Shutdown of Inquiry...

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

Galileo Galilei

The astronomer Galileo was more than a simple academic.  He was a wealthy aristocrat, a social climber, and something of a political figure.  Far from a naive scientist who bumbled into the bad graces of the Catholic Church, Galileo understood quite well the dangerous waters he was trying to navigate.  If not for his gross misjudgment of the climate in Rome he might not be the martyr to empiricism that he is today.

By the early seventeenth century the Copernican theory had been gaining ground for many decades not only in scientific circles but also with church scholars as well.  The papacy had tried to largely subsume the Copernican system by holding it to be essentially a mathematical trick or shortcut for making superior computations in specific cases, while maintaining that the heavens really moved according to the Earth-centered Ptolemaic system.  While there was a lot of room for debate about the relative merits of the two different systems, the weight of evidence had been accumulating almost entirely on the heliocentric side, especially with Kepler's updating Copernicus's circles to ellipses in 1609.  Although Galileo generally avoided making public statements on the matter, it was generally known from his private debates and correspondences that he stood shoulder to shoulder with Copernicus and Kepler, and against the church.

Never one to shrink from a conflict of interest, the Pope as the defender of the faith asked the Inquisition as the arbiters of scholarship to decide the matter.  Wonder of wonders, they came down on the side of faith.  Cardinal Bellarmine, Rome's chief science officer, told Galileo that he should not argue for heliocentrism, or if he did, that the evidence should be so strong as to be incontrovertible.

Maybe Galileo didn't get the hint.  Or perhaps he thought the new Pope Urban VIII, who was best known for nepotism and was an admirer of Galileo, would be supportive of further argument.  He had several papal audiences from which to gage the pope's mood and the overall political landscape.  Ultimately in 1632 he published his famous Dialogue, presuming the Rome would, however reluctantly, embrace his views since the preponderance of evidence was with Copernicus.

The reaction should be predictable to any who have watched how the faith-based deal with opposition.  Rather than looking at the entirety of the argument, the Catholic Church focused on Galileo's own theory of tides which, while he felt it supported the Copernican system nonetheless contained significant flaws.  Despite whatever other strong evidence there might have been, the Inquisition attacked the weakest part of Galileo's overall work.  On this pretext he was forced to publicly recant his conclusions and spend the rest of his life under house arrest.

The trial and recantation had a chilling effect on inquiry.  Galileo had been made an example of, and it had exactly the result that the church hierarchy had calculated.  The lesson is still valid today.  Those in power will use force to stop inquiry that undermines that power.  The demand for incontrovertible evidence in certain matters amounts to a ban on inquiry, and is now as it was then, anti-reason.  We can't accept house arrest now and hope for vindication by history.  We don't have that luxury.

- jack*

Comments

[Zenji]

there's nothing wrong with asking for evidence, or even better evidence.....there is something wrong with squelching the pursuit of evidence. There is also something very wrong with refusing to be swayed by evidence, in favor of random faith-based beliefs.

The church may have made galileo's life difficult, but it lost in a big, big way from the whole issue. In my mind, it is largely because of the refusal to accept heliocentric theories, despite the clear and eventually incontrovertible evidence, that scientifically and rationally minded people turned against the church in such large numbers in the following centuries. The church took a stand, declaring that they had the right answer from faith and that opposing explanations were 'wrong' despite all appearances to the contrary, and that they must not be allowed to flourish. But humans are reasonable animals, and it was increasingly clear to more and more people that the church was just wrong on the issue...and if they were wrong, how could reasonable people support them? There was a choice that had to be made: follow the dictates of reason, or follow the dictates of the church, no matter how unreasonable. Is it any surprise that millions chose reason? It is, to me, more surprising that so many did not.

I see evolution as essentially a repetition of the same phenomenon. The church is going to insist contrary to all reason that they know the answer, when it is increasingly obvious that they simply don't....and it will hurt them, badly, in the long run. If reasonable people are restrained from accepting the church by the church's clear dedication to fantasy, it cannot be good for them in any way. In my mind, refusal to embrace science is the number one issue leading to the church's decline and the rise of atheism in the the modern world, followed somewhat by it's opposition to Marxism. (although to be fair, Marx opposed the church first, but he did so in part because...he saw his ideology as *scientific*. )

[Dr. C.]

What you say has some wisdom, Zenji, and I guess I would agree that, to some extent, the Catholic Church is in opposition to Science. But, there are many Catholic scientists, including evolutionary biologists. And, in fact, the Church does not preach strict creationism:
Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms...
from: http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp
Now, mind you, I'm not out here defending the Church (though I did in my youth). Its just that the attack by the Know Nothings is so virulent, we need all the allies we can get. Let the Church demand that Catholics believe that the "soul" is created de novo with each birth (as we have discussed before, this is, I guess, the crux of the aborthion argument). But, the overwhelming scientific evidence of biological evolution has been accepted by the Church and we should use this as an argument against the crazies that want to deny it.
By the way, Pharyngula
http://pharyngula.org/
has great stuff on this battle.