I agree with you that there can be two or more different actions belying different attitudes. In summation though we have to square these actions and resist the temptation to be overly praising or overly condemning.
I sort of agree - but in the sense that one should condemn the anti-science stance the church took in the the Galileo case without having to thereby deny other cases in which the church did the right thing.
For me, in squaring these actions I see the Church was at the forefront of scientific advancement at the time with their education, universities, hospitals and scientists. Many of these people were either clergy of extremely well connected to the Church.
Another way of seeing that is that the Church had (probably inadvertently) created a situation in which
only Catholic religious institutions and individuals were able to carry out scholastic activities. All other centres of learning had died out, or even been explicitly destroyed.
I stand to be corrected, but I donāt think Galileo or anybody else at the time criticised the Church as acting outside their jurisdiction. That charge I believe came only centuries later when scientific organisations had bloomed and could stand on their own two feet.
Again, another way of seeing that is that noone at the time
dared to criticise the church for its approach to science.
In`some ways it is like a professor at a modern day university teaching his students āchaos theoryā as fact or āstring theoryā as fact or āparallel universes theoryā as fact. If a science professor was to do this then the dean of the university would have a quiet word to the professor about the difference between holding a theory and teaching it at university as fact.
A) I think you are wrong about that - from my own experience at the university level professors often
do take a stance on such questions, and are if anything encouraged to do so, in order to prompt students to start thinking about such issues and making up their own minds.
B) Even so, in that case the professor is being paid to do a job, so the University has a moral right to define the limits of that job. For example, had the Pope paid Galileo to write a book or teach a course about cosmology, he would have every right to insist that Galileo
not talk about heliocentrism therein. That is quite different from dragging Galileo in front of the Inquisition and threatening him with torture just for being convinced that heliocentrism was true and presenting his arguments.
If the theory the professor taught ended up being proved true centuries later then perhaps the university looks a little silly, but from their perspective they did the right thing.
That is were you are, and the Church was, wrong, in my opinion. A key point of the scientific method is that anyone should be free to argue their case. Even those who think the earth is flat and 6000 years old. OK, they donāt have an automatic right to be published in peer reviewed journals or employed by top universities, but they should not be imprisoned or threatened with torture for challenging the
status quo.
Where the church made a mistake was that it put too much emphasis on phrases from biblical books.
Again, I think you are focussing too much on the trivial point that the Church backed the wrong cosmological model, rather on the key point that it tried to
punish anyone who disagreed with it. It is that last part that was
anti-science as opposed to just being humanly fallible and factually, as opposed to morally, wrong.
Even though the scientists opposing Galileo got the better of him in the debate at the time, the Copernican system was eventually proved correct 200 years later with the observance of stellar parallax.
Actually it was proved ācorrectā (or at least the best of the current cosmological models) at the time, with the observation of the phases of Venus, the moons of Jupiter, and the explanation of
why stellar parallax might not be observable. His opponents āgot the betterā of him (if you want to call it that) by brute force and violence, not reason and evidence.
The main point is that
Gallileo should have been free to state his opinion and his arguments, without threat of violence. After all, you surely donāt claim that the Church had
proved that geocentrism was true and heliocentrism was false? And yet
they were not only stating their opinions as fact, but were threatening any who disagreed with torture!
This is really a stretch to call it persecution, much less as THE example of church persecution of science.
No, it was undoubtedly āpersecutionā - just forcing a sick old man to make a mid-winter trip to Rome in order to be threatened, humiliated and forced to renounce his lifeās work would count as āpersecution.ā
Certainly there are worse examples of Catholic persecution against individuals, but that hardly puts the Church in a better light. This is not the worst case of persecution, but it is a
very clear case of how the Church was at times anti-science.
Not in the sense of being motivated by a desire to stifle science, but in terms of the effects of its actions. I donāt think the Pope and Cardinals sat down and said āGosh, chaps, how can we hold back Scientific advances? By Jingo, Iāve got it, weāll all persecute Gallileo!ā but I
do think their attitude that any opinion they disagreed with could be
banned, books censored,
ownership of those books criminalised, and even
holding that opinion punished,
that was directly opposed to the fundamental spirit of science.
