For the past several years, I’ve been posting short commentaries on YouTube, probably the most popular website in the world.  I’ve covered everything from movies and music to books and cultural trends, but I’ve given special attention to the New Atheism. Among other videos, I’ve posted three answers to Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great, a brief presentation of some classical arguments for God’s existence, and a response to Bill Maher’s movie Religulous.  As you might know, people are able to post comments in response to videos, and I’ve received a huge quantity of them—mostly negative—in regard to the aforementioned pieces.  Setting aside the venomous and emotionally-driven comments, I’ve been able to discern, in the more serious ones, a number of patterns.

The most glaring of these is what I would call scientism, the philosophical assumption that the real is reducible to what the empirical sciences can verify or describe.  In reaction to my attempts to demonstrate that God must exist as the necessary ground to the radically contingent universe, respondent after respondent says some version of this:  energy, or matter, or the Big Bang, is the ultimate cause of all things.  When I counter that the Big Bang itself demonstrates that the universe in its totality is contingent and hence in need of a cause extraneous to itself, they think I’m just talking nonsense.  The obvious success of the physical sciences—evident in the technology that surrounds us and facilitates our lives in so many ways—has convinced many of our young people (the vast majority of those who watch YouTube are young) that anything outside of the range of the empirical and measurable is simply a fantasy, the stuff of superstition and primitive belief.  That there might be a dimension of reality knowable in a non-scientific but still rational manner never occurs to them.  This prejudice, this blindness to literature, philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism, and religion is the scientism that I’m complaining about.

Another feature of this scientism—and it’s evident everywhere on my YouTube forums—is  the extremely disturbing assumption that science and religion are, by their natures, implacable enemies.  Again and again, my interlocutors resurrect the story of Galileo to prove that the church has always sided with obscurantism and naïve biblical literalism over and against the sciences.  The Catholic philosopher Robert Sokolowski has argued that the founding myth of modernity is that enlightened thought was born out of, and in opposition to, pre-scientific religion.  And this is why, Sokolowski continues, the conflict between religion and science must be perpetually rehearsed and revived, as a kind of ritual acting out of the primal story.  (If you want to see a particularly dramatic presentation of this, watch the movie Inherit the Wind.)

But this myth is so much nonsense.  Leaving aside the complexities of the Galileo story (and there are complexities to it), we can see that the vast majority of the founding figures of modern science—Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Tycho Brahe—were devoutly religious.  More to it, two of the most important physicists of the 19th century—Faraday and Maxwell—were extremely pious, and the formulator of the Big Bang theory was a priest!  If you want a contemporary embodiment of the coming-together of science and religion, look to John Polkinghorne, Cambridge particle physicist and Anglican priest and one of the best commentators on the non-competitive interface between scientific and religious paths to truth.

Indeed, as Polkinghorne and many others have pointed out, the modern physical sciences were, in fact, made possible by the religious milieu out of which they emerged.  It is no accident that modern science first appeared precisely in Christian Europe, where a doctrine of creation held sway.  To hold that the world is created is to accept, simultaneously, the two assumptions required for science, namely, that the universe is not divine and that it is marked, through and through, by intelligibility.  If the world or nature is considered divine (as it is in many philosophies and mysticisms), then one would never allow oneself to analyze it, dissect it, or perform experiments upon it.  But a created world, by definition, is not divine.  It is other than God, and in that very otherness, scientists find their freedom to act.  At the same time, if the world is unintelligible, no science would get off the ground, since all science is based upon the presumption that nature can be known, that it has a form.  But the world, precisely as created by a divine intelligence, is thoroughly intelligible, and hence scientists have the confidence to seek, explore, and experiment.

This is why thoughtful people—Christians and atheists alike—must battle the myth of the eternal warfare of science and religion.  We must continually preach, as St. John Paul II did, that faith and reason are complementary and compatible paths toward the knowledge of truth.
 
 
(Image credit: Room4Debate)

Ever since the seventeenth century, the celebrated “Galileo affair” has been one of the featured items on the list of dark moments in the history of Catholicism. That the Church mistreated the Italian astronomer—or at least misjudged his claims concerning the structure of the solar system—seems clear. Pope John Paul II, for example, apologized for the Church’s condemnation of Galileo in 1992. No one now disputes the fact that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around.

For anti-Catholic historians and polemicists the episode is but the most obvious instance of the supposedly perennial conflict between religion—often enough Catholicism specifically—and science. The seventeenth-century battle, in the conventional view, pitted clergymen, who relied on revelation, against scientists, who relied on empirical observation.

But what if this typical portrayal of the heliocentric debate is almost entirely wrong?

That’s the claim of Dr. Christopher M. Graney in Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). Graney, professor of physics at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky, credits a question from one of his students with propelling him into an exploration of the history of heliocentrism and its skeptics. He corresponded recently about his surprising findings.

 
CARL OLSON: One of the blurbs on the back cover calls it “the most exciting history of science book so far this century.” I took that as hyperbole—until I read the book. It has the potential to overturn some important and entrenched narratives in the history of the relation between science and religion. To understand how, we need to know a little bit about the central character, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, whom you seem determined to rescue from obscurity. Who was he and why is he important?

DR. CHRISTOPHER M. GRANEY: Your comment about obscurity reminds me of my wife dubbing me “Riccioli’s agent.” He was an Italian Jesuit priest who worked in Bologna. He was born at the turn of the seventeenth century, so he was a very young man when Galileo was making big discoveries with the telescope in the 1610’s. Riccioli was bitten by the science bug, and eventually obtained permission from his superiors to devote time to science. He did a lot of physics experiments, including some of the first experiments to precisely study gravity. His results were quite good (he was very “detail oriented,” maybe to the point of being a little obsessive about it). He made a lot of astronomical observations with the telescope; he and his fellow Jesuit Francesco Maria Grimaldi gave the features on the moon the names we use today. Readers may recall that Apollo 11 landed in an area on the moon called “Tranquility.” Riccioli gave it that name. He wrote a huge book on physics and astronomy, called the New Almagest, published in 1651, that became a standard reference book. He was a prominent opponent of the heliocentric theory and was well-known in his time.

CARL OLSON: One of your main contentions is that even though in the long run Copernicus would be proven right by science, considering what was known at the time Riccioli actually had the stronger scientific case. Can you describe some of the problems that heliocentric theorists in the early seventeenth century had no good answer for?

GRANEY: There were two main problems. They take some space to explain fully, as I do in the book, but in short, one problem was Earth’s rotation in the heliocentric system. Fathers Riccioli and Grimaldi figured out that projectiles such as cannon balls should be affected by Earth’s rotation. Today we know that they were right. The effect is called the Coriolis Effect, and it is part of the reason why weather patterns rotate around a “high” or “low.” But it is a subtle thing, and at the time it had not yet been discovered. So Riccioli said that since the effect was not there, the Earth could not be rotating and heliocentrism must be wrong.

The other problem was star sizes. Heliocentrism required the stars to be huge—to utterly dwarf the sun. Today we know that stars come in many sizes: some do dwarf the sun, but many others are similar to the sun in size, and actually most are “red dwarfs” and smaller than the sun. But as I explain in the book, heliocentrism seemed to require every last star to dwarf the sun. Riccioli (and others) thought this was nuts. By contrast, in a geocentric universe everything fit neatly into a consistent size range, with the moon being the smallest and the sun the largest. That seemed much more reasonable.

Interestingly, many heliocentrists didn’t try to argue about the star sizes. They just said, “Hey, God can make huge stars.” One fairly prominent heliocentrist even explained that the stars were so huge because they were God’s warriors—the guards at the gates of heaven. He backed this up with scripture. Riccioli basically said, “Well, no one can deny the power of God, but this idea won’t satisfy prudent people.” It took a long time for scientists to discover that the apparent size of the stars is false, and stars are not all so huge. Explaining why that is takes up quite a few pages in the book.

CARL OLSON: The most stunning passage in the book (p. 104) is where you cite a series of quotations from scientists and historians, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. All accuse Riccioli of excessive reliance on theology and imply that Galileo and the other champions of the Copernican revolution had science on their side. In light of the evidence you’ve produced in this book, it hardly seems possible that so many authorities could be so wrong. How could such an erroneous view be so widespread and so durable?

Graney: That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer. This stuff was not hidden away—Riccioli’s New Almagest is old, and rare, but not that rare, and it was well known in its day. Many copies exist today in libraries and private collections. Other people of that time also wrote about the star size problem (like Tycho Brahe, a very prominent astronomer) and their books are available, too. Moreover, in at least the early nineteenth century you could find the scientific case against heliocentrism, namely the star-size problem, being mentioned even in an encyclopedia article. So the information is in libraries, and it used to be at least somewhat broadly known. I find it particularly weird that the Catholic world forgot this history: prominent work, done by one of its own, that has a bearing on one of (to use your words) the dark moments in the history of Catholicism.

CARL OLSON: The story of the heliocentric debate, you conclude later in the book (p. 145), “does not look so much like a morality play about brave reason and villainous superstition, about ‘science vs. religion,’ as it looks like a battle between two scientific theories, about ‘science vs. science,’ with a little ‘religion vs. religion’ thrown in as well.” Are you optimistic that your book will significantly change the common historical view of the Copernican Revolution? Or popular perceptions concerning the incompatibility of Christianity and science? How do you expect the book to be received?

Graney: Historians of science have been saying for a while now that the heliocentric debate was not like the common or popular perception of it, but that perception still sticks around. Everyone likes a “good guy/bad guy” story more than a story about the scientific process at work! So I’m not expecting much there, unless it comes from the science world, which has been very receptive to Riccioli and the star size problem.

It’s hard to predict how the book will be received, but the science world has been very receptive toward this general topic. Physics Today and Scientific American both published articles I wrote on Riccioli. Nature twice featured the star size problem prominently on their web page. It may be that scientists sense a particular relevancy in this story. Today rejection of science is a growing problem, as recently was brought to attention through a measles outbreak.

People have this image of science as an endeavor in which powerful forces cover up the truth for their own agenda. The stereotypical “Galileo Affair” story feeds that image, to science’s detriment. But the nature of science is actually such that it is hard to cover up truth, because different people get interested in a problem and start attacking it from different angles. Riccioli’s work and the star size problem tell us that what was going on in the seventeenth century was not the brave and reasonable Copernicans against powerful forces arrayed to cover up the truth, so much as it was the scientific process at work: a vigorous debate, with good arguments and careful observations on both sides, as each worked to figure out what the truth was.

So if this book does change broader perceptions, I think it will be because what it has to say about science at work could have some broader appeal in the science world.

Originally published in Catholic World Report. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Catholic World Report)

Today I sit down with two Catholic scientists, Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J. and Father Paul Mueller, S.J. Both men work for the Vatican Observatory, which is based at Castel Gandolfo, Italy. And together they wrote a new book, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? and Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-box at the Vatican Observatory (Image Books, 2014).

Brother Consolmagno is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a B.A. and M.A. in planetary science. After earning a Ph.D from the University of Arizona, he taught at Harvard and MIT before eventually lading at the Vatican Observatory. There he works as the curator of the Vatican Meteorite Collection and researches the connections among meteorites, asteroids, and small bodies in the solar system. He has written more than 40 refereed scientific papers and a number of popular books, including his memoir, Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist. Earlier this year, the American Astronomical Society awarded him the Carl Sagan Award for excellence in communicating planetary science to the general public.

Brother Consolmagno is also well known for his fun appearance on The Colbert Report:

Father Mueller is a philosopher of science who serves as superior of the Jesuit community at Castel Gandolfo. He holds a B.S. in physics from Boston University, an M.A. in philosophy from Loyola University of Chicago, M.Div and S.T.M. degrees in theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and a Ph.D in the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago.
 

 
BRANDON: Brother Guy, as a PhD physicist, Jesuit brother, Vatican astronomer, and Colbert Report guest, you're a sign of contradiction. How did you end up a religious scientist? Do you find any contradiction between those two roles?

BROTHER GUY CONSOLMAGNO, SJ: I have no idea why you'd see any contradiction; I don't. I struggle mightily to figure out what bad assumptions people are making about science and religion when they think that! I know scientists of all religious faiths, and that should be no more surprising than to say that I know religious people who have all sorts of jobs!

Of course my scientific training shapes the habits of thought I use when I think about God, but I also know that my way of thinking about God is neither the only way to think, nor unique just to me as a scientist. And being a person of faith obviously shapes the kinds of questions I think are fun to work on, and the way that I will go about working on them. For instance, I hate the idea of hoarding data; you learn by sharing, and learning is more important to me than getting a career edge on some scientific rival.

I think the big mistake behind the question is thinking that science and religion are rival sets of "things" that must be "believed." “What do I do, if science tells me one thing but religion tells me another thing? Which do I believe?”

There’s a false assumption at the center of that question—because neither science nor religion are about “believing” in “things”. But my religious belief is not in a “thing,” but in a Person—indeed, Three Persons...the Father, Son, and Spirit as described and identified in the Creed, and in the Church that leads us to those Persons. And science is not about the "things" we call data points, but in the description we come up with to describe how those "things" work. The data points stay the same, but the description changes as science changes.

BRANDON: Fr. Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest, is widely considered the father of the Big Bang theory, which he introduced in 1927. Today it's the most widely accepted theory for the origin of the universe. However, Fr. Lemaître and Pope Pius XII disagreed on the theory's implications for a Creator God. What's the significance of the Big Bang and does it provide support for a Creator?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: Lemaitre himself was adamant that his theory was a nice description based on the mathematics of Relativity and the observations of Hubble, but it should never be taken as a last word... much less something infallible on which one could base one's faith. And in fact, following their conversation, it's pretty clear that he convinced Pope Pius XII of this, as well. I would turn the relationship between Big Bang and Creator around...and suggest that belief in a Creator God, who is "The Word"—the Logos...Logic...Reason—provides support for the idea that we ought to be able to understand Creation in terms of a rational, mathematical theory like the Big Bang.

BRANDON: Back in 2006, the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto from planet to "dwarf planet." In the book you note the special role the Vatican played in this decision. How was the Church involved?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: We were astronomers among our fellow astronomers who debated the point. As it happened, I was on one of the (several) commissions that was involved in the discussion, and Fr. Corbally was on the committee that wrote the final resolution voted on by the IAU. But the whole topic is interesting for another reason: it reminds us that "science" is not eternal, and we shouldn't be surprised when it changes its mind in the face of new data. That's one reason why science is not a good foundation for religious belief.

BRANDON:In May 2014, Pope Francis said, "Imagine if a Martian showed up, all big ears and big nose like a child's drawing, and he asked to be baptized. How would you react?" What would your response be?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: I’d want to be sure they really knew what they were asking for! How could you tell? Well...are they willing to share a meal with me? To help me out if I am hurt, at the side of the road? To offer their life for me? And would I be willing to do likewise?

FATHER PAUL MUELLER, SJ: Let’s not forget that Pope Francis was mainly making a point about humans, not about Martians. He was talking about how the early Church struggled over the question of whether non-Jews could be admitted to baptism. The early Jewish-Christians saw themselves as God’s Chosen People, and saw in Jesus the Messiah who God had promised would save them. They had difficulty imagining how that salvation could be extended to non-Jews. But in the end the Church decided that all people were chosen by God, and that baptism could be extended to all. So I think that the Pope’s question was mainly about us and how we see ourselves as chosen by God, rather than about Martians.

BRANDON: You spend several pages in the book on the Galileo affair. What really happened? Could the dispute have been avoided?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: History is made by individuals; individuals could always make different decisions. What happened to Galileo and all the other people in that time and place was the result of the times and the politics and the fears and the hopes of all those individuals. It's not surprising that it happened; but it wasn't necessarily inevitable.

FATHER MUELLER: What really happened with Galileo is a long and complex story—read our book! But our book can get at only some aspects of the story. Of course the dispute could have been avoided, or could have gone differently. History is contingent, after all. And while we’re at it, the subsequent history of interpretation of the Galileo story also could have gone differently—it didn’t have to be interpreted as a great symbol of conflict between faith and science.

BRANDON: Suppose you had one minute to explain to an atheist how "the heavens declare the glory of God." What would you say?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: Go outside and look for yourself! If there's not a God they are praising, there ought to be!

FATHER MUELLER: You can see the lunch that your wife packs for you just as lunch, or as an expression of the love which she has for you. You can see the stars in heaven just as stars, or as an expression of the Love which God is. For those who believe in the God, who is Love and who is ultimate Creator of being and order, the glory of God is declared not just by the heavens but by everything else that exists: by pebbles, earthworms, and trout scales; by hornet nests, finches’ wings, and hockey players; and yes, by atheists too.

I had another experience of that particular pleasure when I received my copy of James Hannam's God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science a couple of weeks ago. For years I've been toying with the idea of creating a website on Medieval science and technology to bring the recent research on the subject to a more general audience and to counter the biased myths about it being a Dark Age of irrational superstition. Thankfully I can now cross that off my to do list, because Hannam's superb book has done the job for me and in fine style.

The Christian Dark Age and Other Hysterical Myths

 
One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who hangs around on discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person's grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing.

So, alongside the regular airings of the hoary old myth that the Bible was collated at the Council of Nicea, the tedious internet-based "Jesus never existed!" nonsense, or otherwise intelligent people spouting pseudo historical claims that would make even Dan Brown snort in derision, the myth that the Catholic Church caused the Dark Ages and the Medieval Period was a scientific wasteland is regularly wheeled, creaking, into the sunlight for another trundle around the arena.

The myth goes that the Greeks and Romans were wise and rational types who loved science and were on the brink of doing all kinds of marvelous things (inventing full-scale steam engines is one example that is usually, rather fancifully, invoked) until Christianity came along. Christianity then banned all learning and rational thought and ushered in the Dark Ages. Then an iron-fisted theocracy, backed by a Gestapo-style Inquisition, prevented any science or questioning inquiry from happening until Leonardo da Vinci invented intelligence and the wondrous Renaissance saved us all from Medieval darkness.

The online manifestations of this curiously quaint but seemingly indefatigable idea range from the touchingly clumsy to the utterly shocking, but it remains one of those things that "everybody knows" and permeates modern culture. A recent episode of Family Guy had Stewie and Brian enter a futuristic alternative world where, it was explained, things were so advanced because Christianity didn't destroy learning, usher in the Dark Ages and stifle science. The writers didn't see the need to explain what Stewie meant - they assumed everyone understood.

About once every 3-4 months on forums like RichardDawkins.net we get some discussion where someone invokes the old "Conflict Thesis". That evolves into the usual ritual kicking of the Middle Ages as a benighted intellectual wasteland where humanity was shackled to superstition and oppressed by cackling minions of the Evil Old Catholic Church. The hoary standards are brought out on cue. Giordiano Bruno is presented as a wise and noble martyr for science instead of the irritating mystical New Age kook he actually was. Hypatia is presented as another such martyr and the mythical Christian destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria is spoken of in hushed tones, despite both these ideas being totally untrue. The Galileo Affair is ushered in as evidence of a brave scientist standing up to the unscientific obscurantism of the Church, despite that case being as much about science as it was about Scripture.

And, almost without fail, someone digs up a graphic (see below), which I have come to dub "The Most Wrong Thing On the Internet Ever", and to flourish it triumphantly as though it is proof of something other than the fact that most people are utterly ignorant of history and unable to see that something called "Scientific Advancement" can't be measured, let alone plotted on a graph.

It's not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked up these strange ideas from websites and popular books. The assertions collapse as soon as you hit them with hard evidence. I love to totally stump these propagators by asking them to present me with the name of one - just one - scientist burned, persecuted, or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists - like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa - and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents usually scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong.

The Origin of the Myths

 
How the myths that led to the creation of "The Most Wrong Thing On the Internet Ever" is well documented in several recent books on the the history of science. But Hannam wisely tackles it in the opening pages of his book, since it would be likely to form the basis for many general readers to be suspicious of the idea of a Medieval foundation for modern science. A festering melange of Enlightenment bigotry, Protestant papism-bashing, French anti-clericism, and Classicist snobbery have all combined to make the Medieval period a by-word for backwardness, superstition and primitivism, and the opposite of everything the average person associates with science and reason.

Hannam sketches how polemicists like Thomas Huxley, John William Draper, and Andrew Dickson White, all with their own anti-Christian axes to grind, managed to shape the still current idea that the Middle Ages was devoid of science and reason. And how it was not until real historians bothered to question the polemicists through the work of early pioneers in the field like Pierre Duhem, Lynn Thorndike, and the author of my astrolabe book, Robert T. Gunther, that the distortions of the axe-grinders began to be corrected by proper, unbiased research. That work has now been completed by the current crop of modern historians of science like David C. Lindberg, Ronald Numbers, and Edward Grant.

In the academic sphere, at least, the "Conflict Thesis" of a historical war between science and theology has been long since overturned. It is very odd that so many of my fellow atheists cling so desperately to a long-dead position that was only ever upheld by amateur Nineteenth Century polemicists and not the careful research of recent, objective, peer-reviewed historians. This is strange behavior for people who like to label themselves "rationalists".

Speaking of rationalism, the critical factor that the myths obscure is precisely how rational intellectual inquiry in the Middle Ages was. While writers like Charles Freeman continue to lumber along, claiming that Christianity killed the use of reason, the fact is that thanks to Clement of Alexandria and Augustine's encouragement of the use of pagan philosophy, and Boethius' translations of works of logic by Aristotle and others, rational inquiry was one intellectual jewel that survived the catastrophic collapse of the Western Roman Empire and was preserved through the so-called Dark Ages. Edward Grant's superb God and Reason in the Middle Ages details this with characteristic vigor, but Hannam gives a good summary of this key element in his first four chapters.

What makes Hannam's version of the story more accessible than Grant's is the way he tells it though the lives of key people of the time - Gerbert of Aurillac, Anselm, Abelard, William of Conches, Adelard of Bath etc. Some reviewers of Hannam's book seem to have found this approach a little distracting, since the sheer volume of names and mini-biographies could make it feel like we are learning a small amount about a vast number of people. But given the breadth of Hannam's subject, this is fairly inevitable and the semi-biographical approach is certainly more accessible than a stodgy abstract analysis of the evolution of Medieval thought.

Hannam also gives an excellent precis of the Twelfth Century Renaissance which, contrary to popular perception and to "the Myth", was the real period in which ancient learning flooded back into western Europe. Far from being resisted by the Church, it was churchmen who sought this knowledge out among the Muslims and Jews of Spain and Sicily. And far from being resisted or banned by the Church, it was embraced and formed the basis of the syllabus in that other great Medieval contribution to the world: the universities that were starting to appear across Christendom.

God and Reason

 
The enshrining of reason at the heart of inquiry, combined with the influx of "new" Greek and Arabic learning, launched a veritable explosion of intellectual activity in Europe from the Twelfth Century onwards. It was as though the sudden stimulus of new perspectives and new ways of looking at the world fell on the fertile soil of a Europe that was, for the first time in centuries, relatively peaceful, prosperous, outward-looking, and genuinely curious.

This is not to say that more conservative and reactionary forces did not have misgivings about some of the new areas of inquiry, especially in relation to how philosophy and speculation about the natural world and the cosmos could affect accepted theology. Hannam is careful not to pretend that there was no resistance to the flowering of the new thinking and inquiry but, unlike the perpetuators of "the Myth", he gives that resistance due consideration rather than pretending it was the whole story. In fact, the conservatives and reactionaries' efforts were usually rear-guard actions and were in almost every case totally unsuccessful in curtailing the inevitable flood of ideas that began to flow from the universities. Once it began, it was effectively unstoppable.

In fact, some of the efforts by the theologians to put some limits on what could and could not be accepted via the "new learning" actually had the effect of stimulating inquiry rather than constricting it. The "Condemnations of 1277" attempted to assert certain things that could not be stated as "philosophically true", particularly things that put limits on divine omnipotence. This had the interesting effect of making it clear that Aristotle had, actually, got some things badly wrong - something Thomas Aquinas emphasized in his famous and highly influential Summa Theologiae:

"The condemnations and Thomas's Summa Theologiae had created a framework within which natural philosophers could safely pursue their studies. The framework .... laid down the the principle that God had decreed laws of nature but was not bound by them. Finally, it stated that Aristotle was sometimes wrong. The world was not 'eternal according to reason' and 'finite according to faith'. It was not eternal, full stop. And if Aristotle could be wrong about something that he regarded as completely certainly certain, that threw his whole philosophy into question. The way was clear for the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages to move decisively beyond the achievements of the Greeks." (Hannam, pp. 104-105)

Which is precisely what they proceeded to do. Far from being a stagnant dark age, as the first half of the Medieval Period (500-1000 AD) certainly was, the period from 1000 to 1500 AD actually saw the most impressive flowering of scientific inquiry and discovery since the time of the ancient Greeks, far eclipsing the Roman and Hellenic Eras in every respect. With Occam and Duns Scotus taking the critical approach to Aristotle further than Aquinas' more cautious approach, the way was open for the Medieval scientists of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries to question, examine, and test the perspectives the translators of the Twelfth Century had given them, with remarkable effects:

"[I]n the fourteenth century medieval thinkers began to notice that there was something seriously amiss with all aspects of Aristotle's natural philosophy, and not just those parts of it that directly contradicted the Christian faith. The time had come when medieval scholars could begin their own quest to advance knowledge .... striking out in new directions that neither the Greeks nor the Arabs ever explored. Their first breakthrough was to combine the two subjects of mathematics and physics in a way that had not been done before." (Hannam, p. 174)

The story of that breakthrough, and the remarkable Oxford scholars who achieved it and thus laid the foundations of true science - the "Merton Calculators" - probably deserves a book in itself. But Hannam's account certainly does them justice and forms a fascinating section of his work. The names of these pioneers of the scientific method - Thomas Bradwardine, Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, John Dumbleton and the delightfully named Richard Swineshead - deserve to be better known. Unfortunately, the obscuring shadow of "the Myth" means that they continue to be ignored or dismissed even in quite recent popular histories of science. Bradwardine's summary of the key insight these men uncovered is one of the great quotes of early science and deserves to be recognized as such:

"[Mathematics] is the revealer of every genuine truth ... whoever then has the effrontery to pursue physics while neglecting mathematics should know from the start that he will never make his entry through the portals of wisdom." (Quoted in Hannam, p. 176)

These men were not only the first to truly apply mathematics to physics but also developed logarithmic functions 300 years before John Napier, and the Mean Speed Theorem 200 years before Galileo. The fact that Napier and Galileo are credited with discovering things that Medieval scholars had already developed is yet another indication of how "the Myth" has warped our perceptions of the history of science.

Similarly, the physics and astronomy of Jean Buridan and Nicholas Oresme were radical and profound, but generally unknown to the average reader. Buridan was one of the first to compare the movements of the cosmos to those of another Medieval innovation - the clock. The image of a clockwork universe which was to serve scientists well into our own era began in the Middle Ages. And Oresme's speculations about a rotating Earth shows that Medieval scholars were happy to contemplate what were (to them) fairly outlandish ideas to see if they might work - Oresme found that this particular idea actually worked quite well. These men are hardly the products of a "dark age" and their careers are conspicuously free of any of the Inquisitors and threats of burning so fondly and luridly imagined by the fevered proponents of "the Myth".

Galileo, Inevitably

 
As mentioned above, no manifestation of "the Myth" is complete without the Galileo Affair being raised. The proponents of the idea that the Church stifled science and reason in the Middle Ages have to wheel him out, because without him they actually have absolutely zero examples of the Church persecuting anyone for anything to do with inquiries into the natural world. The common conception that Galileo was persecuted for being right about heliocentrism is a total oversimplification of a complex business, and one that ignores the fact that Galileo's main problem was not simply that his ideas disagreed with scriptural interpretation but also with the science of the time.

Contrary to the way the affair is usually depicted, the real sticking point was the fact that the scientific objections to heliocentrism at the time were still powerful enough to prevent its acceptance. Cardinal Bellarmine made it clear to Galileo in 1616 that if those scientific objections could be overcome then scripture could and would be reinterpreted. But while the objections still stood, the Church, understandably, was hardly going to overturn several centuries of exegesis for the sake of a flawed theory. Galileo agreed to only teach heliocentrism as a theoretical calculating device, then promptly turned around and, in typical style, taught it as fact. Thus his prosecution by the Inquistion in 1633.

Hannam gives the context for all this in suitable detail in a section of the book that also explains how the Humanism of the "Renaissance" led a new wave of scholars, who sought not only to idolize and emulate the ancients, but to turn their backs on the achievements of recent scholars like Duns Scotus, Bardwardine, Buridan, and Orseme. Thus many of their discoveries and advances were either ignored and forgotten (only to be rediscovered independently later) or scorned but quietly appropriated. The case for Galileo using the work of Medieval scholars without acknowledgement is fairly damning. In their eagerness to dump Medieval "dialectic" and ape the Greeks and Romans - which made the "Renaissance" a curiously conservative and rather retrograde movement in many ways - they discarded genuine developments and advancements by Medieval scholars. That a thinker of the calibre of Duns Scotus could become mainly known as the etymology of the word "dunce" is deeply ironic.

As good as the final part of the book is and as worthy as a fairly detailed analysis of the realities of the Galileo Affair clearly is, I must say the last four or five chapters of Hannam's book did feel as though they had bitten off a bit more than they could chew. I was able to follow his argument quite easily, but I am very familiar with the material and with the argument he is making. I suspect that those for whom this depiction of the "Renaissance," and the idea of Galileo as nothing more than a persecuted martyr to genius, might find that it gallops at too rapid a pace to really carry them along. Myths, after all, have a very weighty inertia.

At least one reviewer seems to have found the weight of that inertia too hard to resist, though perhaps she had some other baggage weighing her down. Nina Power, writing in New Humanist magazine, certainly seems to have had some trouble ditching the idea of the Church persecuting Medieval scientists:

Just because persecution wasn’t as bad as it could have been, and just because some thinkers weren’t always the nicest of people, doesn’t mean that interfering in their work and banning their ideas was justifiable then or is justifiable now."

Well, no-one said it was justifiable, and simply explaining how it came about and why it was not as extensive, or of the nature, that most people assume is not "justifying" it anyway - it is correcting a pseudo-historical misunderstanding. That said, Power does have something of a point when she notes "Hannam’s characterization of [Renaissance] thinkers as “incorrigible reactionaries” who “almost managed to destroy 300 years of progress in natural philosophy” is at odds with his more careful depiction of those that came before." This is not, however, because that characterization is wrong, but because the length and scope of the book really do not give him room to do this fairly complex and, to many, radical idea justice.

My only criticisms of the book are really quibbles. The sketch of the "agrarian revolution" of the Dark Ages described in Chapter One, which saw technology like the horse-collar and the mouldboard plough adopted and water and wind power harnessed to greatly increase production in previously unproductive parts of Europe is generally sound. But it does place too much emphasis on two elements in Lynn White's thesis in his seminal Medieval Technology and Social Change - the importance of the stirrup and the significance of the horse collar. As important and ground-breaking as White's thesis was in 1962, more recent analysis has found some of his central ideas dubious. The idea that the stirrup was as significant for the rise of shock-heavy cavalry as White claimed is now pretty much rejected by military historians. Also, his claims about how this cavalry itself caused the beginnings of the feudal system were dubious to begin with. Finally, the idea that Roman traction systems were as inefficient as White's sources make out has also been seriously questioned. Hannam seems to accept White's thesis wholesale, which is not really justified given it has been reassessed for over forty years now.

On a rather more personal note, as a humanist and atheist myself, there is a rather snippy little aside on page 212 where Hannam sneers that "non-believers have further muddied the waters by hijacking the word 'humanist' to mean a softer version of 'atheist'." Sorry, but just as not all humanists are atheists (as Hannam himself well knows) so not all atheists are humanists (as anyone hanging around on some of the more vitriolically anti-theist sites and forums will quickly realize). So there is no "non-believer" plot to "hijack" the word "humanist". Those of us who are humanists are humanists - end of story. And "atheism" does not need any "softening" anyway.

That aside, this is a marvelous book and a brilliant, readable, and accessible antidote to "the Myth". It should be on the Christmas wish-list of any Medievalist, science history buff, or anyone who has a misguided friend who still thinks the nights in the Middle Ages were lit by burning scientists.
 
 
Originally posted at Armarium Magnum. Used with permission.

It is commonly believed that the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo for abandoning the geocentric (earth-at-the-center) view of the solar system for the heliocentric (sun-at-the-center) view. The Galileo case, for many anti-Catholics, is thought to prove that the Church abhors science, refuses to abandon outdated teachings, and is not infallible. For Catholics, the episode is often an embarrassment. It shouldn’t be.

This article provides a brief explanation of what really happened to Galileo.

Anti-scientific?

 
The Church is not anti-scientific. It has supported scientific endeavors for centuries. During Galileo’s time, the Jesuits had a highly respected group of astronomers and scientists in Rome. In addition, many notable scientists received encouragement and funding from the Church and from individual Church officials. Many of the scientific advances during this period were made either by clerics or as a result of Church funding.

Nicolaus Copernicus dedicated his most famous work, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, in which he gave an excellent account of heliocentricity, to Pope Paul III. Copernicus entrusted this work to Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran clergyman who knew that Protestant reaction to it would be negative, since Martin Luther seemed to have condemned the new theory, and, as a result, the book would be condemned. Osiander wrote a preface to the book, in which heliocentrism was presented only as a theory that would account for the movements of the planets more simply than geocentrism did—something Copernicus did not intend.

Ten years prior to Galileo, Johannes Kepler published a heliocentric work that expanded on Copernicus’ work. As a result, Kepler also found opposition among his fellow Protestants for his heliocentric views and found a welcome reception among some Jesuits who were known for their scientific achievements.

Clinging to Tradition?

 
Anti-Catholics often cite the Galileo case as an example of the Church refusing to abandon outdated or incorrect teaching, and clinging to a "tradition." They fail to realize that the judges who presided over Galileo’s case were not the only people who held to a geocentric view of the universe. It was the received view among scientists at the time.

Centuries earlier, Aristotle had refuted heliocentricity, and by Galileo’s time, nearly every major thinker subscribed to a geocentric view. Copernicus refrained from publishing his heliocentric theory for some time, not out of fear of censure from the Church, but out of fear of ridicule from his colleagues.

Many people wrongly believe Galileo proved heliocentricity. He could not answer the strongest argument against it, which had been made nearly two thousand years earlier by Aristotle: If heliocentrism were true, then there would be observable parallax shifts in the stars’ positions as the earth moved in its orbit around the sun. However, given the technology of Galileo’s time, no such shifts in their positions could be observed. It would require more sensitive measuring equipment than was available in Galileo’s day to document the existence of these shifts, given the stars’ great distance. Until then, the available evidence suggested that the stars were fixed in their positions relative to the earth, and, thus, that the earth and the stars were not moving in space—only the sun, moon, and planets were.

Thus Galileo did not prove the theory by the Aristotelian standards of science in his day. In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina and other documents, Galileo claimed that the Copernican theory had the "sensible demonstrations" needed according to Aristotelian science, but most knew that such demonstrations were not yet forthcoming. Most astronomers in that day were not convinced of the great distance of the stars that the Copernican theory required to account for the absence of observable parallax shifts. This is one of the main reasons why the respected astronomer Tycho Brahe refused to adopt Copernicus fully.

Galileo could have safely proposed heliocentricity as a theory or a method to more simply account for the planets’ motions. His problem arose when he stopped proposing it as a scientific theory and began proclaiming it as truth, though there was no conclusive proof of it at the time. Even so, Galileo would not have been in so much trouble if he had chosen to stay within the realm of science and out of the realm of theology. But, despite his friends’ warnings, he insisted on moving the debate onto theological grounds.

In 1614, Galileo felt compelled to answer the charge that this "new science" was contrary to certain Scripture passages. His opponents pointed to Bible passages with statements like, "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed..." (Josh. 10:13). This is not an isolated occurrence. Psalms 93 and 104 and Ecclesiastes 1:5 also speak of celestial motion and terrestrial stability. A literalistic reading of these passages would have to be abandoned if the heliocentric theory were adopted. Yet this should not have posed a problem. As Augustine put it, "One does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said: ‘I will send you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon.’ For he willed to make them Christians, not mathematicians." Following Augustine’s example, Galileo urged caution in not interpreting these biblical statements too literally.

Unfortunately, throughout Church history there have been those who insist on reading the Bible in a more literal sense than it was intended. They fail to appreciate, for example, instances in which Scripture uses what is called "phenomenological" language—that is, the language of appearances. Just as we today speak of the sun rising and setting to cause day and night, rather than the earth turning, so did the ancients. From an earthbound perspective, the sun does appear to rise and appear to set, and the earth appears to be immobile. When we describe these things according to their appearances, we are using phenomenological language.

The phenomenological language concerning the motion of the heavens and the non-motion of the earth is obvious to us today, but was less so in previous centuries. Scripture scholars of the past were willing to consider whether particular statements were to be taken literally or phenomenologically, but they did not like being told by a non-Scripture scholar, such as Galileo, that the words of the sacred page must be taken in a particular sense.

During this period, personal interpretation of Scripture was a sensitive subject. In the early 1600s, the Church had just been through the Reformation experience, and one of the chief quarrels with Protestants was over individual interpretation of the Bible.

Theologians were not prepared to entertain the heliocentric theory based on a layman’s interpretation. Yet Galileo insisted on moving the debate into a theological realm. There is little question that if Galileo had kept the discussion within the accepted boundaries of astronomy (i.e., predicting planetary motions) and had not claimed physical truth for the heliocentric theory, the issue would not have escalated to the point it did. After all, he had not proved the new theory beyond reasonable doubt.

Galileo "Confronts" Rome

 
Galileo came to Rome to see Pope Paul V (1605-1621). The pope, weary of controversy, turned the matter over to the Holy Office, which issued a condemnation of Galileo’s theory in 1616. Things returned to relative quiet for a time, until Galileo forced another showdown.

At Galileo’s request, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a Jesuit—one of the most important Catholic theologians of the day—issued a certificate that, although it forbade Galileo to hold or defend the heliocentric theory, did not prevent him from conjecturing it. When Galileo met with the new pope, Urban VIII, in 1623, he received permission from his longtime friend to write a work on heliocentrism, but the new pontiff cautioned him not to advocate the new position, only to present arguments for and against it. When Galileo wrote the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he used an argument the pope had offered, and placed it in the mouth of his character Simplicio. Galileo, perhaps inadvertently, made fun of the pope, a result that could only have disastrous consequences. Urban felt mocked and could not believe how his friend could disgrace him publicly. Galileo had mocked the very person he needed as a benefactor. He also alienated his long-time supporters, the Jesuits, with attacks on one of their astronomers. The result was the infamous trial, which is still heralded as the final separation of science and religion.

Tortured for His Beliefs?

 
In the end, Galileo recanted his heliocentric teachings, but it was not—as is commonly supposed—under torture nor after a harsh imprison- ment. Galileo was, in fact, treated surprisingly well.

As historian Giorgio de Santillana, who is not overly fond of the Catholic Church, noted, "We must, if anything, admire the cautiousness and legal scruples of the Roman authorities." Galileo was offered every convenience possible to make his imprisonment in his home bearable.

Galileo’s friend Nicolini, Tuscan ambassador to the Vatican, sent regular reports to the court regarding affairs in Rome. Many of his letters dealt with the ongoing controversy surrounding Galileo.

Nicolini revealed the circumstances surrounding Galileo’s "imprisonment" when he reported to the Tuscan king: "The pope told me that he had shown Galileo a favor never accorded to another" (letter dated Feb. 13, 1633); " . . . he has a servant and every convenience" (letter, April 16); and "[i]n regard to the person of Galileo, he ought to be imprisoned for some time because he disobeyed the orders of 1616, but the pope says that after the publication of the sentence he will consider with me as to what can be done to afflict him as little as possible" (letter, June 18).

Had Galileo been tortured, Nicolini would have reported it to his king. While instruments of torture may have been present during Galileo’s recantation (this was the custom of the legal system in Europe at that time), they definitely were not used.

The records demonstrate that Galileo could not be tortured because of regulations laid down in The Directory for Inquisitors (Nicholas Eymeric, 1595). This was the official guide of the Holy Office, the Church office charged with dealing with such matters, and was followed to the letter.

As noted scientist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked, in an age that saw a large number of "witches" subjected to torture and execution by Protestants in New England, "the worst that happened to the men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof." Even so, the Catholic Church today acknowledges that Galileo’s condemnation was wrong. The Vatican has even issued two stamps of Galileo as an expression of regret for his mistreatment.

Infallibility

 
Although three of the ten cardinals who judged Galileo refused to sign the verdict, his works were eventually condemned. Anti-Catholics often assert that his conviction and later rehabilitation somehow disproves the doctrine of papal infallibility, but this is not the case, for the pope never tried to make an infallible ruling concerning Galileo’s views.

The Church has never claimed ordinary tribunals, such as the one that judged Galileo, to be infallible. Church tribunals have disciplinary and juridical authority only; neither they nor their decisions are infallible.

No ecumenical council met concerning Galileo, and the pope was not at the center of the discussions, which were handled by the Holy Office. When the Holy Office finished its work, Urban VIII ratified its verdict, but did not attempt to engage infallibility.

Three conditions must be met for a pope to exercise the charism of infallibility: (1) he must speak in his official capacity as the successor of Peter; (2) he must speak on a matter of faith or morals; and (3) he must solemnly define the doctrine as one that must be held by all the faithful.

In Galileo’s case, the second and third conditions were not present, and possibly not even the first. Catholic theology has never claimed that a mere papal ratification of a tribunal decree is an exercise of infallibility. It is a straw man argument to represent the Catholic Church as having infallibly defined a scientific theory that turned out to be false. The strongest claim that can be made is that the Church of Galileo’s day issued a non-infallible disciplinary ruling concerning a scientist who was advocating a new and still-unproved theory and demanding that the Church change its understanding of Scripture to fit his.

It is a good thing that the Church did not rush to embrace Galileo’s views, because it turned out that his ideas were not entirely correct, either. Galileo believed that the sun was not just the fixed center of the solar system but the fixed center of the universe. We now know that the sun is not the center of the universe and that it does move—it simply orbits the center of the galaxy rather than the earth.

As more recent science has shown, both Galileo and his opponents were partly right and partly wrong. Galileo was right in asserting the mobility of the earth and wrong in asserting the immobility of the sun. His opponents were right in asserting the mobility of the sun and wrong in asserting the immobility of the earth.

Had the Catholic Church rushed to endorse Galileo’s views—and there were many in the Church who were quite favorable to them—the Church would have embraced what modern science has disproved.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic.com. Used with permission.
(Image credit: PBS)