EVOLUTION, NOT REVOLUTION:

The Galileo Legend (THOMAS LESSL, June 2000, New Oxford Review)

One day, as I was outlining some of the positive contributions made by medieval theology to the development of modern science, a student interrupted to ask why it was, if what I was saying were true, that "the Catholic Church killed all those scientists." Stunned, and not wanting to sound defensive, I turned the tables on the student and asked him to please name some of these scientific martyrs. Of course he could not name any. To ease his embarrassment, I noted that he had probably been misled by popular misrepresentations of the fate of Giordano Bruno, an apostate Dominican who was condemned to death by the Roman Inquisition at the turn of the seventeenth century. Popularizers like to link Bruno with Galileo simply because he happened to embrace the Copernican position. But Bruno did not hold this position as a scientist, nor is there any evidence linking his Copernican beliefs to his condemnation for heresy. Although he occasionally taught geometry, he was famous across Europe as an itinerant preacher of hermeticism — the pop new age religion of his day. The heliocentric model was merely a prop for his pantheistic cosmology of infinite worlds. While we may fault the Church officials who sent Bruno to the stake for cruelty, we cannot fault them for being enemies of science.

I am aware of only one scientist who was sentenced to death by public authorities prior to the twentieth century — when the Nazi and Soviet governments greatly enlarged this number. That was the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution. Although the specific charges which were raised against him by the Terror were political rather than scientific, the anti-scientific tendencies of the regime which condemned him are a well guarded secret. The science textbooks our children read make free with accusations against the Catholic Church over its treatment of Galileo, but we would be hard pressed to find any that mention the Terror's closing of the Academy of Science or its death sentence against France's greatest scientist.

I've always suspected that science popularizers and educators attend selectively to every hint of conflict between science and Christianity in history, but completely block out the most egregious offenses against scientific freedom perpetrated by secular ideologies. I recently decided to explore this suspicion in a more systematic fashion. In just a few hours spent perusing such literature in local libraries, I was able to accumulate 44 different accounts of the Galileo episode, many which also mistakenly assign scientific status to Bruno. Among these books and articles I found only one reference to Lavoisier's fate, and one brief note on the mistreatment of scientists by secular governments in the twentieth century. What I did find, in the numerous discussions of the Galileo episode that turned up, were stories having all the recognizable markings of popular folklore — erroneous embellishments, the omission of crucial details, and tendentious overgeneralizations which make Christianity and science out to be natural enemies. [...]

As an examination of the many samples I have collected will show, Hawking is only one of a multitude of science writers who recite such tales — nor is he the only eminent scientist among them. As a group they have succumbed not only to the delusions of the Galileo legend but to the even more pervasive myth of the "Dark Ages," the erroneous belief that the scientific revolution was brought about by a small handful of defiant geniuses who led civilization out of the valley of darkness into which it had descended — with the coming of Christianity — a thousand years earlier. The absurdity of what the "Dark Ages" myth supposes, never seems to dawn on the scientists who recite it. If medieval thought had been dominated by religious convictions that pointedly denied the very idea of science, why did the scientific revolution occur in the West? On the basis of what Hawking seems to assume, Europe would seem to be the last place on earth to expect a scientific revolution.

This paradox is easily resolved once we realize that this popular conception of the Middle Ages is simply a fiction. The events of the seventeenth century that are collectively called the "scientific revolution" were really products of a much longer period of "scientific evolution," an intellectual movement that was born in the very heart of medieval Europe. The science of Galileo and Newton was only possible because the scientific thinking of Aristotle had been so warmly received into Christian Europe centuries before. The discovery of Aristotle's work and that of a number of other classical thinkers, made available to Christians the most sophisticated scientific thinking that had been developed up to that point in history. But rather than suppressing this information, as the popular legends would suggest, medieval scholars immediately went to work building upon it. They did so because they recognized that Greek science was especially congenial to a biblical understandings of the world. It is not difficult to see why they would have thought so. As the Church Fathers had taught many centuries before, the view of nature that is given in revelation suggests that it might be "read" as a kind of companion volume to Scripture — a book of God's Works to go along with the book of God's Word. The sudden availability of Greek science greatly enlarged the medievals' ability to begin this undertaking, and they did so with great ardor.

The absence of such a sympathetic religious framework in classical antiquity may account for science's much shorter life span during this period. Despite the monumental contributions of Aristotle and others, science never enjoyed the kind of general acceptance in ancient times that it did in Christian Europe. Perhaps this was due to paganism's tendency to regard nature as a divinity. If nature were a goddess, she might be capricious, and thus not conducive to scientific study. Worse yet, the manipulation and probing of nature might constitute hubris, an impious entry into secrets not meant for mere mortals. Medieval Christianity, by contrast, created a general framework of assumptions conducive to much greater optimism about the prospects of scientific investigation. The natural world that is revealed in Scripture shows itself to be both orderly and good. Moreover, human beings are revealed to be creatures not only created in God's image — and thus capable, as Francis Bacon would latter say, "of the vision of the world" — but also commanded by God to be stewards of nature. For Christians science came to be regarded not only as possible, because God had created the human intellect to comprehend the universe, but also a duty commanded by charity. [...]

A broader reading of scientific history shows that Galileo's mistreatment by his ecclesiastical bosses was an anomaly, a momentary break in an otherwise harmonious relationship. In fact a more complete understanding of the relationship between Christianity and science has suggested to some scholars that Christian belief may have been the leaven that made the development of modern science possible. Modern science, after all, emerged in a most unlikely place, in an adolescent European culture that was only a few hundred years removed from barbarism. Nothing so revolutionary ever developed in the great civilizations of the Middle or Far East, despite their considerable antiquity and sophistication. The reason for this should be quite clear. The founding assumptions of modern science, its belief in a universe that is highly ordered and in a human mind that was created to reach beyond its finitude to grasp the mystery of this order, are premises that are secure only where monotheism has taken root.

Ironic, no?...this belief in the Immaculate Conception of science?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 14, 2005 8:40 AM