Even Galileo was free to believe what he wanted
Myth 7 in Galileo Goes to Jail is that Giordano Bruno was a martyr for science; the author, Jole Shackelford, corrects this by pointing out that Bruno was burned alive for heresy, not science. Oh; that’s all right then.
He sets the stage by quoting from…guess…The Warfare of Science (1876), by Andrew Dickson White. The White-Draper thesis is the great bugbear of the revisionists on this subject, and after awhile one starts to wonder why it is so urgent to correct the mistakes of a history (however influential) dated 1876.
Whatever. White made the mistake of implying that Bruno was killed for being a Copernican when in fact he was killed for being a heretic. All right – he was killed for being a heretic. And?
And he had some nerve, that’s what.
How did this defrocked monk and unrepentant heretic who denied the doctrine of the Holy Trinity – the key to Catholic teaching of redemption and eternal life – come to be “the world’s first martyr to science”? [p 63]
Does that read like straight secular history to you? It doesn’t to me. It reads like indignant Catholic history. It reads as if Shackelford takes heresy for granted and thinks Bruno should have repented for it, and as if he thinks Bruno was very wrong to “deny” the “doctrine” of the “Holy Trinity” and also as if he thinks redemption and eternal life are meaningful concepts and things it is possible to have. The article doesn’t read like that throughout, but it often comes close. There’s a strange deafness to the possibility that “heresy” is not a crime and that killing people for it could have a chilling effect on free inquiry.
The Catholic church did not impose thought control on astronomers, and even Galileo was free to believe what he wanted about the position and mobility of the earth, so long as he did not teach the Copernican hypothesis as a truth on which Holy Scripture had no bearing.
Oh I see – liberality itself then. He could think what he liked, provided he shut up about it, but as for saying it aloud – well really. How dare he.
More later.
And the Catholic Church hierarchy never had anyone burned alive or totured for heresy either. In Bruno’s day heresy was a crime against the State, and who was better qualified than the Holy Church to find out for sure if a suspect was spouting heresy?
Once the Church had brought its expertise to bear and the facts were established, the heretic would then be handed over to the State authorities for punishment while the Church scrubbed its hands.
No doubt they learned that trick from Pontius Pilate.
At least Shakleford’s apologia has this going for it: the writing must have kept him off the streets, where the Devil soon finds work for idle hands to do.
I’m glad you are reading the book. Remember Shackelford is trying to address the myth that Bruno was burned for his science, which is a fact I see repeated everywhere – including a recent documentary series on Channel 4 in the UK. I doubt he thinks its a good idea to burn hotheaded Italians for espousing hermeticism.
Oh, come on, this is really cutting things a bit fine, is it not? We’ll burn him for heresy, but not for science?! Dear God! What idiocy it is to believe in gods, and to suppose that there is such a thing as heresy. Bruno had a comprehensive world vision, which was very much, in a sense, like Spinoza’s. The universe itself was material, and it had, in some sense, a universal soul, which latter idea, I understand, was the heretical part. Now, we arrest the man, try him before the Inquisition, and determine to burn him to death for that part, while holding — is this true, that Bruno’s conception of an infinite universe is not heretical? I doubt it. First cause arguments, such as the ones upheld by the Council of Trent, are arguments which depend upon the finiteness of the universe. It is difficult to see how the Inquisition separated the scientific from the heretical from amongst Bruno’s beliefs, and a bit precious to suggest that they even tried. This kind of late night apologetics, that one might her in a freshman dorm, is just a bit silly, isn’t it? Got to be burned, you see, since he is a heretic, but we won’t burn him for his science, of which we heartily approve! Madness, sheer unadulterated madness!
Exactly why do you think Jole Shackelford’s essay is apologetics ?
Right…
Except back then, science WAS heresy.
Shackleford is dumb as a post.
I haven’t read the essay, and don’t plan to in the near future, but you said:
I assume there is some important reason for separating out the heresy from the science, and that has something to do with the status of the church vis a vis its relationship to science today. Obviously, the church doesn`t get many kudos from burning people to death. There`s no a big upside to burning people to death. But it helps if it was for something like heresy, which no one understands, and might be justified from the church`s point of view. Whereas to burn them up for their science — well, that`s frowned on a bit more seriously nowadays. We don`t really care what you did to your heretics way back when, but when it comes to science, the church likes to think of itself as on the winning team, so it helps if Galileo was condemned for heresy rather than for science — since you can, after all, show whether the science was on the right track or not, but the theology, well, that`s a moveable feast. That`s why I think it`s pure apologetics. And the whole enterprise stinks to high heaven!
And Al Capone’s biggest crime was tax evasion…
“deviations from teachings of religion considered fundamental by scholars of the relevant religion.”
So if two scholars disagree on what is considered fundamental, are they both guilty?
Argh, that went on the wrong post for some reason. Weird. Nevermind.
“The Warfare of Science (1876), by Andrew Dickson White”
This is garbled.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/110800069x/sr=1-2/qid=1289856938/ref=dp_proddesc_1?ie=UTF8&n=283155&qid=1289856938&sr=1-2
History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science
by John William Draper was published in 1875.
——–
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
by Andrew Dickson White bears a copyright date of 1896. The full text is available online:
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitewtc.html
Bruno is mentioned in
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitea01.html
chapter I, part I:
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitea03.html
chapter I part III:
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitec02.html
chapter III, part II
Brief mention also in chapter III, parts IV, VI.
The full text of History of the Conflict between Religion and Science by John William Draper is also available online:
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DraHist.html
chapter 6:
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DraHist.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=6&division=div1
(Bold added by me for emphasis)
This reminds me of a discussion at John Wilkin’s blog a few years ago. Wilkin’s mate who goes by the name ThornyC reckoned A.C. Grayling was wrong in asserting that Galileo was in trouble with the church because the church handed heretics over to the secular state. Or something. I didn’t like it then and don’t now. I mean, handing over someone to the Catholic Taliban doesn’t absolve you of responsibility.
I read most of that book, and I found it intellectually dishonest–the blatant bending of history to exculpate religion. The Bruno business is only one of several cases. Numbers is a well known accommodationist, and he’s flying his full colors in this book. (Remember his mutually congratulatory debate on Bloggingheads with Michael Behe?)
Rather transparent and sinister sophistry. The essential fact is that Bruno was murdered because he disagreed with the Church and he certrainly wasn’t ” the world’s first martyr to science”, Hypatia of Alexandria was murdered by Christian psychopaths more than a thousand years earlier.
I read most of that book, and I found it intellectually dishonest–the blatant bending of history to exculpate religion
Hi Jerry – I really don’t see that. As I recall one of the chapters in the book slayed the myth that Darwin and Haeckel were complicit in Nazi Biology – which I would have thought would have at least won your favor; ditto the old chestnut about Darwin converting on his death bed. Numbers edited the book sure, but his chapter was on how Creationism isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon which I seem to remember you drawing attention to in the past. It seems to me the work accomodationist is getting slung around in a very McCarthyist way.
Yes I know that, and I didn’t say otherwise. My point is that Shackelford seems to be implying that “heretic” is a valid category, that “heresy” deserves to be punished, that the church was within its rights to punish Bruno for “heresy,” and so on. My point is not to say “Oh gee Bruno was too so burned for his science.”
Oh, and lest we not be alert, the Catholic version of history will show that they were at the forefront of gay rights, women’s reproductive rights, and the rights of abused altar boys. Stay tuned to atheist discussion boards, where these and other revisionist claims will be pushed by apologists. Can’t hardly wait.
My point is that Shackelford seems to be implying that “heretic” is a valid category, that “heresy” deserves to be punished, that the church was within its rights to punish Bruno for “heresy,” and so on.
I think his point is that he was a heretic by 16th century standards. That makes him a different sort of martyr than the one he was portrayed as in the 19th and 20th century. Frances Yates describes him as a martyr for magic but really he was burned for his religious beliefs; that the church should adopt Hermetism, that Jesus was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved…etc.. So if anything he is a martyr for religious toleration.
Jerry, I think, if I remember correctly, Numbers had that conversation (it was hardly a debate) with Paul Nelson, not Behe.
Eric, you said at #6: “Obviously, the church doesn`t get many kudos from burning people to death.”
A time frame is necessary for this. It has not burnt people for a while now, not because its clerics would not like to, but because the political cost would be too high; even if the many despotic regimes under whose patronage it has operated in the last 100 years allowed it to do so. But there never was a more profound lesson for the mass of observers at a late Mediaeval execution than when it was carried out by burning the victim to death in a public place. For the victim, the fire once ignited would burn forever. In the view of all those brainwashed with Catholic dogma, Bruno would have escaped the fire in Rome only by landing in the fire of Hell.
A most delightful bunch of clerical bastards. Needless to add, the late late Mediaeval Catholic Church of today is still at war with science on a number of fronts, and its modern clerics are still inventing apologies for the acts of their late Mediaeval brothers in Christ.
http://space.about.com/cs/astronomyhistory/a/giordanobruno.htm
The same could be said of most of Newton’s ideas outside of physics; having kooky ideas, particularly before truly modern science, hardly disqualified one from being a scientist (or natural philosopher, if one prefers to avoid those particular anachronisms). This is not even to start on woomeisters such as Aristotle.
That said, I think Bruno was a nut who did little if any real “science” (although he was prescient in some respects, much as the atoms of Democritus presaged later ideas in chemistry and physics). But this is hardly relevant to the injustice of his execution. I’d be surprised if the Church cared strongly about the origins of his ideas; that he was espousing them, for whatever reason, was the real issue. And it’s quite plausible that more empirically serious thinkers who might have had related ideas were dissuaded by the prospect of the death penalty.
So I’d be willing to credit these sorts of apology (and they are apologies, insofar as they attempt to defend the Church’s relationship with science) as perhaps accurate, but missing the point, which is that the Church inhibited science, even if it only did so incidentally in eradicating heresy, that endeavor itself a (dare I say damnably?) horrific pursuit.
Humphrey
On Giordano:
Okay, lets say it was the heresy. How do you, in all intellectual honesty, seperate that from his science? The major issue he refused to recant on was the multiplicity of worlds and their eternity, how do you seperate this issue into “Heresy” and not have it included in “science.”
And isn’t the attempt to do so somewhat suspect? I mean, of course they sentenced him for heresy – ideas they disagreed with were considered heresy. That means science they disagreed with was heresy.
And before anybody points out just how wrong Bruno was, Freeman makes an excellent point on that:
As to the book’s treatment of Darwin, it is kind of irrelevant. Someone being spot on in one instance doesn’t give them a license to be iffy-at-best in another.
I don’t think many of you will have had the chance to read James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers yet but thanks to the world -renowned Regnery Publishers it will be available next year in the US as The Genesis of Science. It has a long section on why Bruno was burned for heresy and not science. It contains such immortal lines as this (P. 307-8):Apparently, according to Hannam, Bruno was caught out misrepresenting his sources at Oxford and then . . .’ the magician slunk off back to the continent. He wandered around Europe hawking his thoughts for almost another decade before ,in 1591, he made the fateful decision to return to Italy into the arms of the Inquisition. A Venetian patrician had invited him to the city and after a few months denounced him to the local inquisitor as a heretic. It has been suggested that the invitation to Italy was a trap, but perhaps the experience of having Bruno in his house for a few months was quite sufficient to cause any sensible Catholic to hand him over to the authorities’. [NO comment needed- thank God ,for sensible Catholics] And then there is a section about that while his scientific views were on the list of ‘heretical statements’ . . ‘ these beliefs were discussed in the Inquisition’s files , but this in no way proves that they were deemed formally heretical’. Phew, I was just getting worried that he might have been burned for his scientific views. Of course not, as Hannam goes on to tell us. ‘Copernicanism was not declared a heresy until 1616’, so Bruno could not have been condemned for heresy in 1600 but presumably he could have been if he had hung on for another sixteen years (in the Vatican prisons where he spent nine years) . Sorry,Hannam , I thought you were meant to be arguing that the Catholic Church supported science!
What a relief, Bruno was burned for his magic and heresy after all!. You can see why in the UK ( courtesy of the New Humanist Blog) I have been complaining that this book was shortlisted as a Science Book of the Year by the Royal Society!! This extract gives you some idea of its racy style!
It is completely untrue to say that Bruno’s cosmological views were not relevant to his heresy trial. The Vatican has conveniently misplaced the records of Bruno’s trial, but they have retained records of some of Bruno’s interrogations. And the record shows Bruno defending his views on cosmology as being based on empirical evidence AND claiming it did not contradict Scripture. The Church was clearly persecuting Bruno for his proto-scientific cosmological views (why else would they interrogate him about it and why would he feel the need to defend himself?). Really, it’s a great example of the church burning the religious moderate. Bruno was a fervent Christian and believed his views were consistent Scripture. Ah, the fruits of accommodationism.
The same Inquisition that sent Bruno to his death also sent Galileo into house arrest for the rest of his life. Not only that, but Cardinal Bellarmine who contested Bruno’s heresy was the same man who summoned Galileo 16 years later — and Galileo was questioned in the room where Bruno was interrogated. I am quite sure the parallels were not lost on Galileo, although these parallels seem to be lost on modern apologists like Hannam and Shackelford.
It is generous of Shackelford to allow 16-17th century Europeans the right to think what they liked provided they never, ever spoke their minds, but surely that’s only because the church had no ability to persecute people according to their beliefs, only their stated beliefs. Does he really imagine that if the Inquisition had access to a mind-reading machine that they would have let people think as they pleased?
Since Rome was at the time the centre of the Papal States wouldn’t it have been the pope’s own lackeys who executed Giordano since the pope was the secular authority there? just asking……
As for the difference between burning Giordano for heresy based on dogma or heresy based on science seems a stretch to me. If it hadn’t been for his science would he have been a heretic?
Okay, lets say it was the heresy. How do you, in all intellectual honesty, seperate that from his science? The major issue he refused to recant on was the multiplicity of worlds and their eternity, how do you seperate this issue into “Heresy” and not have it included in “science.”
I think because it leads to a misunderstanding of Bruno’s personal mission which was to seek a reform of religion – according to Frances Yates he thought himself as a kind of messiah. His idea was ,roughly, that the world was at it’s lowest possible ebb and must now return to its better (Egyptian) state through a return to the pure teaching of Hermetism. Now it should be admitted that the plurality of worlds asserted as a matter of truth was a nagging concern among his inquisitors (the list of points given by Gaspar Scioppius at the trail was ‘that magic is a good and licit thing, that there are innumerable worlds, that the holy spirit is the anima mundi, that Moses did his miracles by magic and that Jesus was a magus). However the natural philosophical views he had – the innumerable worlds and the movement of the earth – were not really based on Copernicanism, of which he had a very poor technical understanding. Instead they were based on what he thought was a new revelation of divinity to return to the natural religion of the Egyptians. So I think if anything he is a martyr for religion or specifically religious toleration
If it hadn’t been for his science would he have been a heretic?
Yeah pretty much.
He picked up much of his natural philosophy from Thomas Digges – one of the first to expound the Copernican system in English. In particular he was enamored with the idea that the universe is filled with an infinite array of stars; each one like the sun and that there must be life elsewhere in the universe. In his own writings he really falls back on theological propositions rather than natural philosophy. The theme of his ‘On the Infinite Universe and Worlds’ is not Copernicanism but pantheism, a theme also developed in his ‘On Shadows of Ideas’, and which would come to influence Baruch Spinoza. His belief in infinity and the existence of innumerable worlds is based on the principle of plenitude, that an infinite cause – God – must have an infinite effect and there can be no limit to his creative power. He also liked the idea of a magic and vitalistic universe with planets that move through space of their own accord and are animated by the divine life – an extension of the Hermetic gnosis. It was his personal cosmology which informed his espousal of Copernicus, not the other way around
I’ve heard this “defense” of what was done to G.B. previously, from a Catholic. Science requires freedom of thought, even of the outlandish and ridiculous (and I don’t know enough to know if G.B. would have been such at the time – certainly now, but that’s irrelevant either way) and so to execute someone for simply espousing a belief … this is supposed to indicate no conflict? Oh, please.
After following this and a couple of the preceding threads on the question of the origins and early history of modern science, it seems fairly clear that we are not going to be able to make a clear distinction, at least at certain stages, between what qualifies as science and what qualifies as heretical religious belief. This fact alone makes the attempt to root modern science in the medieval period a bit questionable. No doubt whatever the intellectual ferment of the late middle ages, dependent as it was on renewed contact, through Islamic sources (though to what degree Islamic science was Islamic, and not the borrowed radiance of the subjugated Christian and Jewish civilisation which preceded the imperial Islamic project can be left to one side for the purpose of what I want to say), with Greek and Roman learning, contributed new ways of thinking about both faith and the world. But, though providing some of the linguistic tools, it is not at all clear that it qualifies as science. The difficulty of separating science from faith in the case of people like Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo makes it tolerably clear that, whatever possibilities there were in mid to late medieval thought, it didn’t amount to science. Since Bellarmine couldn’t distinguish, within Galileo’s writings, between science and theology, and was prepared to condemn him as a heretic for his scientific claims, is pretty decisive, I’d say.
The point that I am making is that there was not a ‘scientific consensus’ at the time of Galileo’s flourishing. Some have suggested that Galileo’s claims were not consistent with the ‘science’ of his day, but in a very real sense, although there may have been scholarly activity which we would now think of as proto-science, Galileo’s work was a significant departure from what Roman Catholic apologists are now trying to present as the ‘scientific consensus’ of late 16th-early 17th century science. And it was that departure, which soon after Galileo’s death developed into what is increasingly recognisable as science — a project entirely separate from and inconsistent with religious modes of thought — that the church was intent on suppressing, because it did conflict (and still does conflict) with religious belief and ways of understanding (though not knowing) the world. Bruno may have been trying to reform religion, not because he was not a scientist or proto-scientist, but because it was impossible, at that stage, to separate the one from the other, and the Holy Office, charged with maintaining the purity of faith, could not make the distinction either.
The attempt by the church to suppress the new learning is well known. The Index of Prohibited Books alone is the most visible of these efforts to freeze thought at a point where it was still manageable by the theologians of the church. It must have been obvious that learning was fast escaping the shackles of theology, and one can imagine the frustration of the Holy Office of the Inquisition as they tried, and failed, to keep speculation within acceptable limits. The atrocity of Bruno’s execution was surely not lost on Galileo, when he, in his turn, was brought into the same room in which Bruno had been interrogated, to suffer the judgement of the Inquisition, and the (possibly apocryphal) story that he said, sotto voce, as he abjured his scientific conclusions, ‘But still it moves’, is the appropriate response to the theologians’ attempt to mark out the limits of sanctioned belief.
But while we speak of Bruno and Galileo, it is simply dishonest not to go on to recall all the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church, over the succeeding centuries, until our own day, to put a stop to the freedom of thought. Even Pope Benedict XVI makes it clear that there are limits to ‘secular’ thought, and that he knows where those limits are. Every progressive movement since the sixteenth century has been opposed by the Roman Catholic Church, almost without exception. There are the purely negative aspects such as the Index, the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX, anti-modernism (a vital part of which was the progress in biblical criticism); and then there are the positive movements such as feminism, gay rights, the right of women to control their reproduction (leading to the completely idiotic campaign to limit the use of condoms in AIDS infested areas), liberation theology and base communities in South and Central America, respect for the rights of children: we could go on and on.
And the signal moments in this long march of offence against human flourishing? — the condemnations of Bruno and Galileo. The apologetic importance of making out that these offences against reason and knowledge and the dignity of human inquiry (quite aside from the atrocity of Bruno’s murder, and the scandal of Galileo’s condemnation) were really simply internal concerns of the church itself, and of no significant cultural or historical importance beyond those limited anxieties, is obvious. And so we have now a rash of ‘experts’ who tell us that the real source of science lay in the church’s teachings and theological speculations. Forget Galileo, we are told. His condemnation was just a hiccup in the long progress that marks the church’s contribution to contemporary science, of which it is, in some sense, the essential foundation. The absurdity of this revisionism is plain for all to see, no matter how many pretzel shapes these historians twist the facts into.
The whole argument is wrong and shows it’s 20th century bias. At the time there was no strong notion of science as distinct from other ideas. Bruno’s mysticism and his scientific views are not separable as neatly as some claim nor is the reaction to Galilei in any way separable. Both ultimately were persecuted for ideas that the power-brokers in the church saw as undermining the churches authority to dictate what dogmatic truth is. And that challenges to that dogmatic truth happen to come from scientific (along with other) ideas is a footnote. There simply was no taste for diversity of thought, scientific or otherwise. And in any case, to split that difference is nonsensical.
To make that point for Bruno. Bruno had ideas linked to hermetism. Now one of the core areas of interested for hermetics is theurgy which is the “magical” working of the stars. No susprise that Bruno posed now uncontroversial ideas about the scope of the universe because these basically interlink with his hermetism. One simply cannot speak of one or the other.
Humphrey Clarke
So the point here seems to be that a person’s motivation determines whether they are acting heretically or scientifically, and justifies the notion that draconian religious treatment of that person is not in conflict with science. I think what I and others here are saying is that the differences in approachare what define the ‘conflict’. Any medieval scientists’ actual thought processes are irrelevant to this; a liberal approach to free-thought, scientific or not, is needed to be compatible with science. It appears a straightforward matter-of-fact that approaching enquiry by privileging tradition and revelation is anti-science; I mean, it is, by definition. Many free thinkers are nutcases, and a religious approach to all free thinking will inevitably be anti-scientific, even if some nutcases are rightly incinerated (joke). At the margins one might disagree; for example, one could make a case that deferral to tradition is analogous to deferral to consensus, but this ignores the evidential base of consensus – it’s stretching the point to breaking.
So apologists might then say that in practice, religion (especially mine!) encouraged science and helped it grow. I’m not convinced of this (but as we’ve seen, the ebbs and flows of society are many and varied, so there’s a lot to unpick); nevertheless, I’m happy to read more on the subject. It’s possiblethat religion did in fact adopt a liberal attitude to free thinkers, and didn’t defer to tradition and revelation, on pain of punishment. This would still not make their professed approach scientific; it would just mean they weren’t acting religiously when dealing with free thinkers, for some reason. This seems a perverse conclusion to me, but conceivable, I suppose.
I loved this article!
So the point here seems to be that a person’s motivation determines whether they are acting heretically or scientifically.
I would say – sticking to the Bruno case – the motivation is the key issue here. Let’s try and give a modern day example.
Say tomorrow morning I wake up and decide to convert to Mormonism. Let’s then say after a year that I happen to read David Icke’s book which argues that the universe is run by an illuminati of shape-shifting lizards. After that I decide to go for something improving and read Stephen Hawking’s a Brief History of Time. At this point I have a religious revelation that the rantings of David Icke are the one true faith and I must move to Utah at once to present these findings to the Mormon Church. I justify this in a couple of books by pointing to the section of Stephen Hawking’s book which talks about the Big Bang and I say that this demonstrates the ‘gnosis of the mother lizard’ which presented the tablets to Joseph Smith. The Mormons take offence to this and pay some rednecks to run me over in their pickup truck. ‘
Now clearly they were wrong to do so – but am I a martyr for religion or a martyr for science? Are the Mormons anti-science in this situation or is it a knee-jerk reaction because I have marshalled science in support of my efforts to reform the church.
a liberal approach to free-thought, scientific or not, is needed to be compatible with science
I mean, I agree with the principle. However I don’t see how that works with the modern day example of the Soviet Union which was very anti-free thought and, under Stalin, declared war on “idealistic” principles built into Einstein’s scientific work, which was seen as anti-materialist and a challenge to Marxist-Leninist materialist epistemology. They also propped up Lysenkoism and executed geneticists. However this was also the society that made the development of science and technology a national priority and was at the cutting edge in fields such as mathematics and in several branches of physical science, notably theoretical nuclear physics, chemistry, and astronomy. They didn’t reverse the decision on General Relativity but more practical considerations took over. When Beria pleaded after the Second World War that soviet physicists needed Einstein’s equations to build a nuclear weapon, Stalin said ‘Leave them in peace, we can always shoot them later’.
I don’t see why you being a martyr for science or religion is relevant. The question is what’s scientific, and what isn’t? The Mormons are clearly being anti-science in your example for doctrinal (religious) reasons and you’ve had a religious revelation so are also behaving anti-scientifically. Just because you’ve harnessed one piece of science doesn’t suddenly make your stand scientific; it’s analogous to the quantum woo mongers like Deepak Chopra misusing oddities at the quantum level to justify nonsense. Sure, they’ve stumbled on some real science, but they don’t embrace the process. If you made a stand on the science because of the principles of science, you would be acting scientifically in that case; but this doesn’t mean you are suddenly ‘scientific’; few of us are. So we need to judge each issue accordingly.
The person’s not important; the processes are.
Now clearly they were wrong to do so – but am I a martyr for religion or a martyr for science? Are the Mormons anti-science in this situation or is it a knee-jerk reaction because I have marshalled science in support of my efforts to reform the church.
The problem is that even now, we can’t make that distinction and it does not make a difference. While the Mormon church may be well within it’s right to kick you out, and the National Academy of Science can critique your beliefs and refuse you membership, but that is (or should be) simply the limit of anyone’s action. The distinction between heresy and science is immaterial here.
Humphrey, your bizarre scenario simply doesn’t work, because we can distinguish between Hawking and Icke, and anyone who adopted the crazy idea that the Big Bang ‘demonstrates the ‘gnosis of the mother lizard’ which presented the tablets to Joseph Smith’ would be rightly dismissed as a crackpot, and nowadays, as ridiculous as Mormonism is, it is doubtful that a Mormon would be moved to run such a crackpot down. So, the kook you are talking about, who offends the Mormons, is a martyr to his own kookiness, which is neither science (in any sense at all) nor religion (in most of its forms). The whole point is that, at the time that Bruno floruit, these distinctions were not at all clear, as is especially evident when you consider Newton’s rather absurd biblical speculations. Of course, in the case of Newton, in retrospect, it seems quite simple to make the distinction between his science and his crazy biblical stuff, but was it so simple at the time? I don’t know, but I suspect that sorting the science from the hermeticism in Bruno’s speculations would have been a bit more difficult. Was he burnt because of his heresy or was he a martyr for science? Since his idea about the infinity of the universe was both a piece of cosmological speculation and heretical, it seems likely that part of the fire burnt up the scientist while the other part roasted the heretic! The only reason, however, for insisting that he was burnt as a heretic is purely apologetic, but what a strange apology! The church’s intention was clearly to monitor and control thought, and, given Benedict’s (Ratzi’s) rather silly outburst in Scotland, that’s still the church’s intention. Leopard’s, they say, don’t change their spots. Let’s not pretend that the church, which still sports anti-scientific spots, did not have them when it burnt Bruno at the stake.
Humphrey Clarke #33
One could speculate that the Soviet Union stands as a good analogy for the churches; perhaps a commitment by the communists to a less dogmatic approach and a freer flow of ideas would have delivered them to the Moon first? Or built a decent version of Concorde? Speculation, as I say. I’m not aware that the Soviet Union explicitly made tradition and revelation into a virtue, but if they did, I would decry them, because it would be against the scientific method. And so I do the churches.
The charge against the churches is not that there was no scientific development because of them, but that their chosen approach would incur an opportunity cost in scientific progress. Hard to prove either way, I agree, but one just has to point to its suppression of one scientific advance due to tradition and revelation to show the logical link, I think.
Jerry Coyne had a post up recently on an “Islamic Cardiology” article in which the authors attempted to pick out of the Qur’an those verses that matched modern views on the circulatory system. The method by which those views were obtained is much more important than the views themselves. If you happen to hit on the right answer for the all the wrong reasons, you are not doing science. Would you trust your heart attack care to a doctor who relied on science or one who relied on revelation and scriptural authority for his or her diagnosis? Thinking that an organization relying on revelation and scriptural authority can or did promote science seems dubious; even if someone were doing science at the time – had empirical evidence from experiments or some such – and that evidence contradicted authority, it would most likely be suppressed.
Humphrey –
You said, in reponse to Tim O’Neill’s complaint about some posts having been deleted,
Really? Do you stand by that? It doesn’t apply to you – you haven’t been ignored, nor has anyone tried to get rid of you.
Here is something else I would like to throw out from chapter two The Historiography of Science and Religion by David Wilson in Science and Religion: a historical introduction edited by Gary B. Ferngren:
How can historians and well regarded historians like J H Brooke get away with not defining terms? How can one possibly write a whole book on science and religion and never define either because it is too difficult?
Really? Do you stand by that? It doesn’t apply to you – you haven’t been ignored, nor has anyone tried to get rid of you.
No, actually – without wanting to seem insincere – i’ll retract that in my case. Previously I had posted a long post which subsequently did not appear on the site. I assumed that I had been banned along with Tim as one of my other posts disappeared which I interpreted as censorship. I think some of the discussions here have been productive – though it has been hard to find time to respond to all the points raised. I don’t think that I have won anyone here over to my point of view but that is probably bad argumentation in my case.
Good, thanks. I restored a post of yours I found in the spam file, earlier today – I’m not sure why it was there – maybe links or maybe I put it there by accident.
Tim O’Neill just was rude and belligerent from the outset, and I feel zero obligation to host that. He can still post if he can do it without the rudeness. Yes the standard for him is higher now, because of the way he started.
I think continuing disagreement is not necessarily a matter of bad argumentation. I think it may be that at bottom we value different things – so we can’t really expect agreement.
Hear, hear. If apologists have cogent and persuasive points to make, they would not need to resort to bullying.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Even Galileo was free to believe what he wanted http://dlvr.it/8b6VP […]
Ophelia – your last comment was beautifully summarised by Augustine. ‘The philosophers are free in their choice of expression and do not fear to offend the ears of the religious when treating difficult subjects. But we [Christians]are duty bound to speak with a fixed rule.’ The City of God, Book 10, Chapter Twenty-Three. Straight from the horse’s mouth.
Well Augustine is a towering intellect and quite funny in places – what does one make of a man who thinks an erection is his flesh defying him – however this quote needs to be put in context to determine what the horse is neighing.
‘‘Plotinus certainly regards the nature of the soul as inferior to the intellect of the father; whereas Porphyry in speaking of an entity in the middle position places it between, not below the two others. Doubtless he meant what we mean when we speak of the Holy Spirit who is not the spirit of the father or of the son only, but of both; and he described him to the best of his power or according to his inclination. For the philosophers are free in their choice of expressions, and are not afraid of offending the ears of the religious when threating of subjects very hard to understand, while we Christians are in solemn duty bound to speak in accordance with a fixed rule, for fear that a looseless of language might give rise to a blasphemous opinion about the realities to which the words refer. Thus when we speak of God we do not talk about two or three principles.’
So in this context he is talking about these -rather tedious – discussions of the Trinity which need to be guarded in case of blasphemy. He isn’t referring to natural philosophy or history.
Thanks Ophelia. As I say, it was a moment of frustration so I wouldn’t want that to be the final word. Tim, well I supposed you could say he is out to enforce the historical consensus whereas i’m here to let you know it exists.
I think it may be that at bottom we value different things – so we can’t really expect agreement.
No I think from our discussions we value the same things – historical truth, human flourishing etc.. The difference is our perspective on the history of science and religion.
Humphrey: I am sorry but I don’t see your point. This [the Trinity] was the hottest topic of all, see my AD 381, but Augustine is surely saying that Christians should not be allowed to discuss it freely in case they got it wrong – by the Church’s own standards,as defined for them by Theodosius’ legislation which decreed that no one can hold a bishopric unless they signed up for the Trinity. So is that the only topic that should not be discussed, as you imply? Surely not. The Church expected to control the debate on virtually everything.
You imply that you support the idea that Christians should be corralled in. Even then, that is one thing when you are free to surrender your independence to the Church (as in most parts of the world today) but by 1215, in the Middle Ages, when it was proclaimed by the Fourth Lateran Council that there was no salvation outside the Church it was somewhat different. And don’t forget that somehow the idea had evolved, which was supported by Augustine above all others, that the default position would be that you would go to eternal hell. What evidence is there for the existence of hell fire?
Surely we have here in a nutshell what this whole issue is about. The problem about Christian doctrine is that virtually none of it rests on a rational foundation ( the Catholic catechism itself defines the Trinity as ‘a revelation beyond reason’). Theodosius could just have easily decided that the Arian alternative was the better one , not least in that it had much more scriptural support. And theologians today would all be lining up to proclaim that the Arian solution was the only possible one, just as they say that about the Trinity today.And the Church would have said that anyone who was not an Arian would be bound to go to hell.
The split in this discussion is between those who want to uphold freedom of intellectual debate and those that think an institution which is rooted in history but thinks it is rooted in something else (?God’s word, however defined and illuminated) has the right to define what is or not acceptable and develop specific means of dealing with those who go outside the box. Exactly how had it come about ( well, I do try and answer that in my books) that you had an institution which claimed the right to tell people what they should or should not think about the universe? I see it as a purely historical issue.
We MIGHT get somewhere if the Christian apologists accepted that their opponents had a perfectly reasonable point of view. Nowhere here has any of the apologists mounted an argument as to why their institution a) has got it all right b) has the right to persecute those who haven’t. That should surely be starting point before discussions such as this go any further.
Eric I am a bit displayed at your lack of sympathy towards my fictional alter-ego who – rather than being a martyr to free-thought is now merely a ‘martyr to his own kookiness’.
Humphrey, your bizarre scenario simply doesn’t work, because we can distinguish between Hawking and Icke
I dunno. It is certainly bizarre – but I think there is a direct comparison. My kooky alter-ego is using the theories of Hawking in service of the theories of David Icke. Giordano Bruno used Thomas Digges’s brand of Copernicanism to buttress his Hermeticism. David Icke believes that the universe is run by shapeshifting lizards (Icke does actually refer to science – the multiverse to back up his claims but that’s just an interesting aside). Hermeticism claims, among other things, that the prophet Hermes the thrice great predicted the coming of Christ; that the Egyptians drew demons and spirits into the statues of their Gods, thus animating them; and that Christ was crucified was not in the form shown on Christian altars, this form being in reality the sign which was sculptured on the breast of the goddess Isis, and which was “stolen” by the Christians from the Egyptians. This is what Bruno was intent on promoting to the church and lay people through his theological lectures.
Anyway, I suppose the point is that is more complicated than just saying that the Church was anti-science in this case; mainly because Bruno was in no way a scientist – he was a religious reformer who used a smattering of science and philosophy to back up his ideas. The cosmological ideas were therefore banded as heretical because – through Bruno – they became mixed up with religious concepts. So they were playing an anti religion card and legitimate science got in the way.
O.K, as a starting point. Some things need clearing up
1) You imply that you support the idea that Christians should be corralled in
Never said this – sounds like a terrible idea. Not to mention impossible
2) The split in this discussion is between those who want to uphold freedom of intellectual debate and those that think an institution which is rooted in history but thinks it is rooted in something else (?God’s word, however defined and illuminated) has the right to define what is or not acceptable and develop specific means of dealing with those who go outside the box.
There is no split – everyone here – as far as I know – wants to uphold freedom of intellectual debate
3) Nowhere here has any of the apologists mounted an argument as to why their institution a) has got it all right b) has the right to persecute those who haven’t.
Well my opinion is that if anyone thinks that – no matter what denomination they belong to – they are almost certainly mistaken and if they agree with the second part they are a moral monster. Do humanists think they have got it all right?
Well perhaps everyone here wants to uphold free debate. This whole post is on the problem that some people did not want to do this in the early seventeenth century.
No, humanists, if that is the word you want to use, try and find foundations from which one can develop knowledge and understanding which all are free to confront without fear. G.E.R. Lloyd’s books on the Greeks show how this worked quite well so that you not only got closer to the truth but also developed more effective methods of argument through competitive debate. (This did not always mean the Greeks got very far with the very limited means they had at their disposal, but the methods of argument they used are still enormously useful in most areas of debate today and the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages would have been nowhere without them.)
The foundations of Christian ‘truths’ and the methods with which the Church came to define truth are not only often obscure but ringfenced against confrontation. This seems to me so obvious, I can’t understand why you cannot see the difficulties here. But perhaps I am blinded by my own prejudices in favour of free debate.I just felt that the apologists in this debate in this post have a duty to define the foundations of the position they are coming from so that we know why many of them seem prepared to defend the Church’s right to create and defend its own boundaries , as well as use rather nasty punishments against those who don’t fit in. This question always seems to be avoided.
The position I am coming from (I presume I am the apologist – although for some reason it seems to stand for ‘people that don’t agree with us’) is that a certain historical argument has been presented; namely that Giordano Bruno was burned for his science. I think it is more complicated than that and that we need to understand the events and the actors involved in their historical context – in particular to understand what Bruno was trying to achieve. Same with the Augustine quote. Then there is the broader question of this incident being called into the service of some kind of heroic grand narrative of reason triumphing over superstition and here the foundation of position is Herbert Butterfield’s ‘The Whig Interpretation of History’.
The Whig interpretation of history was right!
:- )
The word ‘apologist’ has long been linked to Christians. defending their position, right back to Justin Martyr in the second century, up to and including Newman’s Apologia, so I think I am being conventional here.
We can’t understand what Augustine/ the burners of Bruno were trying to achieve without some background knowledge of the institutional church and the demands it placed on its adherents. The apologists continually duck this issue. We need something on why this particular institution, the Catholic Church , achieved the power and the ‘right’ to say what was right and wrong and to defend it in the way it did , both through punishment on earth and through a promised punishment in hell for eternity, something that could never be proved to happen ( and was totally alien to the pagan world). I have tried to address the issue as a historian in my books. Naturally I have not been sympathetic to the process but it remains open to others to put an alternative position. One of my reasons for challenging God’s Philosophers is that it too seemed to take it for granted that the Church could deal with heretics but it held this position alongside one which said that the Church fostered science. I thought it was just a muddle and still do.
One thing Finocchiaro doesn’t explicitly address (in Myth 8, the Galileo chapter) is whether anyone in Italy would have been free to write what Galileo wrote. It seems to be implicit however that the answer is no – there was just no such thing as not being subject to the jurisdiction of the church. There was no opting out, just as there is now no opting out from the secular law of the place one lives.
Reginald Selkirk (@ 10) mentioned the garbled citation – I checked it and it’s as I typed it. The date is a typo in the book.
Looks like I need to make a retraction.
http://books.google.com/books?id=x0waAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22the+warfare+of+science%22&source=bl&ots=CEa9dXTm99&sig=C_Jlp-WJAl0L_0GpKa8_53W464A&hl=en&ei=MA7kTOmyMsL-8Aaxw-SBDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
The Warfare of Science
by Andrew Dickson White, 1876.
This is a short (~ 160 pages) form of his argument, which he expanded in his later book to over 800 pages.
Ah! Then so do I. Beg pardon, Dr Shackelford.
Richard Owen, in his hostile anonymous review of On the Origin of Species in the Edinburgh Review April 1860:
Dratted whig. :- )
Here is a long quote by David Lindberg (Myth 1 in Galileo Goes to Jail):
I bolded the last sentence because I want to know how it follows from the three points he makes above and how he gets away with zero references in this paragraph.
It’s a kind of “it could have been worse” argument. The church could have stamped out all natural philosophy, and then it would have been worse. It’s true that it could have been worse – but it’s also true that it could have been a whole lot better.
Of course, if it had…technology would doubtless have developed sooner and faster, and global warming would have started earlier, and the droughts and floods and famines would have happened earlier, so we would not be here having this pleasant discussion. Thus we see that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
D’oh, I should have remembered the “panglossian defense.”
Interesting article and posts! I’ve just got Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (because of some literary interests/researches). It’s fascinating. It must be remembered that while the Neo-Platonic vision of the Hermeticists strikes us now as weird and irrational, they were cutting-edge in their time: strugging to assert the role of ‘good’ magic (natural magic, theurgy & c) against condemnations of ‘bad’ magic (demons, witchcraft & c), and with alchemy and an interest in the stars, they contributed to the development of experimental and observational science. They had had some positive relations with the Church in late 15C (Alexander VI/Rodrigo de Borja was more sympathetic), but that was before the Reformation. Bruno was facing the Counter-Reformation Church, which was out to extirpate ‘heresy’ in any form.
Humphrey:
As Yates points out, though, this was part of a whole chain of faux-pas caused by the simple fact that until the 17C, all scholars grossly overestimated the date of the Hermetic Corpus, which probably originated in Alexandria in the early centuries of the Common Era, not in the alleged time of Moses or earlier. The ‘prophetic’ references to Christianity and Judaism more probably reflect interactions with Judaism and Gnostic Christianity. The reference to the Isis-cult is an interesting issue: her iconography certainly influenced depicions of the Virgin and child. But given the lack of historical knowledge available to Bruno re: dating the Hermetic Corpus, his speculations were not so outrageous at the time.
Doc M, ooh interesting – I’ve always been puzzled by Yates. I haven’t read her in ages, but when I did, she always seemed to me to take the occult at face value in an odd way. She seemed to be always rebuking 16th C people who thought it was all bullshit – not just rebuking them for thinking it was bullshit for the wrong reasons, but for thinking it was bullshit at all. Do I have her wrong?
Hi Doc M – Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition is the book I am also relying on. You’ll note my argument is basically cribbed from Chapter XIX – Giordano Bruno -Return to Italy. Hermeticism was cutting edge certainly – though so is my alter ego’s ‘Reptilian Corpus’. Subscribers to Hermeticism included such high profile figures as Phillip II of Spain, and the writings were generally tolerated by the Catholic Church. Bruno’s ‘dangerous idea’ was to take the view that the Egyptian religion was the true faith and that the church should return to these old ways; which they were none too pleased about. Actually some have argued that Nicolaus Copernicus himself was influenced by Hermetism to put the sun at the centre of the universe. He wrote in De revolutionibus that:
‘At rest, however, in the middle of everything is the sun. For in this most beautiful temple, who would place this lamp in another or better position than that from which it can light up the whole thing at the same time? For, the sun is not inappropriately called by some people the lantern of the universe, its mind by others, and its ruler by still others. [Hermes] the Thrice Greatest labels it a visible god, and Sophocles’ Electra, the all-seeing..
Yes. She makes it plain that while all of this stuff looks weird to us, we need to look at the disputes in the context of the knowledge that was available to people at the time. One of her key points throughout is that the reverence in which the Hermetic Corpus was held in the Renaissance was founded upon its misdating, which was discovered by Casaubon in 1614. As J B Trapp says in the introduction to the current Routledge edition of Giordano Bruno & the Hermetic Tradition:
As a historian myself, it angers me that some present-day folk (often people whose values I share and opinions I respect in other areas) assume that what to us is obviously bullshit was so to people in the past. It wasn’t (what is absurd, however, is people retaining such beliefs in the present-day, when our knowledge has expanded). Magic thinking was a ‘given’ in the past; the supernatural was, to mediæval and Renaissance people, as real as the natural, so they took discussions about it very seriously. Their knowledge of the natural world and of the distant past was limited in many areas. (A smaller scale example: if you’re evaluating the accuracy of a 19C historical work, you have to bear in mind what sources were then available to the author: you can’t berate him/her for mistakes that are due to limited sources – s/he cannot be blamed for not knowing some things that were only discovered within the past 50 years.)
Looking at history is like entering a science fiction or fantasy universe: to understand how its inhabitants functioned and related to the world around them, you have to suspend disbelief and look through their eyes. The alternative is the ridiculous spectacle of much historical fiction and film, in which the protagonists are contemporary people with modern mind-sets, just in fancy dress.
@Humphrey Clarke:
You keep missing this very elementary point: the church in the time of Bruno did not make the distinction between scientific inquiry and other forms of inquiry. “Science” was not a concept at the time. To say “he was not burned alive for his science” is trivially true, because no one at the time — not a single human being — would have the philosophical background to be able to choose which parts of Bruno’s oeuvre were science and which merely heresy.
The other elementary point is that since there’s no special status for science at the time, “heresy” would almost certainly have been used to describe many subjects that we now consider properly scientific.
The distinction between burning someone for heresy and burning someone for science does not translate back into Bruno’s time. You are imposing constructs of your own culture upon a historical narrative in which those constructs are not valid.
One can even argue that the distinction between science and pseudo-science can only be established ex post facto — that’s essentially Kuhn’s thesis. Suppose, for example, that someone was burned a few hundred years ago for practicing alchemy. Today, one might earnestly say, “well, he wasn’t burned for practicing science.” And technically it would be true as long as we’re using a modern conception of science. But at the time, alchemy essentially WAS science — the methodology was faulty, but it was empirical, and alchemy is quite clearly the historical antecedent to the real science of chemistry. If we talk about science as a historical rather than sociological phenomenon, then our poor alchemist really was burned for practicing science. I think we could say pretty much the same thing for Bruno. “Science” as we understand it didn’t exist. The point is that the church worked hard to suppress those taking the first few tentative steps towards a modern conception of science.
Dan L:
Good post. Scientia was Knowledge/Learning, not as compartmentalised as now. Indeed, until 19C, universities still called their Physics departments ‘Natural Philosophy’.
Hi Dan
I follow parts of your argument – it is certainly true that to use the word science is a tad anachronistic given the term dates from the early 19th century. Could we not though make a distinction between natural philosophy and theology ? Both would be recognisable terms to early modern people. Then we can ask which set of Bruno’s ideas it was that he was indited for. We don’t have much of an account of the trial but the best guess is that he was was a magus who was trying to start a new neo-Platonic religion. He did believe the earth revolved around the sun but this was purely for religious reasons derived from hermeticism – which I believe falls into the category of theology. In any case pretty much all Bruno’s cosmological thought can be found in a book by the 15th-century cardinal Nicolas of Cusa and – given that they burn him – i’d suggest the natural philosophy in question was not the offending article. I don’t honestly see him taking any steps towards a modern conception of science though perhaps you or Doc M will correct me?
I only realized after my last post that alchemy — again, the historical precursor to the real science of chemistry — was heavily informed by the Hermetism advocated by Bruno. So to the extent that we can include alchemy as a science in the historical sense then we really can say that Bruno was burned for practicing (proto)science.
Which of course is all anyone is saying. The church didn’t like new ideas and it tried to suppress them. Sometimes quite brutally. Among those new ideas were a great many unscientific ones and just a few scientific ones. The fact that the church suppressed unscientific ideas along with the scientific ones is certainly no reason to applaud the church.
@Humphrey:
Natural philosophy as conceived at the time was essentially a theological theory — that we can learn about God by studying the world (which, unless I am mistaken, was exactly what Bruno was saying). Again, the distinction between theology and natural philosophy is a synthetic one created by imposing modern concepts on a time in history in which they did not exist. Newton, besides the obviously scientific things he did, wrote a great deal about alchemy AND theology.
Bruno was taking steps towards true science by advocating new ideas. If there’s no such thing as science, then science will necessarily be a new idea. But no one knows what it is until it’s invented. So the only way to invent science is to keep trying out new ideas. The church was opposed to new ideas, and ipso facto was opposed to science.
The really important point is that we only understand what is and what is not science after the fact. The church could not, at the time it killed Bruno, have made the distinction that you are now making. This is not terribly complicated.
Dan L:
Yes. Alchemy was both an experimental science and a Neo-Platonist philosophical system: a poetry of science. The experiments are heavily symbollc, and are also about the scientist’s inner journey towards self-integration – as Jung grasped with his alchemical studies. This is why I find alchemy fascinating as a symbolic system, integrating masculine and feminine, & c.
A scientist in my opinion should respect outmoded theories, remembering always that if born in the Neolithic, Einstein would have been flat out inventing a crude wheel.
All scientists from Mediaeval times to today have had at least one eye on the practical applications of their work. The alchemists were understandably focused on two major projects: transmutation of base metals into gold, and finding a drink which would throw the ageing process into reverse: the elusive Elxir of Youth. In the course of their research, they developed many of the established techniques of practical and analytical chemistry, purifying compounds galore via filtration, evaporation and sublimation to name just three procedures, and of course without a modern theoretical grasp on what they were doing. They also opened up a Pandora’s Box for charlatans and quacks of all hues, brilliantly satirised by Ben Jonson in his Elizabethan play The Alchemist.
But nuclear physicists and chemists now routinely transmute elements, and pretty well only the high cost of electricity stops them from going into production of gold from a suitably cheaper feedstock. If and when fourth generation fission reactors and fusion reactors finally get sorted out, we may finally have electricity too cheap to meter and gold from lead at last.
Many biological and medical advances have extended the average human lifespan to an unprecedented degree. So who knows? One day the alchemists might just have the last laugh.
Dan L:
Right.
Consider a couple of hypotheses: (1) stars are distant suns, and (2) the holy trinity is an ill-evidenced and apparently incoherent concept and thus wrong.
Somebody’s belief that the stars are distant suns may be partly due to their preexisting unscientific theological commitments, but also partly due to the fact that it’s a simpler hypothesis—that there’s one kind of luminous object in the sky, and that the apparent difference is just due to distance. Acceptance of that hypothesis may also reinforce certain intuitions of uniformitarianism that support certain kinds of theology over others. Both are mutually-supporting parts of an overall world view, which you can’t really separate out into scientific and nonscientific/theological parts until you find out that dualism and supernaturalism are wrong.
Similarly, a disbelief in the Trinity, and perhaps a belief in some kind of unitarian supernaturalism, may be informed by a preexisting “theological” preference for the latter, but also be appealing on straighforward rational grounds, because of its simplicity. One may reject the Trinity mostly as an ill-evidenced and cumbersome hypothesis and/or on grounds of incoherence, irrespective of the fact that it’s supposedly “supernatural,” and hence a topic for “theology” rather than “science.”
The real or perceived coherence of different aspects of a worldview are part of what makes that worldview seem more plausible than others. So long as people in general—and “scientists” in particular—believed in the supernatural, no separation of science and theology was possible. Until the last century or two, there was nothing like a scientific consensus that dualism and supernaturalism were generally wrong. Believing in dualism and the supernatural did not make you “not a scientist” by any relevant standard of the time, because vitalism was still a going concern, Darwinian evolution wasn’t known and accepted yet, and neuroscience hadn’t shown that the traditional (substance dualistic) soul was a superfluous theoretical entity.
More importantly, dualistic and supernaturalistic hypotheses were not necessarily unscientific in any useful sense—they were live options that just hadn’t been discredited yet. Nobody could know how successful monistic, materialistic science would be in the latter 19th and 20th centuries.
It’s not just an accident that scientists have typically been less religiously orthodox than nonscientists, for hundreds of years. (For anyone you’d reasonably count as “a scientist” for their time.) For example, 16th, 17th and 18th century scientists were disproportionately (and increasingly) Unitarian or Deist, while mostly accepting that substance dualism and supernaturalism were likely true. I suspect that’s largely because science and heterodoxy go together for a deep reason: scientists are people who look at the evidence for claims, and tend to reject unparsimonious hypotheses. They’re disproportionately likely to question orthodoxy and especially to discard cumbersome and/or incoherent concepts, whether they’re about the types of luminous objects in the sky, or the number and relationships between divine persons or supernatural essences.
The Church has generally been against that, all along, without making a distinction between theological and scientific beliefs until a particular distinction was forced upon them by the general acceptance of consensus science, and their having to cede ground to secular science.
(The Church is still at it. For example, the Pope still maintains that there’s such a thing as a traditional substance dualistic soul, despite the scientific evidence against it, and that it enters a biological human organism at a particular moment. He says he knows what makes a person a person, and when it happens, no matter what the scientists say. He says that the scientific consensus is wrong, because it doesn’t support orthodox theology. Likewise, the Pope still maintains that there is Sin of a certain sort, which is a supernatural phenomenon, and that certain phenomena that science explains as “natural” are no such thing. Homosexual behavior, for example: there’s a fair consensus in science that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon, in both major senses of the word, and thus not a sin in any relevant sense. The Pope says the scientists are just wrong, because the science doesn’t support orthodox theology at any point—e.g. dualism, the existence of supernatural souls and sin, disembodied minds with supernatural moral authority, or the nature of homosexuality specifically.)
The Gnu Atheists are right that science and religion are simply not separate domains, and cannot be. To this day, both make truth claims about what basic kinds of important things actually exist, and how they actually work, and they can’t both be right.
That was certainly no less true in Bruno’s day. The big difference between then and now is that now there’s a broad consensus that the Church failed in opposing emerging scientific ideas in certain areas, such as physics and astronomy.
The big similarity between and then and now is that most nonscientists still believe in the supernatural and divine revelation of some sort, and think that you can somehow separate out the domain of theology from the domain of science.
They are wrong.
The conflict was simply one of orthodoxy vs. heterodox free inquiry, without a basic distinction between science and theology even being possible at the time. Even today, such a distinction is not possible, except where the Church has simply lost the fight and ceded ground to secular science. Where it hasn’t—e.g., cognitive psychology, neuroscience, ethical philosophy, and the anthropology of religion—the conflict is as stark as it ever was.
The really big practical difference between then and now is political. The Church does not have the power to suppress sciences that conflict with its theology, and it knows it and acts accordingly. Instead of fighting with the scientists directly, the Pope et al. simply spews patently antiscientific crap about souls, libertarian Free Will, the nature and origin of Sin, divine moral authority, homosexuality, the effectiveness of prophylaxis, abortion, etc., and he counts on scientific illiteracy to obscure his antiscientific lunacy.
For the most part, scientists just ignore that antiscientific nonsense and go about their scientific business, because now they can.
That’s what this controversy is really all about, isn’t it? It’s about defending the idea of nonoverlapping magisteria for science and religion. The apologists and accommodationists want to make it sound like there is a proper distinction between the domains of science and religion, which the Church got wrong at first, more or less understandably, but gets pretty much right now. Bruno was supposedly killed for transgressing that boundary, which the Church didn’t get right, but wasn’t entirely wrong about, either. That was tragic, but mistakes were made on both sides, and anyhow it was all a long time ago and things are better now.
The people who disagree are saying that no, the Church never got it even approximately right, still doesn’t, and apparently never will, for a very simple reason: there are no separate domains of science and religion, and never will be, so long as religion clings to supernaturalism against the scientific evidence. Theology is apparently a science without a subject, and modern science shows how it’s wrong from the get-go.
Thinking that Bruno was killed for straying from science into theology is not just wrong “in hindsight”—it’s simply wrong. Unless we chastise Bruno for not predicting the course of 20th century science, we have to grant that he was entirely reasonable to try to formulate a worldview that encompassed both naturalistic and supernaturalistic hypotheses. He may have gotten the wrong answers, but he was not wrong to try. That’s how science works; many people try, most fail, and a few succeed.
He was killed simply for disagreeing with the Church when he was right to “mix” the “two” domains, which are not in fact separate. What he was mainly wrong about, in hindsight, was agreeing with the Church on basic supernaturalism, but that’s certainly not what they killed him for.
We still have not identified a proper boundary between science and theology, precisely because Bruno was right to think that it doesn’t exist. What we do have now isn’t a boundary, even a very fuzzy one; it’s a demilitarized zone, which is something else entirely.
Paul W
Good summing up, I think.
This seems to me undeniable, which is why I’m puzzled by those who write apologia for the churches in the ‘science and religion’ debate. Although, to be fair, many of them may simply be saying, hey, it wasn’t as bad as some say. Which may be true, but doesn’t negate the basic point; that religious influence has incurred, does incur and will incur an opportunity cost in scientific progress.
Doc M…Yes but…I’m not convinced that there were no (so to speak) methodological naturalists in the 16th C – people who just thought “if I can’t see it I’m not going to believe it’s there just on your say-so.” People like the Edmund of “this is the excellent foppery of the world” (in King Lear). Edmund is corrupt and his speech is symptomatic, but the point is, what he says was conceivable. So I find it hard to believe that everyone was a Platonist, however “normal” and mainstream Platonism may have been.
There always are just village atheists, vulgar empiricists, who simply refuse to mess with Invisible Powers and the like. That’s not a very sophisticated view, and it doesn’t make for good mathematicians and such, but it does tend to inoculate people against certain kinds of bullshit. It seemed to me that Yates was blind to that factor. (Christopher Marlowe may have been like that, if the gossip is true.)
Ophelia:
No, it’s just not relevant to her subject. If they existed. none of them wrote it (perhaps for obvious reasons). But I think it’s more likely that it was beyond the perimeters of most people’s thought: so far off the map it didn’t exist. All education at this time was permeated with religious assumptions about the universe, and the people she’s writing about were educated.
You’re wanting history to be polemic, to serve your agenda as much as the Catholic apologists want it to serve theirs. Whatever the POV, this is a bad attitude to bring to the past. As I mentioned above, it infuriates me especially when I see it in people whose values I share in the present-day: they want to project these values back on to times in which they were, simply, not part of the conceptual vocabulary. You have to accept that the past is an alien landscape.
Ian:
You can make very small diamonds from tequila…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/28/tequila-diamonds-improbable-research
Doc M – you’re jumping to conclusions. You don’t know what I’m wanting. I said I wasn’t convinced, and I said why. That’s not just obviously me wanting something, nor is it just obviously a bad attitude. I could just as well say that you’re wanting me to be reading through presentist lenses, to serve your agenda.
That’s not true. There were skeptical currents within classical humanist education, for instance. There was Pyrrhonism; there was also Stoicism, which treated nature in a somewhat religious way but was pretty secular in practice.
I suspect you’re using “as a historian” as an argument from authority, which doesn’t work terribly well when it’s just an assertion.
Paul W @ 76:
That was great, thanks. Especially the demilitarized zone bit.
@Doc M:
It seems to me like the risk of underestimating the diversity of perspectives is as much of a problem as the risk of overestimating it. I agree that the intellectual climate of medieval Europe would be alien to us in many ways, but skepticism and iconoclasm are defined by the individual’s relation to society, not by the content of either the individual’s beliefs or the popular consensus, and I don’t see any reason to believe that human beings were any less liable to being contrary than they are today.
Actually, the historical provenance of stage magic suggests to me that there were skeptics in medieval Europe and that they had a financial incentive not only to advocate and attest belief into the supernatural, but also to claim some degree of mastery over it. This is conjectural of course, but it makes a lot of sense to me that stage magicians, even back when they were just “magicians” were as likely to be skeptics as they are today. After all, they had to be able to reliably repeat the tricks to pull off their scams, and they must have known they were often outright deceiving their audiences (without the audience being aware of this fact, as they are today — I would point to this distinction as the difference between “stage magic” and “magic”).
Dan L.:
You’re very welcome.
I didn’t have anything particularly novel to add to the points made by you and others, and am evidently incapable of being brief, so I thought I’d better at least come up with punchy closer. :-)
@ Dan – plus the 16th century isn’t medieval, it’s Renaissance or early modern – and a lot of people were consciously New. There was a lot of intellectual ferment, and a good deal of rebellion. The rediscovery of the classics had a lot to do with this. Montaigne’s Xianity for instance is notoriously pro forma rather than “devout” although M A Screech saw a lot of goddy stuff in the essays – but he inserted some goddy language into his translation (I discovered by comparing a couple of passages) so I think he exaggerates that. In general the Essays are very secular.
There are holes and ragged places – it just isn’t a matter of universal piety. People were always pestering the dying by asking “Do you believe? Do you believe?” and joyously reporting when the answer was “Yes.” Why would they have been doing that unless they were worried about it? Why worry about it if everyone believed?
Dan L.:
Good point. Another piece of evidence like that would be notoriously corrupt churchmen, including the notoriously bad Popes. Clearly some people didn’t take their theology and their immortal souls all that seriously.
And of course, it has ever been thus. The fool saith in his heart there is no God.
How would they know? Presumably the fool confided what he saith in his heart to somebody who ratted him out.
And presumably that “fool” was neither obviously a fool nor alone, or it wouldn’t have been worth making such a fuss over.
There have been skeptics of the Revealed Truth for as long as there have been people claiming to have it—and not a small absolute number of them. (Else why would the scriptures rail about all those faithless people whoring around with other gods and whatnot. Like actual prostitution, it was endemic at some frequency.)
I wish I knew a way of estimating the actual frequency of serious skepticism in past eras, even within an order of magnitude. I could imagine the usual percentage being anywhere from a small fraction of one percent to several percent, in most places at most times.
Ophelia:
Yes. And there have always been competing religions from outside cultures, and schisms from within. That’s what creeds are about—almost every phrase signifies an outgroup being othered and oppressed. (E.g., “only begotten Son, begotten not made, one in being with the Father” isn’t just about the Father-Son relationship, but whether the Son was begotten, and you could get killed over that distinction.)
Without any real evidence, how could there not be constant schisms, dissension, and consequent skepticism?
Given that, how could there not be a significant number of people (if not a significant percentage) who look at the various competing claims and suspect the whole thing’s a sham all around—whether they voice it or just go quietly about their business with their heads down?
It’s not like people hundreds or thousands of years ago were stupid—they were just as smart as we are, but ignorant. Presumably there’ve always been a non-negligible number of “cynical” people who could read the signs that all was not well with the Revealed Truth, and suspected that those in power were ignorant, too, just too powerful to oppose openly.
Accommodationism has a long history. (And prehistory, presumably.)