God's use of natural laws & the Western scientific tradition

Faith & Science Conversation
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I chose clergy because that’s what you asked for. You asked for major theological figures in Christianity, so I gave them to you.

As I have told you before, I have not been arguing this.

As I have told you before, I made this point myself, in the article which started this thread.

No that is not my position. I have told you this before. What I am doing is simply repeating Augustine’s warning. Here are Augustine’s words again.

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds as certain from reason and experience."

“Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people reveal vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh that ignorance to scorn.”

"Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertions.”

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None of this changes the very simple point I am making; the church opposed a scientific conclusion on the basis of its own interpretation of Scripture, an interpretation which was wrong. You can spend all day trying to argue that the church was right to do this, but it won’t change the point I’m making.

Galileo had produced enough evidence to justify his scientific conclusion; this is very different from today’s cold fusion claims. This was acknowledged by other scientists, who didn’t have a theological axe to grind. The only shaky evidence he brought forward was his wrong theory of tides, but the rest of his evidence was solid. That’s precisely why his conclusions were tested by other scientists and found to be valid, and why his view was accepted so rapidly among scientists (though not by clergy).

In contrast, the church opposed him on theological ground with no evidence whatsoever. As I’ve said several times before, if they had opposed him on scientific grounds that would have been entirely reasonable. They would have had good reason to do so, though they still would have ended up wrong. But instead they simply pointed to their interpretation of the Bible and claimed that trumped his scientific discoveries. That’s exactly what Ken Ham does today.

Yes, like preferring their own theological opinion over Galileo’s. So he not only knew more science than they did, his hermeneutic was better than theirs as well. They failed on both science and hermeneutics.

The fact is that what the church did with Galileo is precisely what Ken Ham does today. Should we praise Ken Ham for trying to uphold social stability, for trying to maintain a status quo, for having larger concerns?

You have expressed concern about Christians accepting scientific conclusions very readily, despite this necessitating a change of their interpretation of Scripture. But we need to remember one of the reasons why a lot of Christians accept scientific conclusions so readily these days, is that we know that Christianity has a painfully poor track record of theologians opposing scientific conclusions on the basis of Scripture, and being totally wrong in their interpretation of Scripture.

I don’t trust theologians to be accurate about science when all they’re doing is waving the Bible and shouting loudly, while scientists are busy with rigorous data collection and cross checking their work with repeated experimentation and peer review.

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I must confess I am having great difficulty in understanding your point - from your comments, you insist the Church opposes (or has often opposed) scientific conclusions, and yet you quote one of the most prominent figures of the Church as an example of good practice by the Church regarding science. I cannot begin to imagine the mental gymnastics this may require.

If you are trying to develop a thesis on how Christianity has influenced scientific development in the West, the book by Fuller on this subject would be of great help to you. He is a sociologist and can bring a more balanced perspective to this subject. If on the other hand, you are obsessed with the US arguments about YEC, OEC, TE and so on, than I think you will never make a clear point, as I said previously, this is mainly confined to the US conflict culture in this area - an irrational argument by any stretch.

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No. Please read what I wrote.

There is no need for me to do so. It has already been done several times by people far more knowledgeable and competent than myself. I have most of the standard works, including Duhem, who pioneered the field.

No. I am not obsessed with the US arguments about anything. I don’t even live there.

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Agree completely.

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I am not arguing they were anti-science. I am simply pointing out that they gave preference to their personal interpretation of the Bible over scientific evidence, just like Ken Ham does today.

Yes and I’ve previously read several articles from ThonyC making the same kind of points. It doesn’t change the fact that there was enough evidence to validate Galileo’s position, which is why some of the astronomers agreed with him, and why he was so influential in establishing heliocentrism so quickly after he published, and why scientists and historians of science agree that those contemporaries of his who agreed with him were right to do so, and were pioneers in their field. I don’t know any scientists or historians of science who argue that no one should have agreed with Galileo and his evidence shouldn’t have been taken seriously.

Of course this is only relevant to the scientists. It’s not relevant to the church, because the church didn’t argue against him on the basis of science. It just waved the Bible, pointed to a some verses, and said “Sorry, you’re wrong because the Bible says so”. Just like Ken Ham does today.

In other words, they had only the personal interpretation of the Bible which had been handed down to them, and which they agreed with. And it was wrong. So they were in exactly the same position as Ken Ham, and just as wrong as he is.

I don’t understand how “larger concerns” such as “societal stability” means it’s wrong to say Galileo knew more science than they did and his Biblical hermeneutic was better than theirs, or that it’s wrong to say they preferred their own theological opinion over his.

That’s what this looks like.

But I’m not talking about simply being wrong. I’ve been confining myself specifically to cases in which scientist say X about the natural world, and Christians deny it and say the scientists are all wrong and cite the Bible as evidence. How many times has it been that the scientists have had to say "Wait, you’re right, all my experiments were wrong, the data was completely misinterpreted, I could have saved myself all that time and trouble by simply reading those Bible verses?

Conversely how many times has it been that Christians have initially launched theological arguments against scientific conclusions and then been proved wrong; heliocentrism, the age of the earth, the shape of the earth, the scope of the flood, the age of fossils, what happened to the dinosaurs, the Big Bang, etc.

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So that’s your beef? Well, it’s legitimate. But that’s not exactly what was happening in the case of Galileo. As I’ve said from the beginning, your assessment is anachronistic. Galileo vs. the Church is not the Scopes monkey trials.

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But it very obviously did. People had done this as early as Augustine. Galileo did it, Copernicus did it, even Calvin did it.

The church didn’t say anything about siding with the scientists. It told Galileo that he was contradicting the Bible. This is what Bellarmine said.

“However, it is different to want to affirm that in reality the sun is at the center of the world and only turns on itself, without moving from east to west, and the earth is in the third heaven and revolves with great speed around the sun; this is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.”

“Second, I say that, as you know, the Council [of Trent] prohibits interpreting Scripture against the common consensus of the Holy Fathers; and if Your Paternity wants to read not only the Holy Fathers, but also the modern commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will find all agreeing in the literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world.”

“I add that the one who wrote, “The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose,” was Solomon, who not only spoke inspired by God, but was a man above all others wise and learned in the human sciences and in the knowledge of created things; he received all this wisdom from God; therefore it is not likely that he was affirming something that was contrary to truth already demonstrated or capable of being demonstrated.”

And as I have pointed out, they didn’t appeal to Plato. They appealed to the Bible. Why? Because when they looked in the Bible they could see very plainly what it said, and they weren’t reading it with Plato colored spectacles when they found the Bible gave an excellent description of the earth and sun from a geocentric view. Bellarmine even spelled it out verse by verse. The problem with the church was not Plato or Ptolemy. Ptolemy was a stumblingblock to the astronomers. But the stumblinglock to the church was the fact that the Bible represented the earth from a plainly geocentric view.

Apart from the fact that they never actually said this, and apart from the fact that even if they had said it they would have been totally wrong because there were no such reverberations once people accepted heliocentrism, I’ll point out again that this doesn’t change the facts of what I stated. Galileo knew more about the science than they did. Later the church had to admit he was right about the science. Galileo also knew how to interpret the Bible better than they did. Later the church had to adopt his interpretation of the Bible. He was way ahead of them.

And there you have it, a clear differentiation between science and theology.

Thank you.

In Galileo’s case there was also politics involved. But apart from that, it’s precisely what happened every other time; theologians making blunders with both the Bible and science, and scientists being proved right against the objections of the theologians.

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At the risk of repeating already covered ground --since I haven’t pored over every last exchange above, I recommend James Hannam’s book “God’s Philosophers” as a good corrective to the “science got everything right while the church got everything wrong” fallacy. Hannam may stand accused of being imbalanced in the other direction, but he has the advantage of actually having history (i.e. real historians) on his side. It certainly is true that theologians have had egg on their faces, but not as often as their detractors would have us believe. And of course they will never bring up any opposite case such as when the atheistic scientist (Fred Hoyle) opposed Father LeMaitre’s ‘Big Bang’ theory on the grounds that it sounded entirely too religious. It is worth noting that Fr. LeMaitre was not at all interested in advancing his theory as a Christian apologetic – he was just doing good science. I don’t know of any other clear cut examples where science had to catch up to theology --and there are probably more examples the other way; but again – not so many or so prolifically as modern myth makers want us to believe.

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Hannan’s work is excellent, and I have used it in my own studies more than once. Likewise Livingstone and Numbers. But if you can get hold of Duhem, you’ll find an astonishing gold mine. Most modern historians of science are still digging around in what Duhem uncovered.

Yes indeed, it’s ironic that the Big Bang was (and still is), opposed by many atheists because they feared it was a way of smuggling God in the back door. And to add to that, I’ll say right here that the one indisputable example of a Christian using Scripture to put scientists (or rather natural philosophers), to shame, was John Philoponus and his brilliant work against Proculs. But that was back in the sixth century.

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Are you sure you read that article I posted? The Church had scientists on its side. The same kinds of scientists that refused to accept relativity, the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, etc. Please stop pretending that it was “Galileo against a scientifically ignorant Church.”

"…for the most part the debate between heliocentrism and geocentrism was a scientific argument between Galileo and the Aristotelian scientists, with both sides claiming observational evidence for their respective position, but with the majority of scientists at the time believing that the geocentric model (Tycho’s version) agreed better with reality, especially since no demonstration had yet been made that the Earth moved.

This is an essential point that is oft neglected or ignored: the fact that heliocentrism was first opposed by the scientists of Galileo’s time, and that Galileo’s fight was with other scientists, not the Church. And even when the Church did become involved—through the political maneuverings of said Aristotelian scientists who were fed up with trying to silence Galileo on the scientific playing field—it is erroneous to hold that Christians involved in the debate turned a blind eye to the evidence. It is due to the lack of conclusive evidence for heliocentrism that the Church continued to stick to the traditional position that the Earth was immovable and the sun and planets moved around the Earth."

Your argument is akin to those who claim that “Constantine determined the biblical canon,” when in actuality he insisted that the church leaders determine the canon because the conflict threatened the stability of the Roman Empire.

That’s a very comparable situation to the Galileo incident, except that the Church were the final arbiters in Galileo’s decision–and that’s where things went wrong.

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Thanks for those recommendations. Numbers I have read years ago … and only one book (“The Creationists” I believe.) But Duhem (Pierre?) or Livingstone I’m not familiar with. If you have any particular works of theirs in mind to begin a tour of that ‘goldmine’, I am interested. Thanks again.

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For work by Livingstone, see his chapters in “Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective” and “When Science and Christianity Meet”.For an excellent book edited by Numbers, “Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion”.

Duhem wrote “Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic” (The System of World: A History of Cosmological Doctrines from Plato to Copernicus), which wasn’t published until decades after his death. It takes up ten volumes. You can read more about it here.

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I haven’t been posting here long either, and I haven’t read it either.

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You’re misrepresenting me. As I have said repeatedly, this is not a matter of the long discredited conflict thesis. I have written against the conflict thesis extensively myself.

Certainly. However, none of this changes the fact that when the church brought its objections to Galileo, they were theological. It did not object on the basis of science. It did not cite his scientific errors. It did not cite the arguments of contemporary scientists who disagreed with him. It argued that the Bible is the place to find an accurate account of science, and its arguments were entirely theological. This was a classic case of Bible thumpers versus science, Ken Ham style.

Fortunately contemporary scientists largely ignored the Bible thumping, and continued to investigate Gaileo’s claims on a scientific basis. The happy result was that they quickly found Galileo was right and the Bible thumpers were wrong. This had a huge positive effect on science, and advanced the Western scientific continuum tremendously.

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@Jonathan_Burke,

I’m not sure this clarification is very helpful. The Church OPPOSING a point of nature PURELY ON THEOLOGICAL analysis is the very ESSENCE of the conflict between Religion and Science…

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I am not saying they held to Gould’s NOMA, though both Galileo and Calvin pointed out that the Bible is not the place to go for accurate scientific commentary. Galileo in particular did not believe that theology informed science “better”. On the contrary, he believed that people who didn’t even understand science, shouldn’t be opposing it on the basis of theology. The point is that Galileo, Calvin, and others, were able to make the same distinction between science and theology which we do today, and used some of the very same arguments that we do today. It was not impossible for the church to do the same, but they didn’t.

Where is this process documented please? If step one was really “consult our best scientists”, why is there no mention of this in their statement to Galileo? And why is the statement to Galileo instead filled with appeals to theological tradition and Bible verses? The fact is, he wasn’t charged with “contradicting our best scientists”. Nor was he charged with “contradicting our best scientists and contradicting the Bible”. He was charged with “contradicting the Bible”. Boscaglia, Caccini, Bellarmine, Lorini, and Ingoli all launched theological objections (though at least Ignoli also launched detailed scientific objections).

No, I didn’t say there were no reverberations. I’m pointing out that they never cited any of the reverberations of social distress etc that you say they had in mind (even though they never actually said this), and that even if they had raised such objections, they would have been totally wrong because such reverberations never happened. On the contrary, the results of accepting heliocentrism were overwhelmingly positive.

Society didn’t break down and fail when Copernicus proposed heliocentrism. Science took a step forward. When Galileo accepted and defended heliocentrism, there was no rioting in the streets. When Galileo’s heliocentrism was increasingly accepted and became the standard view, science advanced tremendously, and the world kept turning. There was no social upheaval, no falling of governments, and not even a weakening of the authority of the church. Nothing happened except good things.

It was the same when early Christian commentators agreed that the earth was round. It was the same when Calvin pointed out that there is no such thing as a solid firmament, despite Genesis 1 describing a solid firmament, and despite Christian commentators (and astronomers), from the Early Fathers to the Reformation era insisting that a solid firmament definitely existed. The idea that horrible, terrible things would happen if people disagreed with the church over mattes of science, was simply wrong.

And no I don’t assume Galileo’s Biblical interpretation assumed his science. It was entirely the opposite; his science informed his Biblical interpretation. He changed his interpretation of the Bible based on his scientific discoveries.

They didn’t need to appeal to Plato because the Bible clearly said the same thing as Plato, and was the higher authority. That’s why they appealed specifically to the Bible. The interpretation of Scripture wasn’t based on Plato and Aristotle and Ptolemy, it was totally independent of them. They didn’t misread the Bible in light of the early Greek philosophers, they read it accurately; the Bible overwhelmingly presents a geocentric cosmology. Where they went wrong, was assuming this was correct.

Not only did I read the article, I already agreed the church had scientists on its side. I cited a couple of them. Tyco Brahe and Francesco Ignoli were the two most important. But neither them nor their arguments were cited by Bellarmine, nor were they made the basis of the church’s charge against Galileo. Bellarmine’s argument was entirely theological, and so was the charge brought against Galileo. The Bible and the Council of Trent were appealed to, not the scientific arguments of Brahe and Ignoli.

The fact is the church also knew there were scientists on Galileo’s side. By 1600 the Copernican model was accepted by Maestlin, Rothmann, Kepler, Galileo, Harriott, Bruno, Digges, Gilbert (all astronomers, some also mathematicians), Rheticus, and Stevin (mathematicians). By 1615 this list had expanded to include Castelli, Cavalieri, Zuniga, and Focscarini (who were strong supporters of Galileo) So the church already knew that the Copernican model was gaining increasing acceptance among scientists.

But the church didn’t listen to these scientists, because those scientists didn’t agree with the church’s interpretation of the Bible. They treated scientists the same way Ken Ham and the Disco Institute treat them; “They’re only right when they agree with my interpretation of the Bible”.

Please read what I wrote. I haven’t said that. I made it clear repeatedly that Galileo had his scientific opponents. That was a critical point in my argument; other people objected to Galileo on the basis of science, not Scripture. The church on the other hand objected to Galileo on the basis of Scripture, not science.

[quote=“fmiddel, post:211, topic:4380”]
Your argument is akin to those who claim that “Constantine determined the biblical canon,” when in actuality he insisted that the church leaders determine the canon because the conflict threatened the stability of the Roman Empire.[/quote]

Actually Constantine didn’t tell anyone to determine the canon. But leaving that aside, that’s not a good analogy for my argument. We know that Constantine wanted the church to convene councils on matters such as the nature of Christ for political rather than theological reasons. But we also know that the church convened those councils for theological rather than political reasons. They didn’t say “You’re right Constantine, we need to keep the empire together, that Third Century Crisis was just awful, it’s essential to hold councils on the nature of Christ for the socio-political good of the empire”.

I agree Constantine proposed the councils for political reasons, but we can’t claim the church convened the councils for those same political reasons. What you’re doing is equivalent to claiming that since Constantine was politically motivated to propose these councils, these churches were held by the church because it was concerned by socio-political upheaval. It wasn’t, it was theologically motivated.

At least we can agree that the church was very wrong in the case of Galileo. Why was it very wrong? Because it chose to rely on its own interpretation of Scripture rather than on science. Just like Ken Ham.