Galileo's Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation between Galileo and the Church
328
Galileo's Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation between Galileo and the Church
328eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
In his provocative reexamination of one of the turning points in the history of science and thought, Wade Rowland contends that the dispute concerned an infinitely more profound question: What is truth and how can we know it? Rowland demonstrates that Galileo’s mistake was to insist that science—and only science—provides the truth about reality. The Church rejected this idea, declaring that while science is valid, truth is a metaphysical issue—beyond physics—and it involves such matters as meaning and purpose, which are unquantifiable and therefore not amenable to scientific analysis. In asserting the primacy of science on the territory of truth, Galileo strayed into the theological realm, an act that put him squarely on a warpath with the Church. The outcome would change the world. Wade Rowland’s thoughtful exploration promises to disarm the most stubborn of skeptics and make for scintillating debate.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628722420 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2011 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Overture
The story of the astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei and his trial for heresy by the Inquisition is one of the defining narratives of modern Western culture. The moral lessons it teaches are a cornerstone of our belief in the supreme power and validity of reason, and in science's exclusive access to reliable knowledge of the world we live in. It is a tale that vividly illustrates the dangers and arbitrariness of religious authority, and the futility of resistance to the inexorable advance of scientific knowledge.
There is a modest historical marker in Rome, outside the magnificent Villa Medici where Galileo stayed during his visits to that city, and it sums up what might be called the authorized version of the story I discovered it one brilliant morning in May in the first year of the new millennium, where the enclosing villa wall was softened by masses of mauve delphiniums just coming into bloom. The monument was placed here in 1887. It is about ten feet tall overall, half its height a cylinder of greenish marble, capped with a white mushroom dome on a white fluted marble plinth. A heavy bronze sleeve is wrapped around the middle of the marble cylinder, and on this is an inscription. It says, "It was here that Galileo was kept prisoner by the Holy Office, when he was on trial for having seen that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still "
The marker is Ignored In the voluminous travel literature on Rome — no guidebook that I have seen so much as mentions it, although most Identify the villa itself as the place where Galileo was confined while being tried by the Inquisition. One might easily conclude that the lack of attention paid the monument is due to the fact that it merely Identifies a geographical feature and is of no more Intrinsic interest than a street sign. But It is a cultural artifact of real significance. The reason is that it expresses one of the central misconceptions of the authorized version of the Galileo story — what might more properly be called the myth of Galileo. And that is that he was condemned by the Catholic Church for having discovered the truth. It was the Galileo scholar Maurice Finocchiaro who led me to the marker, In an article in which he asserts that since "to condemn a person for such a reason [that is, for having discovered the truth] can only be the result of ignorance and narrow-mindedness, this is also the myth which is used to justify the incompatibility between science and religion." For Finocchiaro and most other current historians and philosophers of science, the myth is erroneous, simplistic, and misleading.
Nevertheless, it is so widespread that a version of It, not much more sophisticated than that displayed on the monument, is presented in Albert Einstein's introduction to the standard English translation of Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, the work for which Galileo was condemned. And the myth is dramatized to sensational effect in Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht's seductively brilliant play from 1938-39, made into a film In 1975 by the American director Joseph Losey. Children in grade school are asked to write essays on Galileo as a martyr to intellectual freedom. And the Church itself has in recent years seemed to lend credence to the myth with Its own repentant attitude.
My own suspicion that there might be more to the story of Galileo than is contained In the orthodox version was stirred long ago by questions that haunted the blood-drenched twentieth century. How could a civilization that generated the technical marvels that ease our lives in so many ways also have spawned fascism, genocides, environmental havoc, weapons of mass destruction? Why was the once-brilliant promise of "the good life" an ever-receding chimera? A phenomenon of our time has been the rise of Dicken-sian mean- spiritedness as the foundation for a respectable social credo. Our worst-paid and least prestigious jobs are those that involve benevolence, as in caring for the disabled, the disturbed, the old, and the chronically sick. For most people, in most countries, increasing workloads have meant the virtual abandonment of family life, not to mention civic responsibilities. Quality of life has seemed to change in inverse ratio to leading economic indicators. Why are we, in spite of our announced humanist intentions, increasingly treating our fellow human beings as means to economic ends rather than as ends in themselves? How did we come to justify treating government as a purely economic entity, subject to the crude accounting practices of business?
While some philosophers have found answers to these puzzling questions in the rationalism that swept the West in the eighteenth century, and others blamed the romanticism and anti-rationalism that followed in reaction, neither of these views seem adequate to me. I came to share a conviction that the roots of what is most disturbing in the modern world find their nourishment deeper in history, in what is often called the Scientific Revolution. This revolution began in seventeenth-century Europe, and Galileo was among its earliest instigators. Dramatic advances were made in several fields of inquiry — notably mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Pascal invented the calculating machine, Leibniz and Newton jointly invented calculus, Robert Boyle laid the foundations of modern chemistry, and William Harvey mapped the body's circulatory system. John Napier eased the enormous burden of astronomical calculations with his invention of logarithms. Descartes introduced his Cartesian coordinates and gave geometry a new dimension. The microscope, like the telescope, accurate pendulum clocks, and balance-wheel watches, came into general use. Galileo made his epochal discoveries in mechanics and astronomy.
At the same time, radical new ideas were abroad about the nature of knowledge and how best to go about acquiring It, and once again Galileo was In the forefront. The one endeavor reinforced the other, so that these revolutionary insights into the workings of the world and how to explore it had an enormous impact on philosophy, and the names of the great scientists are linked with those of philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and Francis Bacon. Prodigies like Galileo and Descartes and Leibniz excelled In both science and philosophy — indeed, the fields were for much of the century thought of as related aspects of the same discipline. Theology, too, felt the Scientific Revolutions Impact-in fact, was staggered by it, Beginning In the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century, the Church of Rome, for more than fifteen hundred years a leading political force in Europe, was stripped of most of its secular power and then of much of its once-universal moral authority as well. The effect on an Institution already suffering from the hammer blows of the Protestant Reformation and the chaos of the Thirty Years War was ultimately devastating.
We are still, with increasing unease, living with the results of that historic shift in outlook and values. On the one hand, the Scientific Revolution endowed Western civilization with the ability to manipulate nature to an almost magical degree. On the other, it prompted a shift in the prevailing view of the acquisition of knowledge and of moral thought that deprived civilization of any effective means to manage the career of science and to ameliorate Its unwanted impacts. It bequeathed unprecedented power and wealth while at the same time undermining the foundations of the wisdom necessary to their judicious and benevolent use. It expanded the creative horizons of humanity while reducing the mass of individual humans to the status of commodities and consumers. It Improved health and longevity while promoting unprecedented spiritual and existential disease.
Amid all the political turmoil and intellectual ferment of this watershed period, it seemed to me that the Church of Rome's epic confrontation with Galileo was a supremely significant event, one that presents In microcosm the issues that define this most portentous turning point of the second millennium, the transition from the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason — from an era of religion and spirituality to an epoch of science and materialism. Understanding that seminal episode in the history of the modern world can, I believe, provide valuable insights into many of the most vexatious problems afflicting contemporary life, and, more important, clues to finding solutions.
Unfortunately, it is clear from the most cursory examination of school texts, popular literature, science journalism, and even academic treatises that although the historical significance of Galileo's trial is widely conceded, the nature of that significance is almost universally misunderstood. The popular conception of the confrontation and the trial that was its culmination has, indeed, changed little in the more than 350 years since it took place. The Church's victory at the trial with Galileo's conviction was a Pyrrhic one, and the scientist's controversial ideas won an overwhelming triumph in the wider war. It is the victors who write the history of wars, and so it was the heroic picture of Galileo as a lonely champion of enlightenment and the Church as a blind, despotic power, hostile to scientific inquiry, that has come down to us.
If the familiar myth of Galileo as the paladin of truth and freedom opposing a venal and closed-minded Church is untrue, as I have asserted, what really happened between Galileo and the Church back in the seventeenth century? A central issue in the events surrounding the trial was the Copernican hypothesis, the idea that the Earth moved with both diurnal rotations and annual revolutions around the Sun. Galileo's supposed "heresy" lay — at least nominally — in advocating Copernicanism in the face of apparently contradictory biblical passages. The hypothesis, as everybody knows, is correct. What is not so widely known, however, is that there was no convincing proof of its correctness in Galileo's time. Even less well known is the fact that despite this lack of solid evidence, many in the Church — perhaps a majority in its leadership — shared Galileo's view that it was very likely true.
The interesting question that arises out of this historical fact is why did the Church formally and vehemently reject Copernicanism, even though it harbored strong suspicions of its validity? To ask that question is to begin to realize that Galileo's dispute with the Church was not about Copernicanism per se. In other words, it was not about whether the Earth moves. What, then, was it about? The answer to that question is the subject matter of this book, but It can be stated here in a nutshell.
The dispute was over two conflicting views of the nature of truth and reality and about the roles religion and science ought to play in defining the world we live In. Of far more fundamental concern to the Church than the details of the Copernican hypothesis was Galileo's belief In the reality of number, his conviction that the universe was essentially a mathematical entity, In some literal way composed of numbers. The Church, bolstered by Plato, Aristotle, and nearly two thousand years of theological thought, denied this, on grounds that It excluded the possibility that there was an ultimate goal and purpose to existence. For the Church, a mathematical, mechanistic interpretation of nature could never be more than a model, an intellectual artifact. Between theory and reality there would always be a gap that could not be bridged by human reason.
Galileo and his opponents in the Church understood the true nature of their dispute very clearly and explicitly; it is the modern myth of Galileo that loses sight of its real significance. The argument about the nature of reality and what we can truly know nevertheless remains the principal bedevllment of modern civilization, for as Rousseau said, what we think we know, but do not, harms us far more than what we do not know. It is here, in this implacable difference of opinion, that we can identify in its most basic form what I have called Galileo's mistake.
In my exploration of the myth I discovered there are many Galileos: Galileo the dutiful eldest son who made great personal sacrifices to support his mother and siblings after his father's untimely death; Galileo the truant lover who left the mother of his three children when social status beckoned; Galileo the father of two daughters whom he shut away In a cloistered convent at an unconscionably early age; Galileo the man of culture who loved music, art, and literature, especially the classics, and who rejoiced in the delights of the cellar and the table; and Galileo the scientific and philosophical polemicist, who had great power as a writer In the Italian vernacular and loved to flex his literary muscles in the cut and thrust of debate.
There are at least two "scientific" Galileos as well. First, and least familiar to most people, Is Galileo the physicist, whose work In the mathematical and experimental study of mechanics and dynamics earned him the well-deserved title of father of modern science. His masterwork in this area is titled Discourses on Two New Sciences, and it was published in 1638, five years after his famous trial by the Inquisition and four years before he died of a fever on January 8, 1642, in his villa in the hills overlooking Florence. At the core of this work was Galileo's novel approach to description and interpretation of natural phenomena through mathematics. In pursuit of this new discipline he fatally undermined the physics of Aristotle, which had long ago achieved the unassailable status of ordinary common sense. Furthermore, in merging mathematics and physics, he was able to see that the laws of physics familiar to us here on Earth also apply in the celestial realm. Previously, these had been thought of as distinct domains, governed by separate laws. In pursuing his mechanical studies he also developed the modern idea of the experiment (which he called the "ordeal"), constructing many laboratory devices, including various inclined planes and pendulums.
The centerpiece of his mechanical study was his investigation into the laws of motion. In his experiments with falling bodies he discovered that acceleration takes place continuously from the moment of release, and that all bodies fall at the same rate. His work paved the way for Newton's monumental theoretical structure of physical laws. Although Galileo published his findings in this field late in his life, many of his papers circulated privately in draft form, and he established a Europe-wide reputation as a leading mathematician and physicist early in his career.
The second "scientific" Galileo is the one that most often defines him in the popular mind: Galileo the great astronomer. Here, his reputation rests on less secure foundations. Galileo might almost be called an accidental astronomer. His main field of interest was physics, and though he lectured in astronomy at university, it was the ancient system of Ptolemy he taught, in which the Earth is at the center of the universe. His initial adoption of the telescope can be ascribed to his perennial need for money to support his family: he saw in it an instrument he might profitably manufacture. When he finally turned it to the night sky, his discoveries were many and spectacular, and they played an enormous part in the discrediting of the old Ptolemaic beliefs, But his endowments to astronomy are confined almost entirely to these observations. He made no lasting contribution to astronomical theory and was in the thrall of a stubborn conservatism that would not allow him, for example, to accept the idea that planetary orbits could be anything but perfectly circular. His contemporary Johannes Kepler far outshone him as a theorist, and there were others, including Jesuit astronomers, who were equally competent observers,
Nevertheless, it is as an astronomer that he is mainly remembered today, for it was his interpretation of the discoveries he made with his telescope that brought him Into conflict with the Church and led to his Infamous trial in 1633. I must emphasize immediately that it was the interpretation of these discoveries, rather than the discoveries themselves, that was the cause of all the trouble.
Although Galileo's brilliant successes in mechanics, or what we would call physics, were ferociously disputed by the entrenched Aristotelian academic establishment, they went largely unchallenged by the Church, This was not because the Church was uninterested or lacking in expertise. It was instead because in this area of study he was able to avoid metaphysical issues. He could stick to questions of "how" and Ignore the "why." In astronomy, that was not possible because Heaven occupied astronomical space, and it was in the ordering of the cosmos that the mind of God could be discerned. Moreover, where Scripture touched on astronomy, It appeared to contradict his conclusions.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Galileo's Mistake"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Wade Rowland.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Illustration and Photo Credits xiii
Acknowledgments xv
One I
Overture
Two II
Pope Paul V
A Time of Crisis Doctrinal Revolutions
Three 17
A Dialogue
Science's Motives
On Curiosity
A Negotiation
Four 31
Galileo the Aquarian
Ptolemy's World
Comets and Supernova
Kepler's Genius
The Uses of Hypotheses
Five 45
Young Galileo
The Studies in Motion
The Experimental Method
Number and Beauty
The Pythagoreans and the Reduction of Quality to Quantity
Six 55
Ferrara and Copernicus
The Reluctant Revolutionary
Challenging Aristotle
A Stimulating Meeting
Seven 67
The Stagirite
The Primacy of Mind
The Good
Deductive Science
Eight 79
Aristode's Influence
A Question of Infinity
Copernican Caution
Saving die Appearances
Nine 85
The Padua Years
The Telescopic Discoveries
The Lure of the Medici
The Jesuits
Rumors of Reaction
Ten 105
In the Medician Court
The Phases of Venus
Sunspot Disputes
Triumph in Rome
Cardinal Bellarmine
Eleven 113
Bruno's Heresy
An Infinite Universe
Aristode Revisited
The Struggles of Aquinas
The Return of Pythagoras
Twelve 129
Storm Warnings
Cardinal Barberini
The Conflict Is Joined: "Letter to Christina"
Bellarmine's Response
Thirteen 141
Under Attack
A Dangerous Mission
Barberini's Argument
Defeat in Rome
The Warning
Fourteen 151
A Dialogue in Venice
Sciences Successes
The Nature of Knowledge
Fifteen 159
Further Dialogue in Venice
Science and Faith
Faith and Reality
The Nature of Progress
Sixteen 167
On the Lido
The Problem of Objectivity
Reasoning's Recursiveness
The Map and the Territory
An Unfortunate Outburst
Seventeen 179
At Santa Maria Maggiore
Galileo's Conservatism
Kepler's Heterodoxy
A Remarkable Fresco
Eighteen 185
A Scientific Testament
Models of the World
The Paradox of Empiricism
Nineteen 193
Pope Urban VIII
Intimations of Change
Galileo's Dialogue
The Suppression
A Summons from the Inquisition
Twenty 209
An Enigmatic Pope
A Mass in St. Peter's
A Chance Encounter
Twenty-One 219
A Remarkable City
History's Parochialism
An Uncomplicated Man
The Motives of Pontiffs
Twenty-Two 227
A Dialogue in Vatican City
Galileo's Rehabilitation
"Learned Ignorance"
The Puzzle of the Abjuration
Twenty-Three 239
The Final Journey to Rome
The Inquisition
The Denial
The Confession
The Sentence
Twenty-Four 253
The Judgment and Abjuration
The Unspoken Issues
Twenty-Five 259
The Aftermath
Return to Arcetri
Discourses on Two New Sciences
A Visit from Hobbes
Milton's Tribute
Twenty-Six 267
On the Road to Florence
Galileo's Tomb
Human Happiness
Science and Number
Limits to Scientific Knowledge
An Unfinished Journey
Appendix 279
On the Question of Galileo's "Perjury"
Notes 283
Index 291
