[MD] Galileo and the church

[MarshaV]

dmb,

Are you clinging to Arlo's pant leg these days?   


Marsha  



On Dec 13, 2010, at 4:37 PM, david buchanan wrote:

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> "... What eventually drew the Church into conflict with Galileo were its lay academic advisors, who insisted that Rome had a duty to stop Galileo, for if he were left unchecked, he would destroy the entire university system by undermining the Aristotelian beliefs on which it was based.  These scholastic philosophers refused to even look through a telescope, for they adamantly insisted that whatever was seen through the lenses that contradicted their beliefs, had to be optical illusions." B. Alan Wallace, Mind in Balance, pg 18, hardcover edition.
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> Arlo said: 
> To suggest that were it not for "academics", the Church would have otherwise embraced Galileo is nonsense. However, were it not for fundamentalists and literalists, it very well may have.
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> John replied:
> Well then, you should probably take up that with Wallace, for he plainly is making a different case from yours. ... blame it on the lawyers, in the interest of peace,  but lets face it, it was the academics who trained the lawyers... so ...
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> dmb says:
> I think John is misreading Wallace. You have to realize that there was no such thing as academia or science in the sense that we think of them today, as separate from government and religion. In the pre-Modern age of scholasticism - wherein Aristotle was fused with Christian theology - art, science, religion and politics were not yet differentiated. They were all one thing. The basic definition of modernity is the differentiation of these domains. In those days, for example, astronomers could be branded as heretics. If Copernicus is right, then Aristotle is wrong and that's unacceptable because that means Christian theology is wrong. The whole thing was so interconnected that a telescope could just about kill God himself. Thus the panic. If the earth moves and isn't the center of the universe... Try to imagine their horror. Back in those, people got killed for saying the earth moves. Now Carol King can sing about it - erotically, no less.
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> Arlo:
> ...The exact same divide that has fundamentalists claiming the earth is only 6000 years old, dinosaurs rode on a big boat to survive a flood, and everyone who does not call god by a certain name is going to hell. THESE are the people threatened by advances in understanding made through observation. ..This whole "big bad academics" nonsense is really getting sad.
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> dmb says:
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> I agree. It seems to me that academia is still fighting for independence. One hundred years ago a person could not graduate from Harvard without studying a whole bunch of theology. It could even be that you HAD to get a degree in Divinity along with whatever else you studied. Religious and political conservatives don't have much power to interfere directly anymore, thank God, but they sure do make a full time job out of hating academia. Of all the things in the world to complain about, Universities are what bugs you? 
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> The Inquisitors were not inquisitive so much as they were torturous. Torturous also happens to describe John's version of history.


 
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