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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Why was (is) Benedict XVI so unpopular?
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
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Originally posted by IngoB:
Of course, most people would have not made the connection of Ratzinger with the CDF and of the CDF with the Inquisition at all, without some helpful journalist prompting the association.
Gotta go with Palimpsest on this one. The media will dig up your skeletons and your half-skeletons and your things that look like skeletons. Boo fucking hoo.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
So much nicer than the Spanish Inquisition who killed and expelled many many more.
Indeed. I know you are desperately trying to be ironic here, but actually the Roman Inquisition was a lot better (i.e., less bad) than the Spanish one. If something nobody expects came around to my house, then I for one would much prefer it to be Roman, not Spanish.
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
You may think saying Benedict was head of the organization that descended from the Roman Inquisition and not the Inquisition or the Spanish is a rousing defense.
Actually, I simply think that it is a fact. I like facts. When I see someone making a factual error, I often feel inspired to correct them. So here. I also do not think that BXVI requires a defence, much less a rousing one. From all I know about him so far, I would say that he is a good and intelligent man who became a weak pope. The most questionable act of his entire ecclesiastic career was most likely ... resigning as pope. And not just because we got a loose-talking populist Jesuit next.
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
It is nitpicking to outsiders who lack your subtle theological insights. That's the hazard of not letting the church ban books and newspapers anymore so people can be protected from being informed of these links.
Being as old as the ruins of Rome has some disadvantages, for example that everybody can find some issue with you to exercise their anachronism against. Speaking of which, it might interest you that there is a field of intellectual inquiry called "history" (Wikipedia has a helpful article that will explain more). I mention this because my contribution here was what people would call "historical", rather than "theological". Perhaps you think that "theological" means "having to do with religion", but that's also not quite accurate. Again, you could start with the Wikipedia article to understand the term better.
See, I told you that when I see factual error, I often feel inspired to correct it.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
So much nicer than the Spanish Inquisition who killed and expelled many many more.
Indeed. I know you are desperately trying to be ironic here, but actually the Roman Inquisition was a lot better (i.e., less bad) than the Spanish one. If something nobody expects came around to my house, then I for one would much prefer it to be Roman, not Spanish.
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
You may think saying Benedict was head of the organization that descended from the Roman Inquisition and not the Inquisition or the Spanish is a rousing defense.
Actually, I simply think that it is a fact. I like facts. When I see someone making a factual error, I often feel inspired to correct them. So here. I also do not think that BXVI requires a defence, much less a rousing one. From all I know about him so far, I would say that he is a good and intelligent man who became a weak pope. The most questionable act of his entire ecclesiastic career was most likely ... resigning as pope. And not just because we got a loose-talking populist Jesuit next.
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
It is nitpicking to outsiders who lack your subtle theological insights. That's the hazard of not letting the church ban books and newspapers anymore so people can be protected from being informed of these links.
Being as old as the ruins of Rome has some disadvantages, for example that everybody can find some issue with you to exercise their anachronism against. Speaking of which, it might interest you that there is a field of intellectual inquiry called "history" (Wikipedia has a helpful article that will explain more). I mention this because my contribution here was what people would call "historical", rather than "theological". Perhaps you think that "theological" means "having to do with religion", but that's also not quite accurate. Again, you could start with the Wikipedia article to understand the term better.
See, I told you that when I see factual error, I often feel inspired to correct it.
We outsiders would not be happy if the Roman Inquisition came around to our house to call. You're a true believer and could help them with their fact finding. We outsiders would be heretics. Less bad than the Spanish Inquisition has plenty of room to be quite horrible.
The Roman Inquisition's history is one of executions, imprisonments and book banning. Yet you seem to think it's much better for Benedict to be associated with their organization then the Spanish Inquisition. So I assumed you had a theological reason for your fondness for the organization. Thanks for explaining you were only nitpicking. Again, no one cares about your taxonomy of national Inquisitions. Benedict ran an organization that has a nasty history and an infamous name before they changed it.
Posts: 2990 | From: Seattle WA. US | Registered: Nov 2011
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
We outsiders would not be happy if the Roman Inquisition came around to our house to call. You're a true believer and could help them with their fact finding. We outsiders would be heretics. Less bad than the Spanish Inquisition has plenty of room to be quite horrible.
Given your continued anachronism, it is no surprise that you think nobody else could possibly have learned a lesson from history.
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
The Roman Inquisition's history is one of executions, imprisonments and book banning.
Of course, if you are an Anabaptist and Zwingli's or Elizabeth I's men came knocking on your door, you would be in much better shape. Or a RC in the English Reformation. Or an Old Believer among Russian Orthodox. I'll tell you what has reduced the religious body count most: the separation of Church and state. Of course, nature abhors a vacuum, so various secular ideologies have been steeping into that place. That really made the body count go through the roof...
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
Thanks for explaining you were only nitpicking.
You are welcome.
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
Benedict ran an organization that has a nasty history and an infamous name before they changed it.
Personally, I think an Inquisition is necessary but need not be evil. The modern institution that BXVI used to run does a fairly good job, all things considered. And I would be entirely OK with still calling it the Inquisition, but then I care more about facts than labels.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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deano
princess
# 12063
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Posted
Actually, EVERYONE expected the Spanish Inquisition. They had to give 30-day’s notice in writing before they called on you.
So if we are debunking myths here, let’s debunk another one.
It seems to me – and I’m NOT a catholic – that after Galileo, the Catholic Church actually started to move toward embracing and supporting science. Not quickly, but she’s a big leviathan to turn around. But the Church became a great source of patronage for scientific research.
Science flourished to the point where the proposer of the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe was by Monseigneur Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a catholic priest and theoretical physicist.
So to point out the flaws of 500 years ago, and to try to impose them onto todays church is quite frankly ridiculous. It just doesn’t stand up. I think Lemaitre has more than offset Galileo.
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"The moral high ground is slowly being bombed to oblivion. " - Supermatelot
Posts: 2118 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: Nov 2006
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by deano:
It seems to me – and I’m NOT a catholic – that after Galileo, the Catholic Church actually started to move toward embracing and supporting science. Not quickly, but she’s a big leviathan to turn around. But the Church became a great source of patronage for scientific research.
Actually, to the extent that one can talk of supporting science at all in the past, the RCC has always been one of the foremost patrons and it would be more accurate to say that her patronage has only diminished with modernity, when secular funding has ramped up massively. The most respected astronomer in Europe when Galileo was starting to make his mark was the Jesuit Christopher Clavius, who is largely responsible for the Gregorian calendar and the modern usage of the decimal point. And if we look back further in time, then the only "researchers" in sight are Church people like Albert the Great, who undoubtedly was one of the greatest "natural scientists" of medieval times. One person who directly profited from Church support happens to be Galileo Galilei. His friend, pope Urban VIII, actually gave him the equivalent of a sizeable grant when he came to Rome, namely a pension to support him. Galileo in turn bit the hand that fed him. Hard. Writes the Galileo Project:
quote:
Maffeo Barberini was an accomplished man of letters, who published several volumes of verse. Upon Galileo's return to Florence, in 1610, Barberini came to admire Galileo's intelligence and sharp wit. During a court dinner, in 1611, at which Galileo defended his view on floating bodies, Barberini supported Galileo against Cardinal Gonzaga. From this point, their patron-client relationship flourished until it was undone in 1633. Upon Barberini's ascendance of the papal throne, in 1623, Galileo came to Rome and had six interviews with the new Pope. It was at these meetings that Galileo was given permission to write about the Copernican theory, as long as he treated it as a hypothesis. After the publication of Galileo' s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, in 1632, the patronage relationship was broken. It appears that the Pope never forgave Galileo for putting the argument of God's omnipotence (the argument he himelf had put to Galileo in 1623) in the mouth of Simplicio, the staunch Aristotelian whose arguments had been systematically destroyed in the previous 400-odd pages. At any rate, the Pope resisted all efforts to have Galileo pardoned.
If you call a renaissance prince who has supported you a "simpleton", you can expect trouble. If that renaissance prince happens to be the pope, and you have tangled with the Inquisition before, then guess what happens... Galileo was never tortured or otherwise physically harmed, was comfortable throughout the trial, and his punishment was to live in house arrest - with various (fairly posh) friends. He had a proper Church burial, in fact he was laid to rest prominently in Santa Croce, Florence, and had special blessing sent to his deathbed by ... Urban VIII. The big problem of the Galileo affair was not what happened to Galileo, who got off rather lightly by the standards of the time, but that through the Inquisitorial reaction to him the Church clamped down unduly on heliocentrism. Up to this point, the Church had only insisted that heliocentrism must be marked an unproven hypothesis - which at the time it very much was. Prior to Galileo triggering the pope's wrath, everything was set to follow Cardinal Bellarmine's prior good judgement: "I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated."
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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deano
princess
# 12063
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Posted
I do wonder if Galileo, brilliant scientist that he was, was also a poor diplomat at a time when people like that were not tolerated as they are now.
Imagine a Sheldon Cooper in 17th Century Rome and you begin to see the problem. If Galileo had been better able to explain himself to the powers of the day then perhaps he wouldn't have run foul of the papacy.
I'm not saying he should have denied his findings, but that he was probably not the best person to explain them.
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"The moral high ground is slowly being bombed to oblivion. " - Supermatelot
Posts: 2118 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: Nov 2006
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Actually, to the extent that one can talk of supporting science at all in the past, the RCC has always been one of the foremost patrons and it would be more accurate to say that her patronage has only diminished with modernity, when secular funding has ramped up massively.
<snip>
The big problem of the Galileo affair was not what happened to Galileo, who got off rather lightly by the standards of the time, but that through the Inquisitorial reaction to him the Church clamped down unduly on heliocentrism.
Shorter IngoB: Aside from its multi-century attempt to suppress of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church was a big supporter of science.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by deano:
Imagine a Sheldon Cooper in 17th Century Rome and you begin to see the problem.
Exactly. The other thing people forget is that all this happened at the same time as the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the biggest military showdown of Protestant and Catholic forces in the wake of the Reformation, which wiped out up to 40% of the population in Germany and surrounds. At the time of Galileo's condemnation, Gustavus Adolphus was trashing the forces of the Holy Roman Empire. It was not a good time to openly challenge the authority of the RCC on interpreting scripture and of the pope personally. The end of this war, a mere six years after Galileo's death, de facto ended the political power of the papacy. And the cracks began to show during Galileo's house arrest, when Catholic France attacked Catholic Habsburg. The pope was - one imagines - rather too busy with serious political and military concerns than to worry much about what he had done to the relationship between Church and science. Yet that is all he is remembered for now, the personification of Church as anti-science...
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Pomona
Shipmate
# 17175
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by deano:
I do wonder if Galileo, brilliant scientist that he was, was also a poor diplomat at a time when people like that were not tolerated as they are now.
Imagine a Sheldon Cooper in 17th Century Rome and you begin to see the problem. If Galileo had been better able to explain himself to the powers of the day then perhaps he wouldn't have run foul of the papacy.
I'm not saying he should have denied his findings, but that he was probably not the best person to explain them.
Not sure a deeply pious RC and father of several children out of wedlock could be much of a Sheldon Cooper type!
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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]
Posts: 5319 | From: UK | Registered: Jun 2012
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Shorter IngoB: Aside from its multi-century attempt to suppress of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church was a big supporter of science.
A discovery that was made by Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon and doctor of canon law in the RCC. Pope Clement VII and selected cardinals attended lectures on the Copernican ideas in Rome, and one of those cardinals wrote to Copernicus, urging him to publish. He finally dedicated his work to Pope Paul III, and at the end of his life was buried in Frombork Cathedral.
But yes, there was the Galileo affair, and it took the the RCC more than a hundred years (till 1758) to lift the general prohibition against heliocentrism. This - no doubt - was a grave mistake. But it simply is not by and in itself a demonstration that the RCC was an enemy of science throughout history. She was not, and she is not. (And as an aside, Protestants should tread rather carefully on the subject of heliocentrism. Rather unsurprisingly, it wasn't just Catholics who worried about its apparent contradiction of scripture.)
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
Not sure a deeply pious RC and father of several children out of wedlock could be much of a Sheldon Cooper type!
He wasn't. He was a famous public intellectual, and an accomplished speaker and lecturer.
Also his father was a well-known musician and composer, probably the second most famous music theorist of the century - he was one of the originators of what we know know as Baroque music, and also Italian opera (which is to say opera, as the Italians invented it, even though they pretended they were reviving classical Greek drama) and the man who did most of the erly work on the sounds produced by vibrating strings of different lengths and tensions (sometimes wrongly attributed to the more famous son).
And Galileo's younger brother was also a famous musician. As was Galileo's son. In fact the brother was a bit of a suiperstar for the time.
And the Pope, and sopme of the cardinakls, and some leding politicians, were his personal friends. So no silly theories about shy nerds! He knew what he was doing and so did his opponents.
(And anyway, it was Kepler who got most of it right, not the publicty-hungry Galileo. and Kepler was a Protestant, and astrologer, and his mother had been accused of witchcraft - but the Pope never bothered to attack him)
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Shorter IngoB: Aside from its multi-century attempt to suppress of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church was a big supporter of science.
A discovery that was made by Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon and doctor of canon law in the RCC.
Sort of. Copernicus formulated the theory and noted that certain observations (e.g. retrograde motion of planets) were more simply explained by a heliocentric model. It was Galileo's work with the telescope that provided the observational evidence (e.g. the phases of Venus) that geocentrism was wrong. I guess it depends on whether the credit for discovering something goes to the initial theoretical formulator (Copernicus) or the person making the practical demonstration (Galileo). It's a similar question to whether you credit the discovery of black holes to Albert Einstein, who theorized the existence of such bodies, or to the team of astronomers who determined that Cygnus X-1 was almost certainly a black hole.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
But yes, there was the Galileo affair, and it took the the RCC more than a hundred years (till 1758) to lift the general prohibition against heliocentrism.
And the ban on certain works that were originally placed on the Index of Forbidden Books because they advocated heliocentrism (e.g. Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) persisted well into the nineteenth century. That's quite the vendetta to be based on an argument with one uppity Italian.
And I'm hesitant to consider any organization that maintains something like an Index of Forbidden Books a "supporter of science".
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
(And as an aside, Protestants should tread rather carefully on the subject of heliocentrism. Rather unsurprisingly, it wasn't just Catholics who worried about its apparent contradiction of scripture.)
Indeed. You probably had more to worry about advocating heliocentrism in Calvin's Geneva than you did in Urban VIII's Rome. But I'd also argue that "more tolerant of dissent than John Calvin" is setting the bar so low you can't even see it anymore.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Callan
Shipmate
# 525
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Posted
Clearly the thing to do was to move to England where the Arian Sir Isaac Newton, devoted servant of the Calvinist William of Orange and the Anglican Queen Anne died in his bed, refusing the sacraments of the Church of England and was nonetheless buried in Westminster Abbey by the same Church. The Catholic Alexander Pope wrote of him:
"Nature, and nature's laws lay hid in night
God said, let Newton be, and all was light."
Incidentally, I am aware that both Calvin and Luther opposed the heliocentric theory in their writings but is anyone aware of a protestant state which persecuted a scientist for holding such opinions?
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How easy it would be to live in England, if only one did not love her. - G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 9757 | From: Citizen of the World | Registered: Jun 2001
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Moo
Ship's tough old bird
# 107
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Posted
AIUI the main goal of the Spanish Inquisition was to identify and get rid of the Moors and the Jews. The (Catholic) Spaniards had been fighting for dominance over the entire Iberian peninsula for more than five centuries. When they finally achieved it, they used the Inquisition as a tool for ethnic cleansing.
Moo
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Kerygmania host
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See you later, alligator.
Posts: 20365 | From: Alleghany Mountains of Virginia | Registered: May 2001
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Shorter IngoB: Aside from its multi-century attempt to suppress of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church was a big supporter of science.
A discovery that was made by Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon and doctor of canon law in the RCC. Pope Clement VII and selected cardinals attended lectures on the Copernican ideas in Rome, and one of those cardinals wrote to Copernicus, urging him to publish. He finally dedicated his work to Pope Paul III, and at the end of his life was buried in Frombork Cathedral.
But yes, there was the Galileo affair, and it took the the RCC more than a hundred years (till 1758) to lift the general prohibition against heliocentrism. This - no doubt - was a grave mistake. But it simply is not by and in itself a demonstration that the RCC was an enemy of science throughout history. She was not, and she is not. (And as an aside, Protestants should tread rather carefully on the subject of heliocentrism. Rather unsurprisingly, it wasn't just Catholics who worried about its apparent contradiction of scripture.)
Copernicus waited decades until he was dying before allowing his book to be published despite the urging of a cardinal writing and telling him to publish. The usual explanation is that he didn't want to deal with any backlash from religious objections. Not so good for the rapid progress of science, but a lot safer when dealing with the Church.
Posts: 2990 | From: Seattle WA. US | Registered: Nov 2011
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
The Roman Inquisition's history is one of executions, imprisonments and book banning.
Of course, if you are an Anabaptist and Zwingli's or Elizabeth I's men came knocking on your door, you would be in much better shape. Or a RC in the English Reformation. Or an Old Believer among Russian Orthodox.
Hush, children, and you may hear the rare yet beautiful "I know you are but what am I?" defense. Be still and listen, for you may never hear it again.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
(And as an aside, Protestants should tread rather carefully on the subject of heliocentrism. Rather unsurprisingly, it wasn't just Catholics who worried about its apparent contradiction of scripture.)
Okay, so I lied. You will hear it a lot here.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by deano:
Imagine a Sheldon Cooper in 17th Century Rome and you begin to see the problem.
Exactly. The other thing people forget is that all this happened at the same time as the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the biggest military showdown of Protestant and Catholic forces in the wake of the Reformation, which wiped out up to 40% of the population in Germany and surrounds. At the time of Galileo's condemnation, Gustavus Adolphus was trashing the forces of the Holy Roman Empire. It was not a good time to openly challenge the authority of the RCC on interpreting scripture and of the pope personally. The end of this war, a mere six years after Galileo's death, de facto ended the political power of the papacy. And the cracks began to show during Galileo's house arrest, when Catholic France attacked Catholic Habsburg. The pope was - one imagines - rather too busy with serious political and military concerns than to worry much about what he had done to the relationship between Church and science. Yet that is all he is remembered for now, the personification of Church as anti-science...
The end of the reformation certainly started the weakening of Papal political power.
What ended the political power of the papacy was the Capture of Rome in 1870. It was in some part due to general reaction due to the Roman Inquisition, the Removal of a Jewish Boy Edgardo Mortara from his home because he had baptized by a servant. The Vatican later became recognized as a separate nation but no longer had political control of the papal states.
Posts: 2990 | From: Seattle WA. US | Registered: Nov 2011
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Tommy1:
A couple of points. Firstly criticising Ratzinger for the Galileo is rather like criticising David Cameron because of Charles I's Star Chamber.
Nobody did that, did they? There was argument about inquisitions and attitudes to science, but so far as BXVI was concerned that was in the context of his popularity related to a prior appointment. Or did I miss something in my Hostly speed-reading?
quote:
Secondly there is a serious side to this issue of Francis being more media savvy than Benedict. I have a horrible suspicion that we would have heard rather more about this story in the media
http://www.examiner.com/article/pope-francis-accused-of-cover-up-dominican-republic-pedophile-scandal
http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/158234,Vatican-refuses-to-extradite-Polish-archbishop-accused-of-child-sex-abuse
if the Pope at the time had not been media star Francis.
Well, I don't know about that. But I did know about the cases in question. Personally, I don't think the media show poster boys any more mercy than they show anyone else. My gut feel is 'probably less'. They build them up to knock them down and, both ways, get stories out of the process. The media are iconoclastic, even when doing the initial polishing of icons. It's what they do, isn't it?
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
So no silly theories about shy nerds! He knew what he was doing and so did his opponents.
I'm not so sure about that one. He may not have been a Sheldon, but it sure looks to me like Galileo played a game of social poker, and seriously overplayed his hand. As for the pope, I do not think that his primary motivation was to shut down heliocentrism, much less science at large. As mentioned, the official line had actually been worked out (discussion allowed, but only as unproven hypothesis) and Galileo was supposed to write his book along those lines. What instead happened appears to have been a clash of egos. One can of course view this along the lines of "personal matters should never interfere with science", but that is a bit naive even for modern academia (wave about some serious cash, and the slurping sounds that you hear do not just come from the vacuum pumps...).
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
I guess it depends on whether the credit for discovering something goes to the initial theoretical formulator (Copernicus) or the person making the practical demonstration (Galileo).
Copernicus was - among many other things - a practical astronomer, and Galileo did not provide a practical demonstration of heliocentrism. The first real experimental "proof" in terms of measuring a star's parallax was obtained by Bessel in 1838 (after a failed earlier attempt by Bradley). By that time even the slightest opposition from the Church had evaporated, indeed, the Holy See approved printing of heliocentric books in Rome in 1822.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
And the ban on certain works that were originally placed on the Index of Forbidden Books because they advocated heliocentrism (e.g. Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) persisted well into the nineteenth century. That's quite the vendetta to be based on an argument with one uppity Italian.
I don't think that it was that. As mentioned, the general ban was lifted in 1758. I think the ban on these specific publications lasted longer simply out of respect for the papacy, or to put it less nicely, to save face. Back then, a hundred years was just a bit too short to completely overturn the direct interventions of a pope. So they kept a fig leaf in place.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
And I'm hesitant to consider any organization that maintains something like an Index of Forbidden Books a "supporter of science".
There simply is no question that the Church was a major patron, and in the very beginning pretty much the only supporter, of scientific endeavours. The Index of Forbidden Books was not primarily aimed at scientific works. Rather from a modern perspective "science was none of their business", hence those few cases were scientific books did land on the Index are now given particular attention. (One can of course ask whether there should be any censoring of books, and one can certainly argue that the Church should never have had an Index at all. But this simply was not primarily an anti-science tool.) The Church could have acted much better in the Galileo case, even by the measure of the day, but it simply remains nonsense to project 21stC sensibilities onto that period.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
But I'd also argue that "more tolerant of dissent than John Calvin" is setting the bar so low you can't even see it anymore.
Perhaps, with anachronistic hindsight across the centuries... I really think that this is the wrong attitude. It is one thing to say that something was wrong in the past, perhaps horribly so. It is another thing entirely to judge people of the past by present standards. Everybody at all times is a child of their time. When we say that someone is a genius or pioneer or saint, we do measure them primarily against their time, not ours. In the same way, we have to judge negative performances by the baseline of their time, not by ours. Likewise, if we wish to judge rather than to state principles of what we think is right or wrong, then we do have to take circumstances into account. It simply is relevant what was happening all around people, if we want to judge their actions.
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
The usual explanation is that he didn't want to deal with any backlash from religious objections. Not so good for the rapid progress of science, but a lot safer when dealing with the Church.
Sure, but what point do you believe to be making there? We are talking about the very beginnings of modern science there. You may think that it is perfectly obvious just what authority scientific findings have. But that was far from obvious back then, and certainly there were no ready-made prescriptions on how to resolve apparent conflicts with scripture. In particular, the standard of what it means to demonstrate something was being re-written. But how did the new standard of "probable by empirical evidence" relate to reading and interpreting scripture? It is just plain unfair to look back to this time and say "they should have known better". Well no, not really. They were creating the knowledge that makes you know better, and sometimes such processes are messy and ugly. We can still identify villains and heroes based on the outcome we enjoy, but we should paint them against the backdrop of their time, not ours.
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
The end of the reformation certainly started the weakening of Papal political power. What ended the political power of the papacy was the Capture of Rome in 1870.
It was pretty much political "game over" for the pope with the principles of the Peace of Westphalia, that the princes get to determine the religion for their domain, and that individuals could practice a different religion to the official one of the domain. As minor prince among princes, it was just a question of time until the pope was going to lose his territories to a superior power.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
It was Galileo's work with the telescope that provided the observational evidence (e.g. the phases of Venus) that geocentrism was wrong. I guess it depends on whether the credit for discovering something goes to the initial theoretical formulator (Copernicus) or the person making the practical demonstration (Galileo).
Copernicus was - among many other things - a practical astronomer, and Galileo did not provide a practical demonstration of heliocentrism. The first real experimental "proof" in terms of measuring a star's parallax was obtained by Bessel in 1838 (after a failed earlier attempt by Bradley).
I re-included the bit of my post that you obviously missed the first time through. I didn't say Galileo demonstrated heliocentrism was right, just that he demonstrated that geocentrism was almost certainly wrong. That's probably why he called his seminal work in this area Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, not Dialogue Concerning All Possible World Systems.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
And I'm hesitant to consider any organization that maintains something like an Index of Forbidden Books a "supporter of science".
. . . (One can of course ask whether there should be any censoring of books, and one can certainly argue that the Church should never have had an Index at all. But this simply was not primarily an anti-science tool.)
That is, in fact, what I am arguing. The deliberate suppression of knowledge is anti-science insofar as science is a form of knowledge. I'm also not sure the ". . . but the Church suppressed other forms of knowledge too!" argument is much of a mitigator.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The Church could have acted much better in the Galileo case, even by the measure of the day, but it simply remains nonsense to project 21stC sensibilities onto that period.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
But I'd also argue that "more tolerant of dissent than John Calvin" is setting the bar so low you can't even see it anymore.
Perhaps, with anachronistic hindsight across the centuries... I really think that this is the wrong attitude. It is one thing to say that something was wrong in the past, perhaps horribly so. It is another thing entirely to judge people of the past by present standards. Everybody at all times is a child of their time. When we say that someone is a genius or pioneer or saint, we do measure them primarily against their time, not ours. In the same way, we have to judge negative performances by the baseline of their time, not by ours. Likewise, if we wish to judge rather than to state principles of what we think is right or wrong, then we do have to take circumstances into account. It simply is relevant what was happening all around people, if we want to judge their actions.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Catholic case for moral relativism! It's interesting/appalling how insistence on the existence of changeless, objective morality goes out the window as soon as history is discussed, particularly the history of a beloved institution.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
The usual explanation is that he didn't want to deal with any backlash from religious objections. Not so good for the rapid progress of science, but a lot safer when dealing with the Church.
Sure, but what point do you believe to be making there? We are talking about the very beginnings of modern science there. You may think that it is perfectly obvious just what authority scientific findings have. But that was far from obvious back then, and certainly there were no ready-made prescriptions on how to resolve apparent conflicts with scripture. In particular, the standard of what it means to demonstrate something was being re-written.
It probably didn't help that Francis Bacon's work in this area was also placed on the Index.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Dogwalker
Shipmate
# 14135
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Posted
The January Scientific American has an article about the non-religious reasons for resistance to Copernicus. It's previewed here: The Case Against Copernicus.
Two issues stood out for me: based on then current knowledge, stars would have to be much too large in the heliocentric system. The other is more practical: they knew approximately how big the earth was, and about what it weighed. Knowing how hard it is to move a cubic meter (say) of rock, how the heck did the earth keep moving? (The celestial bodies were clearly made of something different from earth: they moved.)
A competing model, with the earth unmoving in the center, and the other planets revolving around the sun revolving around the earth, fit observations better.
Laws of motion and gravitation, and atmospheric effects on star visibility solved these issues later.
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If God had meant for us to fly, he wouldn't have given us the railways. - Unknown
Posts: 155 | From: Milford, MA, USA | Registered: Sep 2008
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SeraphimSarov
Shipmate
# 4335
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Of course, most people would have not made the connection of Ratzinger with the CDF and of the CDF with the Inquisition at all, without some helpful journalist prompting the association.
Gotta go with Palimpsest on this one. The media will dig up your skeletons and your half-skeletons and your things that look like skeletons. Boo fucking hoo.
Boo F hoo until it is pointed at you
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"For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like"
Posts: 2247 | From: Sacramento, California | Registered: Apr 2003
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Tommy1
Shipmate
# 17916
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
quote:
Originally posted by Tommy1:
... Secondly there is a serious side to this issue of Francis being more media savvy than Benedict. I have a horrible suspicion that we would have heard rather more about this story in the media
http://www.examiner.com/article/pope-francis-accused-of-cover-up-dominican-republic-pedophile-scandal
http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/158234,Vatican-refuses-to-extradite-Polish-archbishop-accused-of-child-sex-abuse
if the Pope at the time had not been media star Francis.
I'd not heard this story before. But before we all say 'how dreadful', answer this question. Do you really think that the US, or any other government would have handed over its ambassador to the Dominican Republic is it had been their representative who was being accused of child abuse, rather than whisked them out of the country under a cloud?
Oh I'm sure they wouldn't. The point I'm making is that Vatican involvement and complicity in the cover up of abuse by clerics has been a major news story and yet this story has had very little mention in the press.
Francis gets a very easy ride from the press. Remember the story of how he showed his 'humility' by paying his own hotel bill after the conclave. I don't remember anyone from the press making the rather obvious point that if it had been real humility he wouldn't have allowed press photographers to come along to document the event.
I'm afraid the present Pope rather reminds me of Matthew 6
quote:
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
2 “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.
Posts: 256 | Registered: Dec 2013
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Trisagion
Shipmate
# 5235
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Ladies and gentlemen, the Catholic case for moral relativism! It's interesting/appalling how insistence on the existence of changeless, objective morality goes out the window as soon as history is discussed, particularly the history of a beloved institution.
It's nothing of the sort: it says nothing about objective morality and everything about culpability. If you can't make that sort of proper distinction, perhaps you should to stick to something more suited to your debating skills...sudoku perhaps, or carpentry.
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ceterum autem censeo tabula delenda esse
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dogwalker:
The January Scientific American has an article about the non-religious reasons for resistance to Copernicus. It's previewed here: The Case Against Copernicus.
Two issues stood out for me: based on then current knowledge, stars would have to be much too large in the heliocentric system. The other is more practical: they knew approximately how big the earth was, and about what it weighed. Knowing how hard it is to move a cubic meter (say) of rock, how the heck did the earth keep moving? (The celestial bodies were clearly made of something different from earth: they moved.)
A competing model, with the earth unmoving in the center, and the other planets revolving around the sun revolving around the earth, fit observations better.
Laws of motion and gravitation, and atmospheric effects on star visibility solved these issues later.
Resistance to new theories by argument and evidence is fine. Threatening the proponents of the theory with prison or torture to silence them is not useful.
Posts: 2990 | From: Seattle WA. US | Registered: Nov 2011
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
Tommy1
I see no real evidence that you are right about the easy ride, but even if you are, it's no more than a temporary honeymoon period for the present Pope. The knives will be out before too long. And neither the instant applause nor the accusatory knifing is likely to be a very clear guide to anything. At least so far as the instant and more sensational outlets are concerned. And there are many of them.
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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Tommy1
Shipmate
# 17916
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
Tommy1
I see no real evidence that you are right about the easy ride
I haven't seen Francis get any negative press in any of the main newspapers. Benedict got that from the start of his papacy. Francis was just named Time magazine's 'Person of the Year'. Even if you're right that it won't last how is that not getting an easy ride?
Posts: 256 | Registered: Dec 2013
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Forthview
Shipmate
# 12376
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Posted
One has to ask is it newspapers who control the Catholic church or is it indeed the pope or could it possibly be ultimately in God's care ?
The personality of the pope,whether he is media savvy or not,is not really important.He is the guardian and for Catholics the guarantor of God's promises never to desert the Church.
Posts: 3444 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2007
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
Without means of measurement, Tommy1, it's just opinion. How do you know the bias is not in your head or mine?
The difference between us is that I think there is a good deal more evidence in the public domain to justify my view of the prevailing media tendencies re idolising/iconoclising than there is to support your view of either the Pope or the alleged fawning of the press. Your accumulated data so far do not impress me.
I'm holding an open mind on the topic, pending further information. Don't see the need for any such judgment yet. YMMV, but I'm not convinced. End of.
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
I don't know what to make of Pope Benedict; I never met him, I've never read any of his books and I'm wary about forming a judgement on someone based on media clips alone. However, I wonder if a parallel can be drawn with Archbishop Rowan (whom I have met, and whose books are a source of delight and inspiration).
Rowan was an academic, not at his best when dealing with the media, but a deeply spiritual and humble man. He often got a bad press because of his dislike of sound bites and quick fixes, or so it seemed to me. Was this the problem with Benedict; he didn't "do" the media, in an age when Presentation is all?
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Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
Posts: 8927 | From: In the pack | Registered: May 2001
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Tommy1
Shipmate
# 17916
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
Without means of measurement, Tommy1, it's just opinion. How do you know the bias is not in your head or mine?
The difference between us is that I think there is a good deal more evidence in the public domain to justify my view of the prevailing media tendencies re idolising/iconoclising than there is to support your view of either the Pope or the alleged fawning of the press. Your accumulated data so far do not impress me.
I'm holding an open mind on the topic, pending further information. Don't see the need for any such judgment yet. YMMV, but I'm not convinced. End of.
Whether the idolising will be followed by iconoclising I don't know, we'll see. My clear impression is that so far we have had idolising and that this wasn't really the case for Benedict. That's my impression but I'm open to the suggestion I could be wrong about that.
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
I re-included the bit of my post that you obviously missed the first time through. I didn't say Galileo demonstrated heliocentrism was right, just that he demonstrated that geocentrism was almost certainly wrong. That's probably why he called his seminal work in this area Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, not Dialogue Concerning All Possible World Systems.
False. Rather, Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus ruled out only the Ptolemaic system, not however the geocentric system of Tycho Brahe. And the Tychonic system was put forward in 1583, long before Galileo observed the phases of Venus (1610, published 1613). Galileo certainly was heaping on the pressure, but geocentrism wasn't dead until Bessel measured the parallax in 1838.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
That is, in fact, what I am arguing. The deliberate suppression of knowledge is anti-science insofar as science is a form of knowledge. I'm also not sure the ". . . but the Church suppressed other forms of knowledge too!" argument is much of a mitigator.
The purpose of the Index was never to suppress knowledge. The purpose was to suppress the spread of heresy and immorality, and thus what the Church considered as religious / moral misinformation. You can disagree with the judgement of the Church, in specific cases or with the policy in general. But you cannot simply claim that they were trying to suppress knowledge. From a neutral, non-believing point of view they were rather trying to suppress contrary religious / moral opinion. That is simply not the same thing as knowledge. The reason why relatively few "scientific" works ended up on the Index is precisely because relatively few "scientific" results were threatening in a religious / moral sense. If you wish to say that this censorship was a bad idea, then I will agree. But it was not censorship aimed against knowledge production, but against heresy / immorality threatening the religious hegemony of the Church (an issue of pressing importance in the 16th and 17th century).
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Ladies and gentlemen, the Catholic case for moral relativism! It's interesting/appalling how insistence on the existence of changeless, objective morality goes out the window as soon as history is discussed, particularly the history of a beloved institution.
I have no idea what you are talking about. The consideration of individual and external circumstances is part and parcel of every Catholic moral judgement of persons. For example, to be judged to have committed a mortal sin requires grave matter, deliberate consent and full knowledge. Only the first of these three is "objective", determined by the deed as such. The other two are circumstantial, determined by the individual and the situation. In this case we are looking back in time, and it is appropriate to consider the "typical" differences between the circumstances today and the circumstances back then, because these should influence our moral judgement.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
It probably didn't help that Francis Bacon's work in this area was also placed on the Index.
This site states that only Book IX of "The Advancement of Learning" was placed on the Vatican's Index of Prohibited Books. (Whereas the Spanish Inquisition banned all his books.) Having skim read over that book here, leaves me rather puzzled why it was banned, but certainly not because it contains deep secrets of the scientific method...
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Galileo certainly was heaping on the pressure, but geocentrism wasn't dead until Bessel measured the parallax in 1838.
Just out of curiosity, can you name any astronomer of note who still used a geocentric model in 1837, but who switched over to heliocentrism in 1838? Your insistence on a sharp, definite cut-off date would imply a certain geocentric faction still existed in 1837 but vanished sometime in the subsequent year.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
That is, in fact, what I am arguing. The deliberate suppression of knowledge is anti-science insofar as science is a form of knowledge. I'm also not sure the ". . . but the Church suppressed other forms of knowledge too!" argument is much of a mitigator.
The purpose of the Index was never to suppress knowledge.
The purpose of censorship is always the suppression of knowledge. Sure, it's been dressed up in the tattered rags of various justifications through the centuries, but that's what it always boils down to.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The purpose was to suppress the spread of heresy and immorality, and thus what the Church considered as religious / moral misinformation. You can disagree with the judgement of the Church, in specific cases or with the policy in general. But you cannot simply claim that they were trying to suppress knowledge.
Don't tell me what I can't do! Once you start with the premise that certain ideas need to be deliberately suppressed, you're banning knowledge. I don't think it really makes that much difference if you're banning Galileo's Dialogue or the Talmud. It's still the suppression of knowledge.
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The reason why relatively few "scientific" works ended up on the Index is precisely because relatively few "scientific" results were threatening in a religious / moral sense.
Why the scare quotes around "scientific"? Are you trying to imply that Galileo's work (or Copernicus') don't really qualify as scientific in nature?
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
If you wish to say that this censorship was a bad idea, then I will agree. But it was not censorship aimed against knowledge production, but against heresy / immorality threatening the religious hegemony of the Church (an issue of pressing importance in the 16th and 17th century).
Have you considered the "don't publish anything to piss off the Pope" rule in itself serves to suppress knowledge? Especially given that you wouldn't necessarily know in advance what would piss off the Pope? Looking at it in advance you wouldn't think "a new theory of orbital mechanics" would be something the Pope would particularly care about, but obviously Galileo was wrong. So your typical scientist [or poet or diarist or composer of useful hints on animal husbandry or whatever] has to start wondering "if the Church can end the career of one of the most prominent men of the era and lock him up, what are they likely to do to me, someone much less prominent?"
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Trisagion:
If you can't make that sort of proper distinction, perhaps you should to stick to something more suited to your debating skills...sudoku perhaps, or carpentry.
I don't always agree with Crœsos, but this is unfair.
[oops spelling]
[ 13. January 2014, 04:13: Message edited by: mousethief ]
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Just out of curiosity, can you name any astronomer of note who still used a geocentric model in 1837, but who switched over to heliocentrism in 1838? Your insistence on a sharp, definite cut-off date would imply a certain geocentric faction still existed in 1837 but vanished sometime in the subsequent year.
I have not made a study of the history of astronomy, so I cannot answer that question. Neither have you, I'd bet. My statement however implied nothing like the conclusion you are drawing. Rather, it simply points out that the crucial experimental confirmation that geocentrism could not be maintained only came in 1838. It is often the case that new scientific theories win adherents, and even start to dominate the scientific consensus, before their superiority is experimentally secured. In the case at hand we see this in the Tychonic theory, which adapted key aspects of Copernicus model to geocentrism in spite of the comprehensive lack of experimental evidence at that time. That Copernicus had the "better idea" was hence clear to some researchers long before the experimental confirmation. Nevertheless, one could have maintained some version of geocentrism until the measurement of the parallax in 1838. Given that the Holy See allowed books to be published that claimed heliocentrism as fact from 1758 onward, I assume that by that time the scientific consensus was already firmly favouring heliocentrism.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
The purpose of censorship is always the suppression of knowledge. Sure, it's been dressed up in the tattered rags of various justifications through the centuries, but that's what it always boils down to.
This is mere assertion, not argument. It also relies on ambiguities concerning what we call "knowledge". Obviously all censorship suppresses knowledge at least of that which is being censored. But this is simply not the same as saying that the censorship targets knowledge as such. For example, if a dictatorship censors the news that some rebel group has successfully attacked a government building, then this removes a piece of knowledge, namely this news. But the aim is not the general suppression of news about attacks on buildings, but rather to deprive that rebel group of publicity which might fuel its popularity. The censor is intending to suppress the rebels, not knowledge. If the government forces successfully attack a rebel building, then the censor will certainly not suppress that bit of news. And while "news" type of knowledge quite often falls prey to a censor, scientific knowledge is not usually a major target - precisely because it generally does not have this kind of immediate instrumental impact on the actual aims of the censor. I guess this would most commonly happen in a military context, e.g., I bet censors were guarding the Manhattan project (and again not really because of the science as such, but because of its ultimate usage for weapon development). Anyway, the Roman Inquisition is no different there, its aim certainly was not to suppress scientific knowledge as such, but rather the spread of heresy and immorality.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Why the scare quotes around "scientific"? Are you trying to imply that Galileo's work (or Copernicus') don't really qualify as scientific in nature?
In that period we are in a transition phase from natural philosophy to natural science, and the works produced are a mixed bag. Galileo's Siderius Nuncius is already a lot like a modern scientific paper (if a bit ... verbose), his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems not so much. It was the latter that got him into trouble with the pope, of course.
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Have you considered the "don't publish anything to piss off the Pope" rule in itself serves to suppress knowledge? Especially given that you wouldn't necessarily know in advance what would piss off the Pope? Looking at it in advance you wouldn't think "a new theory of orbital mechanics" would be something the Pope would particularly care about, but obviously Galileo was wrong. So your typical scientist [or poet or diarist or composer of useful hints on animal husbandry or whatever] has to start wondering "if the Church can end the career of one of the most prominent men of the era and lock him up, what are they likely to do to me, someone much less prominent?"
It was not the case at all that Galileo was happily researching in his lab, and suddenly and unexpectedly the pope took interest in his results and threw him in the slammer. Galileo had tangled for quite some time with the Inquisition, but was working under the direct and explicit patronage of pope Urban VIII at the time. He ignored direct orders to discuss heliocentrism as merely unproven hypothesis (which in fact it was at the time), and insulted his patron the pope. The lesson to be drawn from this as far as other researchers were concerned surely was "if you tango with a powerful patron, don't stomp on his feet". I doubt very much that this lesson came as a surprise to any renaissance researcher. And I have seen no historical evidence whatsoever so far of some kind of deep chill spreading throughout the nascent scientific world at large. There almost certainly was some extra delay in adopting heliocentrism from this, e.g., a boost for the Tychonic theory. However, it was hardly only the pope or Inquisition or religious people of all sorts who were opposing these new theories. There was plenty of backlash from the "academe proper". If you have any indication that "animal husbandry" or something likewise remote was affected, let's hear that. (By the way, the works of Charles Darwin never made the Index of Prohibited Books.)
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
Kepler. It was Kepler who worked out what our solar system looks like. Not Galileo, and certainly not Copernicus. He did it by doing hard sums. Which Galileo and Copernicus wouldn't have been capable of probably. (Though Newton would have of course)
There was no real room for doubt after Kepler, at least not for those who understood his work. And what possible remaining doubt there was was abolished by Newton (and dozens of other lesser scientists of his time) and the famous laws of motion, which neatly explain Keplers laws.
But really it was all a done deal in the 17th century. The idea that it wasn't "proved" till the 19th is just a cultural preference for manipulative experiment over observation, for deterministic systems over probabilistic ones, for laboratory work over field work, for calculus over statistics, which is perhaps strongest among physicists. (And dare I say it was a big part of the German invention of the modern academic system and research university in the 19th century, and perhaps persists so strongly because of the amazing success of that system).
But seriously anyone who could understand Kepler's maths (I can't) should have been convinced by Kepler. And everybody else by Newton. No room for doubt remained after that. By the century every scientist was already a heliocentrist.
(Of course there is a philosophical hurdle to jump over before you are compelled to believe these things - you have to accept that the same physical laws apply over the whole observed universe. Galileo was part of the. And to do that you need to ditch Plato - you can't really do science if you are a Platonist - and you need to read Aristotle rather critically and not rough the neo-Platonist blinkers that most scholars had been reading him for the previous thousand years or more. You need to get out of the mindset that the natural phenomena we observe on earth only apply to this sublunary sphere, and that every sphere has its own distinct order of nature)
And anyway, we no more really understand what gravity is or how it relates to other physical forces now than we did in 1838.
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
But the question boils down to, on what grounds should the Holy See be making decisions about what constitutes science?
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Honest Ron Bacardi
Shipmate
# 38
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
But the question boils down to, on what grounds should the Holy See be making decisions about what constitutes science?
Past tense, surely? Unless they are still doing it that is - presentism being the besetting sin of such discussions frequently.
Croesos - your definition of censorship appears to be inadequate.
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Anglo-Cthulhic
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Honest Ron Bacardi:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
But the question boils down to, on what grounds should the Holy See be making decisions about what constitutes science?
Past tense, surely? Unless they are still doing it that is - presentism being the besetting sin of such discussions frequently.
Croesos - your definition of censorship appears to be inadequate.
There's a complaint in this thread that it's anachronistic to hold the judge the actions of the historical past by modern standards. What opens that door is the claim that the Church has theories and laws made in the past that are eternally true and not subject to modification over time.
If you insist that these are eternally correct and apply now, then the historical consequences should be correct as well.
To tie the tangent back to the thread, modern society increasingly believes the Church should have no temporal authority to impose itself on those who are non-believers. Benedict's history of condoning the concealing Child Abuse from temporal authorities so it would be subject only to "internal discipline" is consistent with the theory that the Church is an independent peer of Temporal Authorities. That is increasingly not the view of an increasingly secular society.
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Callan
Shipmate
# 525
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Posted
I am under the distinct impression that Gaudium et Spes cites the Galileo affair as an instance of the Magisterium overreaching itself and cites a book on the subject which was placed on the Index when discussing the subject. John Paul II went on to issue a formal acknowldgement that the Papacy had been bang out of order on the issue. So the Galileo was wrong meme derives from contrarians like the late Colin Wilson and Arthur Koestler, people who can never, never, ever admit the Magisterium was wrong under any circumstances ever, and a handful of wild and wacky traditionalists who are convinced that, actually, the sun really does revolve around the earth. The whole 'posterity has vindicated Galileo' bit was put forward by an Ecumenical Council and confirmed by a Pope who has, subsequently, been Canonised. And just to keep things on topic I imagine that Emeritus Pope Benedict has absolutely no problem with that.
[ 13. January 2014, 19:29: Message edited by: Gildas ]
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How easy it would be to live in England, if only one did not love her. - G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 9757 | From: Citizen of the World | Registered: Jun 2001
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Chesterbelloc
Tremendous trifler
# 3128
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Posted
Granted, Gildas. But you wouldn't have to be a raving rad-trad to think the Church might have over-egged the chest-beating.
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"[A] moral, intellectual, and social step below Mudfrog."
Posts: 4199 | From: Athens Borealis | Registered: Aug 2002
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Honest Ron Bacardi
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# 38
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Posted
quote:
There's a complaint in this thread that it's anachronistic to hold the judge the actions of the historical past by modern standards. What opens that door is the claim that the Church has theories and laws made in the past that are eternally true and not subject to modification over time.
If you insist that these are eternally correct and apply now, then the historical consequences should be correct as well.
No, I get that, Palimpsest. It still requires the judgement as to whether those laws were in fact being applied or whether something else was going on. Failure to consider that is likely to lead to many category errors.
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Anglo-Cthulhic
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Honest Ron Bacardi:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
But the question boils down to, on what grounds should the Holy See be making decisions about what constitutes science?
Past tense, surely? Unless they are still doing it that is - presentism being the besetting sin of such discussions frequently.
Fine. What right DID IT HAVE to make those decisions? If any, what are they? If none, why is IngoB defending them?
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Callan
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# 525
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
Granted, Gildas. But you wouldn't have to be a raving rad-trad to think the Church might have over-egged the chest-beating.
How is it that Jesus comes to us preaching a Gospel of humility and contrition and you get upset when his Vicar and the Successors of His Holy Apostles display humility and contrition? In real life, when you fuck up, you generally get points for putting your hands up and saying "my bad". Why should the Church be exempt? To save a great deal of bandwidth I acknowledge that I am not personally very good at this but one does, rather, expect Jesus' representative on earth to be somewhat better.
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How easy it would be to live in England, if only one did not love her. - G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 9757 | From: Citizen of the World | Registered: Jun 2001
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Honest Ron Bacardi
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# 38
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Posted
Mousethief asked:- quote:
Fine. What right DID IT HAVE to make those decisions? If any, what are they? If none, why is IngoB defending them?
Well - I'm not IngoB - but my reading of his position is that he's not defending their incursion into science, but rather their right to counter "heresy and immorality" - and that anyway they miscalled this one. At least that's my reading of this para. -
quote:
The purpose of the Index was never to suppress knowledge. The purpose was to suppress the spread of heresy and immorality, and thus what the Church considered as religious / moral misinformation. You can disagree with the judgement of the Church, in specific cases or with the policy in general. But you cannot simply claim that they were trying to suppress knowledge. From a neutral, non-believing point of view they were rather trying to suppress contrary religious / moral opinion. That is simply not the same thing as knowledge. The reason why relatively few "scientific" works ended up on the Index is precisely because relatively few "scientific" results were threatening in a religious / moral sense. If you wish to say that this censorship was a bad idea, then I will agree. But it was not censorship aimed against knowledge production, but against heresy / immorality threatening the religious hegemony of the Church (an issue of pressing importance in the 16th and 17th century).
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
Kepler. It was Kepler who worked out what our solar system looks like. Not Galileo, and certainly not Copernicus. He did it by doing hard sums. Which Galileo and Copernicus wouldn't have been capable of probably. (Though Newton would have of course)
There was no real room for doubt after Kepler, at least not for those who understood his work. And what possible remaining doubt there was was abolished by Newton (and dozens of other lesser scientists of his time) and the famous laws of motion, which neatly explain Keplers laws.
The Tychonic model is indistinguishable from a heliocentric one, based on the observation of planets alone. It is mathematically equivalent. This is true for Kepler's heliocentrism just as much as for that of Copernicus. What happens for Kepler instead of Copernicus is simply that instead of a circle the sun makes an ellipse around the earth. Such updates of the Tychonic system were indeed made.
I've created a little movie to illustrate the point, see here (6.8MB, H.264 codec - should run native on the latest version of Firefox). On top is a little Keplerian solar system. Please note that these ellipses are totally unrealistic, real planetary trajectories are a lot closer to circles. But this makes for better graphics, and does not change the principles. Otherwise this system obeys all three laws of Kepler. On the bottom is the equivalent Tychonic system, in which the sun revolves around the earth, but then all planets revolve around the sun. Thick lines are the absolute trajectories, thin lines show the relative trajectories of the planets (other than earth) around the sun.
I hope it is clear from this that the Tychonic system is perfectly compatible with Kepler's laws - if one assumes that they are valid on one hand for the trajectory of the sun around the earth, and on the other hand for the trajectory of the other planets around the sun.
So to mention Newton is the right idea. Because Kepler's system can be seen as an approximation of the system under universal Newtonian gravitation, if the sun is much heavier than the planets. Whereas in the Tychonic system the same force laws could still apply, but they would not be "universal" but selective. We would have to declare ad hoc what attracts what, and what doesn't. From a modern perspective that sees physics as governing everything, this is clearly a fudge. But historically astronomy (somewhat astonishingly) used to be considered separate from physics. It is precisely with Newton that astronomy finally becomes merely the physics of astronomical bodies. This simply was not obvious before.
It took till the end of the 17th and into the early 18th century before the Tychonic models were finally laid to rest by the scientific community at large.
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
But really it was all a done deal in the 17th century. The idea that it wasn't "proved" till the 19th is just a cultural preference for manipulative experiment over observation, for deterministic systems over probabilistic ones, for laboratory work over field work, for calculus over statistics, which is perhaps strongest among physicists. (And dare I say it was a big part of the German invention of the modern academic system and research university in the 19th century, and perhaps persists so strongly because of the amazing success of that system).
This appears to be a strange kind of ad hominem?! It is correct to say that astronomers had switched to a Keplerian perspective before the middle of the 18th century. It is also correct to say that the ultimate experimental justification for this switch only came with Bessel's measurements. Though perhaps Bradley's measurement of stellar aberration in 1729 was already sufficient, Wikipedia seems to think so (see "Tychonic astronomy after Tycho"). I wasn't aware of that before (I am not a historian of astronomy...).
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
But seriously anyone who could understand Kepler's maths (I can't) should have been convinced by Kepler. And everybody else by Newton. No room for doubt remained after that. By the century every scientist was already a heliocentrist.
The former is not true, as demonstrated. The latter is basically true, but it take till the early 18th century until astronomy became firmly established as branch of "physics" and the universality of Newtonian law became an insuperable argument (at least on the theoretical side of things).
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
And anyway, we no more really understand what gravity is or how it relates to other physical forces now than we did in 1838.
We understand that a lot more now...
quote:
Originally posted by Gildas:
So the Galileo was wrong meme derives from contrarians like the late Colin Wilson and Arthur Koestler, people who can never, never, ever admit the Magisterium was wrong under any circumstances ever, and a handful of wild and wacky traditionalists who are convinced that, actually, the sun really does revolve around the earth.
Nobody here has proposed that Galileo was wrong to support heliocentrism, or even that he was wrong in insisting on it as such. Also, the Church clearly handled this badly. However, it is also clear that Galileo wasn't quite the martyr for science that enlightenment hagiography made out of him. And that resistance to Galileo's proposals wasn't simply a matter of ignorance and stupidity. At the time, reasonable doubt was still possible.
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Fine. What right DID IT HAVE to make those decisions? If any, what are they? If none, why is IngoB defending them?
I'm defending what, precisely? I'm not defending what Urban VIII and the Inquisition did. They overstepped their remit even in terms of their times. I am however pointing out that the usual story of Galileo as sacrificial lamb for science, and the Church as anti-scientific troglodytes, just doesn't hold up. It wasn't that simple.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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Chesterbelloc
Tremendous trifler
# 3128
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gildas:
quote:
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
Granted, Gildas. But you wouldn't have to be a raving rad-trad to think the Church might have over-egged the chest-beating.
How is it that Jesus comes to us preaching a Gospel of humility and contrition and you get upset when his Vicar and the Successors of His Holy Apostles display humility and contrition? In real life, when you fuck up, you generally get points for putting your hands up and saying "my bad". Why should the Church be exempt? To save a great deal of bandwidth I acknowledge that I am not personally very good at this but one does, rather, expect Jesus' representative on earth to be somewhat better.
In short, reacting to complex historic failings by somewhat exaggerated vicarious chest-thumping can devalue the currency a bit and looks somewhat corny. Proportionality does not denature contrition.
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