the Bible is infallible only in spiritual matters, not when it comes to history or science. It is a position in some favor, as you might expect, with believing scientists. What is surprising is that it also has among its proponents non-scientist theologians who also characterize themselves as evangelicals. Schaeffer bitterly opposes this view: "Evangelism is not consistently evangelical unless there is a line drawn between those who take a full view of scripture and those who do not." (p. 13)
I hold to the Scriptures being absolutely true in every point. I also recognize that we do have to be careful how we handle it, also. Might I suggest that what the Scriptures talk about is all that’s really important. Anything else is, at best, questionable and possibly superfluous – including science. Carver T. Yu in Being and Relation discusses the Hebrew and early Church view of reality, and that’s a – if not the – key to this matter. He also contrasts it to the modern Western view of reality. I’ll go into it more later, so you’ll have to keep reading for that.
Thanks for taking time to read and comment. Again, I’m sorry I’ve been so long responding.
Rob
Rob:
Let me jump in here from a different angle. It seems to me that the pope's view should not be regarded as the view of The Church - not sure what that is either. We have individual Christians hopefully motivated by the Spirit to speak the Truth as well as they might. When parts of the body of Christ decided they needed to operate from a political/ bureaucratic platform - that did not mean that platform (the pope and his minions) necessarily spoke with godly authority.
Perhaps Galileo was intemperate as you suggest, but it hardly merited house arrest as though somehow The Church was threatened. I doubt whether Galileo objected to the central truth the Church is called on to proclaim - i.e., Christ and him crucified. The trouble arises when some monstrosity that calls itself "the church" begins to set standards where it has no standing.
Other parts of the Church's true message have to do with bearing love and compassion to our neighbors. The church has no more authority to compel others on these issues than Jesus did - he spoke the truth - when others objected and sought to silence him - he took the punishment. We can expect nor claim no more. The tragedy of the western church organization is that it gets embarrassed or offended and then uses political power to compel those it disagrees with.
My criticism is not just for western Catholic institutions, sadly they were played out in Protestant organizations as well - leading to centuries of religious conflict with the worst of atrocities.
Science can become arrogant, but Christians have no reason to expect protection there either - we are just called to be patient ministers of the gospel, no more no less.
David: Don't take my sympathetic views as condoning the actions of the Catholic church or support of institutionalized Christianity. My point is to begin to expose a critical paradigm shift that, I believe, has done great harm to the Western world and Christianity more specifically.
Actually, your "different angle" is the more common one. While I agree with most of what you said, one point that is underestimated is that the Catholic church considered that its authority was being threatened, and rightly so, I think, especially when it was greatly threatened due to the still-red-hot Reformation. I think we would both agree that it needed the challenge, but that's a different discussion. And, yes, Protestants committed their own atrocities in the name of correct doctrine, even some of our Reformation heroes.
The next post I'm working on gets into one point you accurately made. I wasn't true Christianity that was being challenged. It was really a Pythagorean/neo-Platonist worldview vs. an Aristotelian worldview. The point I'm getting at with my blog is that Christians, even Galileo, had so bought into these pagan worldviews that they didn't realize what they were doing to Western Christianity, and modern Christians still aren't aware of it.
One outcome I'll return to in future posts is that this whole affair had a powerful secuarlizing influence on Christians. Whereas, early on, Christians sought to pursue science in league with theology - however wrongly they did it - after Galileo, Christians became rapidly more comfortable leaving their Christianity out of the lab while pursuing science without boundary. In fact, it became unthinkable to do otherwise. Anyhow, further discussion of this will have to wait - this isn't the place for it.
I like your description of the ministry or work of the Church and the problems of institutionalizing the Body of Christ. I don't think it's ever worked in all of history. What I hope you'll pick up, however, is that there is a conflict between science and Christianity that goes unseen in our secularized way of looking at the majority of life - Christians are double-minded. It's hindered greatly, I believe, the work you so beautifully described. My most recent posts and those now in process will hopefully highlight this.
Rob
Rob:
My main point is they shouldn't have
"had a dog in that fight." We don't have to defend the church, or God or the truth. They had no reason to feel threatened. The sense of entitlement that the church ought to be provided a safe environment by civil society is bunk.
In my opinion when the church goes down that road and seeks to buttress some social position with political power, they are climbing up on the pinnacle of the temple to to take the devil up on the deal Jesus rejected. It is enough to let our yea be yea and nay nay.
David: I want to say that I agree. It looks like your thinking is headed in the same direction as mine - maybe.
Are you saying that Christians should leave science alone, or that it's okay for Christians to be involved in science but not the Church?
If the latter, my question is then what's the difference between Christians being involved and the Church being involved?
Or perhaps you would agree with the comment of one brother who said that religion and science should remain separate in their individual domains, neither one encroaching on the other's domain in the slightest, both just as valid and true as the other.
Then again, perhaps you have another alternative view.
Thanks,
Rob
By all means, Christians ought to be involved in science, accounting and even (gulp) economics. We are to be in the world , but not of it. How else can we be salt and light if we exclude ourselves. I am sure any complaint you find for science can be applied to all other disciplines, just because they are all inhabited by sinful men. For example medicine has some roots in cultic practices.
The key question is - how can I do this work (economics, science, etc.) and depend on God in my involvement. I will do science and other disciplines differently than the average practice. If the observations of science seem to contradict scripture there are a variety of possible reasons. 1. the inference from scripture about scientific observation may be incorrect - after all, the universe is not geo-centric. 2. Science maybe has a way to go to sort issues out - in the meantime Christian Scientists need to pick their battles - not go to the mat for everything. 3. I think to much is made of the claim that Scripture speaks the same content as science - there may be less conflict with Scripture's focus on Why and Who as compared to Science's focus on 'What.' I am not impressed by the "Creation Science" gambit if it does not come to grips with scientific observation that is based on sound observation and interpretation - even though it may change in the future. Christian scientists can show insight and humility - God is not being challenged the least in these discussions. This is not a call to compartmentalize but to integrate, to live at the intersection of the kingdom of men and the Kingdom of God. The leven of such involvement will be a witness of Emmanuel - God with us.
David: That's what I see as the problem - Christians dive into the world and become a part of it in science. We'd like to think of science as neutral, but it isn't. Read my more recent posts.
Where do we draw the line between being in and of the world? Should we practice witchcraft in order to engage witches with the gospel? I think you would say that's ridiculous. So, where's the line? What you'll see, as I am beginning to layout in more recent posts, is that Christians have engaged in unguarded worldly thinking. The problem isn't that sinful men are involved in the development of ideas. The problem is that ungodly thinking - doctrines of devils, if you will - has been involved in order to deceive even the elect and rather successfully. Anyhow, shouldn't we take a godly worldview to them rather than absorb their godless or occult worldview into our Christianity? The latter has been happening, not the former.
Anyhow, let's carry this discussion into my more recent posts. There perhaps you can at least see what leads me to say this as I lay out the evidence. There is so much more I have to say about the influence of science, let alone the origins, that ought to be of concern, regardless of what you end up thinking about science itself.
BTW, did you read my post previous to this one regarding the influence of neo-Platonism - in part a kind of sun worship - on the heliocentric model? Re medicine, see my post on Chronic Disease - there is much to say there, too, which I haven't even begun to lay out.
Rob
Post a Comment
<< Home