375 years and one day ago...

June 22nd is one of the most important dates in the history of the modern world, and I like to hope it represents one of the last important setbacks for the age of reason, for it was on June 22nd 1633 (375 years ago yesterday) that Galileo Galilee was forced by the Vatican to recant the heliocentric model.

It was not, of course, until Oct 31st 1992 that the Vatican got around to apologising to Galileo and admitting that the earth probably did travel around the sun after all.

(Most interestingly of all, this fantastically-overdue apology was itself the product of an internal enquiry instigated by Pope John Paul II in 1979 and lasting an inexplicably drawn-out 13 years. One can but wonder what those 13 years were spent actually doing. Did they build their own primitive telescope from scratch to check whether Galileo was right? Or did they waste more than a decade asking themselves the question, over and over, "is there really no way at all we can persuade humanity that the earth is still the centre of the universe and that we were right all along?")

Happily (and this is of course not an original point, it was made far better by Bertrand Russell in his exemplary Why I am not a Christian and recently most eloquently by Douglas Adams in is there an artificial god?) there is a lesson we can all take away from this debacle. The history of superstition over the last few hundred years has been a history of intellectual retreat; a history of the adherents, leaders and apologists for superstition either having to admit that they were mostly wrong or looking absolutely ridiculous when they don't. As we learn more about the nature of the universe, the need for myth recedes and the credibility of the people pushing those myths diminishes. Over to Mr Adams:

"This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise."

June 22nd is an excellent day to remember how the intellectual, psychological and emotional crutches that saw our distant goatherding ancestors safely across their unmapped deserts become less useful every day. The earth really does go around the sun, and irrespective of what may have been said under duress the best of us knew it was true more than 375 years ago.

I wonder which fallacy they'll have to abandon next. And how long they can keep retreating before there is nowhere left to go.

Comments

[Colin Donald]

Terrific, Seamus,

And it might be worth pointing out that what we call common sense is so very often painfully misleading.

Look up into the sky.

The sun very obviously goes around the Earth.

Look! We're not moving. It is. It's common sense.

And it goes to sleep at night.

Unless you measure it, of course.

Or use a telescope.

[Craig McGill]

We should draw up a list and offer odds on what goes next. After all, it wasn't that long ago the Catholic Church more or less abolished limbo (and I don't think it was because of poor property prices).

[Seamus McCauley]

Colin -

I think it's technically called the "well that's what it looks like from here" theory. Although I recall someone asking once "how would it have looked different, exactly, if the sun had been going round the earth?"

Craig - surely one of the predictions markets could be put to such a purpose. I think I'd quite enjoy seeing what odds I could get on the pope renouncing the virgin birth, say, before the end of the century.

Thanks for comments guys.

[bill greene]

Ever the contrarian, I must attempt to dissuade people from the merits of this nit-picking over obscure scriptural details of religion. Note that by 1633 the Vatican, and most of its "loyal" southern European nations, had lost momentum to the Protestant north European states, which were more successful at separating church and state. After all, since the 12th century and the days of Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste, the European universities had led the scientific revolution that created huge advances for mankind's comfort and affluence. These universities were founded by the several Christian monastic orders that pushed the physical sciences as separate from spiritual matters. Thus Christianity was no monolithic order--it was I believe in Spain that the Inquisition tried to squelch Galileo's obvious assertions. And yet almost 150 years earlier it had been Spain's Queen that had financed Columbus' search for new lands and sea routes. Nothing in history developed as clearly or cleanly as today's Monday morning quarter-backs might desire. Christianity, and the way it gradually adapted itself over the last 2,000 years, was a cornerstone of Western civilization's success because it recognized the importance of every individual, his free will, and responsibilities. All other Faiths in the world downplayed the importance of the indivdual, stressed obedience and resignation, and restrained their followers more than Christianity did. None of them were perfect. Even Tom Brady fumbled the ball once. Even the Red Sox lost a few games before winning the superbowl. Similarly, Christianity, like the American governmental system, although riddled with corruption, incompetence, and a constant stream of fumbles and mis-steps, still towers over all the competition. And there lies the difference--why you bloggers have the freedom, leisure, and affluence to sit there blogging. And that point about not needing the "crutch" of faith anymore; that we are smarter, and oh-so-much more sophisticated than those goat-herding ancestors of ours; consider the 20th century, when such secular and agnostic ideas took hold in the minds of many--that the horrors of that time were imposed on mankind by the brilliant intellectual "ideas" implemented by atheist leaders in five secular nations--Nazism, Stalin's Communism, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Japan, of the rape of China fame, and Mao's cultural Revolution in China. One might conclude, like Nicholas Rubashov in "Darkness at Noon," that we are running amuck--"the running amuck of pure reasom. Perhaps it did not suit man to be completely freed from old bonds, from the steadying brakes of 'Thou shalt not,' and 'Thou mayset not,' and to be allowed to tear along straight towards the goal. . .And perhaps reason alone was a defective compass." If history reveals any successful lessons, it is that the combination of common sense and scientific minds, fostered by the comforts and guidance of spiritual beliefs, has been a powerful tool of progress. Everything great about America and its current success was built by the institutions, beliefs and attitudes of the last 400 years. The leaders of the last half century have done little more than maintain it, if that, but the foundation was built back in prior centuries--and atheism was rarely part of the mix.

[Seamus McCauley]

Bill - thanks, very interesting comment. Of course, in a similarly contrarian vein one might see the excesses of Nazism, Stalinism et al not as the product of their leaders' witless attempts to concoct new atheist creeds but those same leaders religious upbringings. Give me a child of seven and all that - and Hitler was brought up catholic, Stalin had all the benefits of a Georgian religious education, Mao's early life was buddhist. (I'm not sure what you mean by characterising mid C20th Japan as atheist.) Had the leaders of the mid C20th autocracies really enjoyed the benefits of pure reason during their formative days perhaps we'd have been spared the Holocaust, Purges and Year Zero. I can't offhand think of any notable figure in history who commited notable evil having really started his life with reason as his only compass.