The Ontological Necessity of a God Thread?: Religion II

[The Marquis de Leech]

Fine, call it immoral. Call it anti-freedom. But don't call it anti-science, because it wasn't.

[Gears of the Beast]

Fine, call it immoral. Call it anti-freedom. But don't call it anti-science, because it wasn't.

You don't think it was, I do. We disagree, I think we've established that.

[The Marquis de Leech]

OK, let's take a step back. Let's pretend that the Church going after Galileo was the Church actively obstructing science (it wasn't, but let's pretend). How do you generalise that one particular case into a wider policy of hostility to science?

[Rorshach]

You don't think it was, I do. We disagree, I think we've established that.

Indeed. But only one of you follows scientific methods (that is, historical science).

[TrueMetis]

You guys really (like in really, you need it) should og read "The great ptolemaic smackdown". Like in you need to.

The things you know about the Galileo trial? You don't know them. Like in don't know. Seriously.

Basically, what you don't know is context. So you read things both with the present in mind, but also out of context within the period. So go read. Or the Tim O'Neill piece on Quora - it's well researched and sourced. But please stop this "Galileo was condemned for science because of scripture"-thing. The claim itself is anti-Scientific (science here meaning historical science). Histoirans know better.

ETA: having installed Chrome on my in-laws computer, I can add links again. Oh, happy day!

I linked the papal condemnation written by the Judges who sentenced Galileo. It explicitly states that one of the reasons they condemn him is going against holy scripture.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

I linked the papal condemnation written by the Judges who sentenced Galileo. It explicitly states that one of the reasons they condemn him is going against holy scripture.

Yes, but if the RC Church was wrong about the science, they were willing to reinterpret scripture around the science. But it went against their then exegetical views, which have certainly not been fixed in time, but have mostly been accommodating of the sciences of their eras.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

TM,

I believe the point that RBPL and Rorshach are making is that if the reasons offered were the only and primary reasons for Galileo's house arrest and censure then the Church is very inconsistent in the application of the principles they claim to be upholding in their ruling given the disparate treatment of Copernicius and Kepler as compaired to Galileo.

As such it behoves the careful examiner to consider the wider context of the ruling for a more likely explaination of it's impossition than "the Roman Catholic Church was generally hostile to scientific inquiry" which appears to be the position you and GotB are espousing.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[TrueMetis]

TM,

I believe the point that RBPL and Rorshach are making is that if the reasons offered were the only and primary reasons for Galileo's house arrest and censure then the Church is very inconsistent in the application of the principles they claim to be upholding in their ruling given the disparate treatment of Copernicius and Kepler as compaired to Galileo.

As such it behoves the careful examiner to consider the wider context of the ruling for a more likely explaination of it's impossition than "the Roman Catholic Church was generally hostile to scientific inquiry" which appears to be the position you and GotB are espousing.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Not a position I'm espousing, though I do think religion generally does not mesh with science all that well. I'm merely pointing out that despite what Rosrach said "it goes against scripture" was used to condemn Galileo. The reasons behind using scripture to condemn him and the fact that Galileo's interpretation was wrong matters not one bit on that part.

It's like the government taking down Al Capone for tax fraud, we know that wasn't the real reason they were after him. Similarly they wanted to take Galileo down and as a way of doing that condemned him by using that fact that his interpretation of things went against holy scripture.

[The Marquis de Leech]

For well over a millennia, the established science had been that the Sun moved around the Earth (yes, there was some Greek bloke who thought the other way round, but his "reasoning" was that fire was purer than earth, so should be at the centre). The Fathers of the Church had interpreted Scripture as referring to a stationary Earth for that reason - the science said so, That was why the Church wanted Galileo to show that his model was better, before they went to the hassle of reinterpreting scripture (Catholicism is much more comfortable with this sort of thing than more literal Protestants). But he didn't (and was an arsehole about it), so we end up seeing Galileo being condemned for going against scripture.

It's not fundamentalism v. science. It's a burden of proof issue: Galileo could have taught the same model, without a "scripture" problem, if only he'd actually been able to actually back it up, and as such you can just as easily replace the word "scripture" in the ruling with "established science".

[Gears of the Beast]

As such it behoves the careful examiner to consider the wider context of the ruling for a more likely explaination of it's impossition than "the Roman Catholic Church was generally hostile to scientific inquiry" which appears to be the position you and GotB are espousing.

Not a position I'm espousing either, which I have actually clarified 32 times. I'm in agreement with TM.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Not a position I'm espousing either, which I have actually clarified 32 times. I'm in agreement with TM.

So your position is that the Church was anti-science in its dealing with Galileo. Excellent. What general lesson are we to derive from this particular incident?

[Gears of the Beast]

So your position is that the Church was anti-science in its dealing with Galileo. Excellent. What general lesson are we to derive from this particular incident?

Who cares? That comment was with regard to my opinion on whether the church is anti-science, I answered not really with the caveat that throughout the history of the catholic church there have been times in which its actions/positions have been hostile towards science - Galileo is an example of a particular instance in which the catholic church was hostile towards science. I'm happy to discuss why the catholic church is a morally repugnant organisation that should be (figuratively) burned to the ground but its position on science isn't really a part of that as I have made clear several times.

[The Marquis de Leech]

To draw a modern analogy. Suppose for the sake of argument that the Church still enjoyed seventeenth century level powers. Suppose also however that it had upgraded its interpretation of scripture to fit with modern understanding (which it pretty much has anyway). Now suppose that some guy (in 2014) wants to teach that the Earth is flat. He's a bit of an arsehole about it, and can't show why his model is better than a round earth model, so the Church ultimately condemns him for going against scripture and established knowledge. Who is being unscientific here?

[The Marquis de Leech]

Who cares? That comment was with regard to my opinion on whether the church is anti-science, I answered not really with the caveat that throughout the history of the catholic church there have been times in which its actions/positions have been hostile towards science - Galileo is an example of a particular instance in which the catholic church was hostile towards science. I'm happy to discuss why the catholic church is a morally repugnant organisation that should be (figuratively) burned to the ground but its position on science isn't really a part of that as I have made clear several times.

So if there is no general lesson to be drawn from the Galileo case, why bring it up at all?

[Gears of the Beast]

To draw a modern analogy. Suppose for the sake of argument that the Church still enjoyed seventeenth century level powers. Suppose also however that it had upgraded its interpretation of scripture to fit with modern understanding (which it pretty much has anyway). Now suppose that some guy (in 2014) wants to teach that the Earth is flat. He's a bit of an arsehole about it, and can't show why his model is better than a round earth model, so the Church ultimately condemns him for going against scripture and established knowledge. Who is being unscientific here?

Ok, first of all they're not analogous at all. You're positing Galileo as some bumbling moron with crackpot ideas that contradicted proven facts about reality. Just simply looking at what Pope John Paul II said about him, this clearly wasn't the case. "Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture".

But sure. To use a similar scenario to yours let's say a known scientist - holds and talks about a position he has that contradicts what many others in the field believe. For any institution to:

-force him to completely stop teaching, defending, discussing or writing about this position

-force him to not hold this position at all

-force him to recant this position

would be very hostile to science indeed.

[Gears of the Beast]

So if there is no general lesson to be drawn from the Galileo case, why bring it up at all?

*takes deep breath*

As I said; "That comment was with regard to my opinion on whether the church is anti-science, I answered not really with the caveat that throughout the history of the catholic church there have been times in which its actions/positions have been hostile towards science"

I was then asked to provide examples. Which is why I said "- Galileo is an example of a particular instance in which the catholic church was hostile towards science."

Also, I didn't say that there is no general lesson to be drawn. That's just not relevant whatsoever.

[TrueMetis]

To draw a modern analogy. Suppose for the sake of argument that the Church still enjoyed seventeenth century level powers. Suppose also however that it had upgraded its interpretation of scripture to fit with modern understanding (which it pretty much has anyway). Now suppose that some guy (in 2014) wants to teach that the Earth is flat. He's a bit of an arsehole about it, and can't show why his model is better than a round earth model, so the Church ultimately condemns him for going against scripture and established knowledge. Who is being unscientific here?

If they outright arrest him and prevent him from expressing his views? The church. Anytime you suppress dissenting views via censorship that is anti-science. Although a better analogy would be string theory, cause while geocentrism may have been the better supported theory, that doesn't make it well supported. After all for all that geocentrism was considered true many of Copernicus' ideas were used despite coming from a heliocentric framework.

Note though this is different from not allowing him to teach it that way in school.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Ok, first of all they're not analogous at all. You're positing Galileo as some bumbling moron with crackpot ideas that contradicted proven facts about reality. Just simply looking at what Pope John Paul II said about him, this clearly wasn't the case. "Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture".

Galileo's ideas were, given the data available, crackpot. For starters, a moving earth should result in shifts in the perceived location of stars relative to others (the so-called stellar parallax). However, no stellar parallax could be measured until the nineteenth century: the technology didn't exist in the seventeenth. The Copernican argument was that the stars were really far away, and thus the stellar parallax couldn't be measured properly; this argument was correct in hindsight, but at the time was merely one artificial supposition being imposed on another (recall Ockham's Razor?). Then there were the problems of the allegedly circular planetary orbits, which resulted in all sorts of insane fudges to make the things fit. Then there was the fact that Copernicus was relying on obsolete star charts to make his calculations: Tycho Brahe (and then Kepler) actually went out and got fresh data for themselves.

Put simply, if you apply modern methods of science to the available information, anyone with a brain could see Galileo was wrong. Which is what the Church did. Except that Galileo kept insisting his version was right, and insisted that anyone who disagreed with him was an idiot. Which is asking for trouble.

(As for John Paul II, his statement is, of course, wrong. Amongst other things, Galileo's discoveries about Jupiter's moons and the phases of Venus were being made by others at the same time. Galileo was just supremely good at historical PR and at trolling).

[The Marquis de Leech]

But sure. To use a similar scenario to yours let's say a known scientist - holds and talks about a position he has that contradicts what many others in the field believe. For any institution to:

-force him to completely stop teaching, defending, discussing or writing about this position

-force him to not hold this position at all

-force him to recant this position

would be very hostile to science indeed.

If he holds a position that is overtly incorrect, and continues to hold it as absolute truth when he has been told he is free to teach it as a possibility, and then insults everyone (including the most powerful person in Europe) who disagrees with him, one can only expect repercussions. Today, our flat-earther would merely be regarded as a harmless crank. Seventeenth Century Europe, in the grip of the Reformation, was not so tolerant of free speech, but Galileo did not help himself. If he'd followed modern scientific principles, rather than being an attention-seeking troll, he'd have never had the problems he did.

[The Marquis de Leech]

*takes deep breath*

As I said; "That comment was with regard to my opinion on whether the church is anti-science, I answered not really with the caveat that throughout the history of the catholic church there have been times in which its actions/positions have been hostile towards science"

I was then asked to provide examples. Which is why I said "- Galileo is an example of a particular instance in which the catholic church was hostile towards science."

Also, I didn't say that there is no general lesson to be drawn. That's just not relevant whatsoever.

So you want to use Galileo to illustrate the Church being hostile to science. But you don't think the Church has had a general policy of being hostile to science, because an illustration of a Churchman (like Mendel) advancing science is supposedly irrelevant to what you're getting at. Except that I don't see you arguing that the Church has both advanced and inhibited science throughout its long history: you only want to focus on the (alleged) inhibitions, not the advancements. Which strikes me as a tad disingenuous.

Is Galileo a one-off, where we get to laugh at those silly superstitious idiots who had the nerve to try and use the information available to them at the time, or is this just a convenient stick to whack over the heads of the contemporary Church?