S
sedonaman
Guest
This is the typical anti-Catholic, Reformation propaganda about the Galileo incident, which is, strangely enough, the only one ever trotted out to “prove” the Church is anti-science. It amounts to taking one data point and extrapolating a whole universe, which itself is not a very scientific approach to proving anything. Apparently the facts in those days weren’t so simple because Galileo never proved his theory.
You are taking this propaganda even further by saying that the Church is not a seeker of truth in general and that because of a scientific dispute, the Church is 500 years behind in the thinking of such things as the nature of man. What a leap!
To borrow from Feser: The world of the anti-Catholic is Manichean: either you are intelligent, well-informed, and honest, and therefore question all authority and received opinion; or you accept what popular opinion or an authority says and therefore must be stupid, dishonest, and ignorant. There is no third option.
Quote: The standard Enlightenment narrative has had a powerful influence on the way modern people understand the relationship between authority, tradition, and common sense on the one hand, and science and rationality on the other. We tend reflexively to assume that the popular or received wisdom, especially if associated with some “official” source or long-standing institution, is always ripe for challenge, and also that if some independent thinker or writer takes an unconventional position, however extreme or counter-intuitive, then there simply must be something right in it, or least worth listening to. “Innovator” and “iconoclast” are among our favorite terms of approbation, and “questioning authority” and “thinking outside the box” are applauded even by many self-described conservatives. By contrast, “unoriginal” and “conventional” are treated as if they were synonyms for “unintelligent” and “unthinking.”
The picture of science that has gone along with this tends to portray it as in the business of overthrowing long-standing opinions and common sense in general. We used to think the earth was at the center of the solar system, but Copernicus showed that the sun is; etc. The history of science, as popularly understood, is thus a story of daring individuals constantly challenging current orthodoxies and authorities, and constantly being proved right.
… the modern tendency toward hyper-skepticism seems largely to be the result of a massive over-generalization from a mere handful of cases where common sense turned out to be mistaken. A philosopher, Michael Levin, has given it a name: the “skim milk” fallacy, the fallacy of assuming, in the words of Gilbert and Sullivan, that “things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream,” so that common sense can in general be presumed to be mistaken. To be sure, where phenomena remote from everyday human experience are concerned – the large-scale structure of space/time, the microscopic realm of molecules, atoms, and so forth – it is perhaps not surprising that human beings should for long periods of time have gotten things wrong. But where everyday matters are concerned – where opinions touch on our basic understanding of human nature and the facts about ordinary social interaction – it is very likely that they would not, in general, get things wrong. Biological and cultural evolution would ensure that serious mistakes concerning such matters would before too long be weeded out. The detailed reasons for this are complex, but when spelled out they provide the basis for a general defense of tradition and common sense of the sort associated with thinkers like Burke and Hayek.
… it is really just not possible to treat authority, tradition, and common sense as if they were in general and in principle likely to be wrong. For in forming our beliefs we must always start somewhere, and have nowhere else to start except the general picture of the world we have inherited from our parents, society, and people who due to special experience or study have more knowledge of a subject matter than we do.
… it is simply a necessary feature of the human condition that our starting point in coming to know about the world must always be what we have inherited from some authority or other – parents, Church, scholars, government, or whomever. Such authorities might not always have the last word, but they cannot fail to have the first word. And to reject the mindless view that authority as such is always to be questioned is not to embrace the equally mindless view that authority is always to be trusted. It is rather just to take the sensible middle ground position that authority has an unavoidable and necessary place in our lives (intellectual and otherwise) even if it is something fallible that we often need to be cautious about.
At some level, everyone knows this, even if some people pretend to think otherwise. The secularist who chides religious believers for having faith in what the Church teaches will also tell them, in the very next breath and with no sense of irony, to shut up and trust the experts where scientific matters are concerned. That there are philosophers and theologians who can present powerful and sophisticated justifications of religious belief is taken to be no defense of the average believer – he ought to “think for himself,” says the secularist.
Unquote.
