The Intellectual Heirs of the Inquisitors

Entrenched in the intellectual psyche of the West, at an almost archetypical depth, is the story of Galileo Galilei before the inquisitors at the Vatican who threatened to torture him unless he recanted his cosmology. As every schoolchild (probably by the fifth grade) knows—contrary to the long-held belief (from about 400 B.C.) that the earth sat immobile at the center of the universe and that the sun and the stars orbited it—Galileo argued that the sun was at the center of the universe and that earth orbited it. Deemed a heretic and, after at times a nasty trial in 1633, Galileo abjured his heliocentrism, never publicly talking about it again.

This unfortunate episode has, over the centuries, assumed an almost mythic status (as these things tend to do), bruited about as the example par excellence of intolerant religionists dogmatically adhering to ancient superstitions while simultaneously fighting against the progress that the Enlightenment and its intellectual tributaries (such as the scientific revolution) had juicily dangled before the thinking public. And though some truth to this spin exists, the Galileo fiasco, instead of being an account of religion battling science, is really an account of what happens when religionists, far from battling science, unnecessarily surrender to it.

How so? Because the inquisitors in Rome were not defending Scripture itself; they were defending an interpretation of Scripture based on a flimsy and clumsy melding of the Bible and science, in this case the “science” of Aristotle and Claudius Ptolemy. In a similar way, today’s Neo-Darwinian synthesis (the latest version of evolution) has assumed the role that Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology had in Galileo’s day: it is the paradigm, the filter, commonly used to interpret Scripture. And, unfortunately, many of these Neo-Darwinians are just as intolerant of dissent from this paradigm as the Vatican clerics were of theirs, making today’s defenders of the present orthodoxy, instead of the intellectual heirs of Galileo, the intellectual heirs of the inquisitors who threatened Galileo with the rack if he didn’t recant.

Galileo’s Heresies

Few events in intellectual history have been parsed, interpreted, reinterpreted, examined, and reexamined as much as has the Galileo controversy with Rome. One egregious twist on it appeared in Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom (1896), today deemed a simplistic cherry-picking anti-Catholic spin job credited with having done more than any other work to promote the idea of an inherent and deep-seated hostility between faith and science, which most scholars deny. On the other hand, making White’s work seem all but canonical, there’s Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, by Robert Sungenis (2004), a two-volume tome that, as the title suggests, defended the church’s opposition to Galileo and (believe it or not) defends geocentrism. 

Though almost everything about the Galileo controversy has been contentious, what is pretty much agreed upon is that Galileo’s unfortunate adjuration—“I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the universe and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the universe and moves . . . I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies”[1]—was dragged out of him under the threat of violence.

And what were “the aforesaid errors and heresies” that the Vatican was going to torture this old man over? 1. The sun exists as the center of the cosmos. 2. The earth itself is not at the center of the cosmos. 3. The sun does not move. 4. The earth moves around the sun, not vice versa. These were Galileo’s four heresies that appear in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,[2] his 1632 work that challenged the reigning paradigm and defended a Copernican (or close to Copernican) cosmology instead.

Few events in intellectual history have been parsed, interpreted, reinterpreted, examined, and reexamined as much has the Galileo controversy with Rome.

Aristotle and Ptolemy

 Anyone familiar ancient Greek and Roman astronomy should notice something about these “heresies.” Galileo wasn’t challenging Scripture; he was challenging, instead, an Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology that had been dogmatically imposed upon Scripture, becoming the filter through which the Bible was to be interpreted, just as today’s evolutionists do with Neo-Darwinism.

“Lest we forget,” wrote David Bentley Hart, “the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science.”[3]

Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C.E., particularly with his On the Heavens, laid the foundation for belief in a geocentric cosmos, which set the earth immobile in the center of the universe, with the sun, stars, and planets orbiting it in perfect circles and at constant speeds. Astute observers noticed, however, that many aspects of the heavens did not seem to be reading Aristotle. So, in the second century C.E., Greco-Roman astronomer/astrologer (back then inseparable) and mathematician Claudius Ptolemy—seeking to “save the phenomena”—wrote The Almagest (The Greatest), a complicated and convoluted mathematical and astronomical attempt to make Aristotle’s science fit the phenomena, and this Aristotelean-Ptolemaic cosmology (flaws and all) would dominate the noosphere for almost 1,000 years.

That is, until Galileo upended it with his heresies.

The Heresies

Take Galileo’s first heresy, that the sun stood at the center of the universe. In this case the inquisitors and Galileo were both wrong, drastically so: the sun (as far as we can tell) is nowhere near the center of the universe, wherever that center is, or if even that concept (the center of the universe) makes sense in an infinite creation. 

But that’s not the issue. The issue, instead, is how could Galileo’s claim be heresy? The Bible said nothing about the sun being at the center of the universe; in fact, the Bible said nothing about the location of the sun’s position in the cosmos at all. The Aristotlian-Ptolemaic system, of course, put the earth at the center, and because the Bible was being interpreted through that lens, the powers-that-be condemned an old man over what was, at the core, a biblical nonissue.

The next heresy, following deductively from the first, was Galileo’s claim that because the sun was at the center of the universe, the earth could not be. Again, as with the location of the sun, Scripture does not put the earth at the center of the universe. The earth’s geographic locale in the cosmos is never discussed in Scripture, period. Yet, based on the church’s false science, Galileo was condemned not only for what was, again, a biblical nonissue, but for a position that turned out to be correct, after all.

His third heresy, that the sun is “immovable,” is another error on his part, yes. But the egg is on Rome’s face, not his. In this case Rome did at least have some Scripture, as opposed to relying solely on The Almagest or On the Heavens. Of course, key were such texts as Psalm 19:5, 6, which read: “In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is deprived of its warmth” (NIV).

Clearly the Bible is talking about the motion of the sun, is it not?

Or is it? We are dealing here with Psalms, poetry, a literary form filled with images and metaphors that are not always meant to be taken literally, as is typical of all poetry. When the psalmist says about God, “I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings” (Ps. 57:1, NIV), he is using metaphors and symbols. Otherwise, what? God had literal wings under whose shadow David hid? In fact, in Psalm 19, talking about the glory of God in the heavens, David writes that there “is “no speech nor language where their voice is not heard” (verse 3). Is he saying that the sun, moon, and stars speak in different languages, literally, or was David simply using poetry and metaphor to teach spiritual truth about God’s glory? Or when the Bible (Deut. 10:16; 30:6; Jer. 4:4) says “circumcise your hearts,” is it talking literally?

No more literally than the following texts. “The sun had risen upon the earth when Lot entered Zoar” (Gen. 19:23). “The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose” (Eccl. 1:5)? This language reflects our common language today, when we use the same metaphors to express the appearance of the sun in the sky, not its true motions through it.

Psalm 19 is, simply, David’s talking about the revelation of God in the cosmos. It is not cosmology, nor was it meant to be cosmology, but it became so, not because of the Bible, but because of a false interpretation of the Bible, one based on the prevailing scientific paradigm of the time.

And, finally, the fourth heresy: that the earth, instead of being stationary, moves. Here too, Rome claimed biblical backing. After all, doesn’t the Bible say, “The world is established, so that it cannot be moved” (Ps. 93:1)? Yes, it does. But it also says that “the Lord will roar from Zion, and thunder from Jerusalem; the earth and the heavens will tremble” (Joel 3:16, NIV). And that “the earth reels like a drunkard” (Isa. 24:20, NIV). And that “I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place” (Isa. 13:13). Even if one argues that these were statements about the power of God, and not cosmology, which they were, Rome was still on very shaky ground arguing, from Scripture at least, for an immobile earth.

After all, were earthquakes unknown in Bible times? If so, what did Amos mean: “The words of Amos, one of the shepherds of Tekoa—the vision he saw concerning Israel two years before the earthquake, when Uzziah was king of Judah and Jeroboam son of Jehoash was king of Israel” (Amos 1:1, NIV)? And did not Jesus Himself warn that “there will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven” (Luke 21:11, NIV)—a statement that makes no sense if the earth were immobile?

The church’s attack on Galileo here was the result, not just of adhering to a false cosmology, but, by having superimposed that false cosmology on the Bible, of turning that cosmology into a doctrine from which they allowed no dissent. 

Darwin and Aristotle

What about today? There might be no Inquisition, at least in any formal sense, but woe to the scientist or intellectual who dares question, much less challenge, today’s Aristotelian-Ptolemaic paradigm, which is Darwin or whatever the latest incantation of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis happens to be, and whose paladins no more brook dissent now than did Galileo’s inquisitors back when.

Take, for example, the umbrage when highly respected philosopher and writer Thomas Nagel, an avowed atheist, published his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Dealing basically with the mind-body question, Nagel had the audacity to state (among other things) that “physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect.”[4] Worse, and more unforgivably, though not believing in Intelligent Design (he’s an atheist, remember), Nagel dared to defend them, writing that these people “do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.”[5]

The attacks against Nagel were bitter, revealing an intellectual dogmatism about what remains surely one of the most intractable questions in modern science: what is consciousness, and how do third-person objective neurohormonal and electrical processes in our brains translate into first-person subjective experiences? No one knows, no one comes close to knowing, and yet to challenge the reigning materialist paradigm, which appears to be radically inadequate to explain consciousness (the basic point Nagel was making), is the unpardonable sin.

In April 2000 the Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University hosted a conference called “The Nature of Nature,” which featured a host of speakers, from jihadist materialists such as Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg, to Intelligent Design advocates, including William Dembski. How did Baylor, a professed Christian University, respond to the presence of an Intelligent Design perspective on its campus?

It shut the Michael Polanyi Center down.

Augustine and Barth

The immediate issue is not the truth or falsity of Neo-Darwinism (however absurdly false it is), but the inquisitorial intolerance shoveled upon those who dare deviate from it, as Galileo did from Aristotle. Swiss theologian Karl Barth warned that the church must not be captured by “the dominant science of the time. As Christians we must not let ourselves be taken captive either by an ancient picture of this nature or one newly arisen and beginning to be dominant.”[6]

This advice came a bit too late for Augustine (354-430 C.E.). He railed against the faithful who expressed “utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements”[7] about the creation because these “untrue statements” would hurt the Christian witness about “the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven.”[8]

So, if one of his contemporaries had argued that the sun, not the earth, sat at the center of things, and that the earth moved around the sun, not vice versa, he would be making the precise “utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements” that Augustine warned about. After all, for centuries everyone had known—from Scripture (via Aristotle and Ptolemy), as well as from personal experience (the earth sure doesn’t feel as if it’s moving, and sun looks as if it is)—what the truth was.

So, contrary to the meme, today’s defenders of the current Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy are not the true heirs of Galileo but of the inquisitors who condemned him.

[1] Galileo’s Abjuration. http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1630galileo.asp. (Italics supplied.)

[2] Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1967).

[3] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, Kindle Edition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 68.

[4] Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Kindle Edition (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[5] Ibid. pp. 10, 11.

[6] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, Kindle Edition (London: SCM Classics, 1947), p. 59.

[7] John Hammond Taylor, St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis: 41 (Ancient Christian Writers) (Kindle Location 507). Kindle Edition (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press. 1982).

[8] Ibid. (Kindle Locations 503-504). Kindle Edition.