Comments on: The Galileo Legend

By: Getting the story straight: Galileo and the church « Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:20:13 +0000

[...] Here’s an essay from Peter Klein at the economics blog Organizations and Markets, on details of the story of Galileo, setting the record straight, but raising a lot more issues about what actually happened in this story from the history of science. The problem is that the leaders of Galileo’s day didn’t think the sun revolves around the earth. My former colleague Thomas Lessl is an expert on Galileo, and from him I learned that virtually every aspect of the Galileo legend is false. [...]

By: pj

pj — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:27:59 +0000

My understanding of the conflict, derived from reading original documents and correspondence, is that Galileo was punished by the Pope for his lack of charity toward his opponents. Galileo in fact had the better arguments theologically as well as scientifically, knew it, and didn’t hesitate to ram that superiority down his opponents’ throats. He mocked his opponents mercilessly, and called them stupid. The Pope directed him to treat them with courtesy and charity. Galileo followed up by publishing the Dialogue, in which he placed his opponents’ arguments in the mouth of Simplicio (i.e., “Simpleton”) and made them look as silly as possible. This led directly to the Pope’s rebuke. It was a rebuke that was, presumably, based on the Pope’s concern for Galileo’s soul and his desire for comity in the Church, and probably had nothing to do with the Pope’s opinion on heliocentrism, which there is reason to believe he supported.

The similarity between Galileo’s theological arguments, which were in fact taken almost word for word from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and Luther’s was a bad argument made by Galileo’s fundamentalist opponents. I don’t believe the Pope ever endorsed either the theology or science of Galileo’s opponents, rather he was pushing for a more civil theological debate and for obedience to his pastoral directives.

It is impossible to understand the Galileo issue except as an intra-Church squabble among the faithful. To represent Galileo as a “secularist” is quite unfaithful to history, and would certainly have shocked him, since he was one of the most devout and theologically sophisticated lay Catholics of his day, and a close friend to many senior churchmen.

Why was Galileo, who as Postrel says was capable of being a “courtier,” so stubborn and strong in his behavior? It was because he thought the theological stakes were very high — and no doubt this appraisal was influenced by the Reformation. He was sufficiently devoted to the Church that he wanted to eradicate error in it, even at the cost of personal sacrifice.

From the modern perspective, the Pope placed too high a premium on charity and too little a premium on truth. But we shouldn’t denigrate the intentions of people from another time until we have understood their perspective.

By: Thomas Lessl

Thomas Lessl — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:37:20 +0000

The position I take on the Galileo case in the article Peter Klein quotes from is not really a “revisionist” argument. That interpretation of the Church’s prosecution of Galileo is not my own. It is a compliation of the interpretations given by all of the major Galileo historians of the last fifty years. I don’t mention Sobel, simply because my research predated her popular book. Those who read the full article will see that I do not deny any of the facts mentioned above–though Galileo was technically not “locked up.” He lived out his remaining years under house arrest. The issue is how this event and the larger religious controversy that arose out of the Copernican revoluion are interpreted by popular writers like Hawking. I did not object to the seminal importance of Galileo’s contributions to science in my comments on Hawking’s tribute. What is objectionable is Hawking’s silly claim that no one before Galileo thought that natural observation could have a scientific pay off, and his further assertion that this anti-scientific stance was rooted in religious prejudice. Although Aristotelian assumptions were clearly an obstacle to the development of science that Galileo helped to clear away, the empiricist doctrine that Hawking lauds was deeply rooted in Aristotle’s philosophy of science–something that Galileo himself (contra Hawking) acknowledges in the very book that was at the center of this controversy. So if the Church sided with the Aristotelians against Galileo, it certainly was not taking an anti-empiricist or anti-scientific stance.

By: spostrel

spostrel — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:56:56 +0000

I’ve read a few articles that take this revisionist view. They generally read like special pleading to me. The one you linked leaves the same impression. Its attempt to denigrate Galileo’s seminal contribution to the methods of modern science–the use of mathematical laws to describe motion, the breakout from Aristotelian styles of reasoning–is unsupported and unconvincing, though I do agree that cartoon versions of the medieval period as a scientific desert are nonsense.

The apologetic for the church is implausible in the first place. Think about it. Galileo was a well-connected, devout, and skilled courtier. If anyone should have been able to finesse the conflict between what he was compelled to say as a scientist and church doctrine, it would be him. Yet he ended up in confinement (where he ended up doing his greatest work–I hope deans don’t apply this lesson to our productivity). His love of the church is all the more reason for believing that it was his scientific views, not his theological opinions, that got him in trouble.

Lesai does not deny that Galileo was locked up by the church for saying that the earth actually moves, instead of claiming that terrestrial motion was only a useful mathematical assumption (the church’s line). Even the church-sympathetic Dava Sobel has it down that way. And if you don’t believe the earth moves, you’re not really a Copernican or a heliocentrist. This is one case where instrumentalist philosophy of science doesn’t cut it–realism is called for.

I agree that the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation raised the stakes and made the Catholic church more prickly, but it isn’t like Luther made Galilean physics a central point of his theology. The role of academic feuds in generating the persecution is worth remembering, especially in today’s climate, but it is irrelevant to the truth that the church opposed science when it conflicted with official theology. We also know that Copernicus himself and later thinkers such as Descartes were extremely circumspect in propounding their views, precisely because of fears of heresy accusations.