Dark ages

Factual Questions
21

I am not sure the crusades were such a major part in bringing Arab culture to Europe. I think there were many other factors which were spread over time and much more effective.

For one thing Arabs and Christians (and Jews) shared the Iberian peninsula for 800 years and there was a lot of cross cultural links. I have a very vague notion that in the capital city of Toledo there was some institution translating Arab and Jewish works into Castillian in the middle ages.

Also, the Mediterranean was always a crossroads and Christians and Turks were always warring and then negotiating. Any christian who set out to sea had a fair chance of ending up as a Turkish slave until he was rescued if it ever happened. Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, spent quite a few years or his life in Algeria. Turks who sailed the Med were in as much danger of spending some time as Christian slaves.

Christian nations would ally themselves with the Turks when it suited them. I believe it was Francis I of France who allied himself with the Turks against Spain. There was much more exchange than you might think.

22

At Amazon.com under Irish Civilization:

Editorial Reviews
In this delightful and illuminating look into a crucial but little-known “hinge” of history, Thomas Cahill takes us to the “island of saints and scholars,” the Ireland of St. Patrick and the Book of Kells.

Here, far from the barbarian despoliation of the continent, monks and scribes laboriously, lovingly, even playfully preserved the West’s written treasury. When stability returned in Europe, these Irish scholars were instrumental in spreading learning, becoming not only the conservators of civilization, but also the shapers of the medieval mind, putting their unique stamp on Western culture.

                 Midwest Book Review

The holy men and women of Ireland play a key role in preserving European Western civilization’s heritage: they remain unconquered when Rome fell and preserved the bulk of western social and literary heritage. Passages gleaned from historical writings compliment a fine history which often
reads like a novel. --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title

                                                                  See all 11 editorial reviews...
23

Terms like “Dark Ages,” “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” are not precise, scientific terms. Indeed, the terms are little more than editorializing by secular, anti-religious historians and scholars.

That doesn’t mean you have to embrace midieval Europe as a Paradise (it wasn’t!). It simply means that you have to show the same skepticism to (supposedly) neutral scholars that you show to churches.

Is it coincidental that secular, anti-religious (and anti-Catholic, in particular) scholars like Gibbon and Hume chose to view the period when Christianity was at the peak of its secular power as the most horrible time in human history? Is it coincidental that the 18th century (a period in which academia came to be largely dominated by atheistic scholars) was called “the Enlightenment” by those very same secular philosophes?

Hardly. Historians always have their own agendas. Study what happened in midieval Europe with open eyes and an open mind. It’s not an era I’d like to have lived in, but there was a LOT more going on than bubonic plague and witch burnings.

24

Oh, Astorian, the Church perhaps wasn’t ALL bad, but who had access to the knowledge and ideas of books? The Church kept a tight hold on there; they weren’t available for all, or even some, of the teaming masses. Eco’s thesis in The Name of the Rose (okay, it’s fiction…but it’s erudite fiction) gives a good description: the Church may have preserved some of the ideas, but then became power-hungry. They stifled new intellectual growth, censoring that which might have led independent thinkers into all kinds of heresy. Scares me to death to read of the small doctrinal differences that meritted burning at the stake. Let’s just say I don’t think I would have been a big intellectual free-thinker had I been neither literate nor given access to books with the accumulation of knowledge. It’s hard to re-invent the wheel, or optics, or mathematics…

25

Paradocs, can you point to any knowledge that was withheld from the populace? Are you aware of any actual rules forbidding secular scholars from pursuing studies at monastic libraries?

Roger Bacon published his findings openly. In the late pre-Renaissance, the Church supported Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo (at least, until Galileo demanded that the Church accept some of his errors as truth without sufficient evidence).

An incident in 4th Century Alexandria has been used to “demonstrate” the opposition of the Church to science. As part of the religious/political battles that raged through Alexandria as the Christians forcibly oppressed the pagans and Jews of that city, a group of monks savagely murdered Hypatia, a brillaint mathematician whose father had been a pagan philosopher and who maintained her pagan faith while teaching at the school of Plotinus. The murder was prompted by politics (and, shamefully, the monks were never tried for the crime), but the incident has been used to “prove” that the Church opposed either/both secular science or/and women who tried to rise above their station. (It is given some credence because the contemporary, John, Bishop of Nikiu did write approvingly of her murder, complaining that “she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes, and instruments of music.” This despite the fact that all other medieval (church) histories speak highly of Hypatia and condemn the senseless murder and the un-Christian politics that let her murderers go free.)

There is no question that the Christian church was (too often literally) death on people holding different religious views. However, there is very little evidence that that same intolerance carried over to matters of engineering or science. In every case that I am aware that a scientist was persecuted, religious belief (and, usually, politics) was tied up in the issues.

I am not condoning any persecution. However, while you can justifiably criticize the Church for its stranglehold on religious belief, it is not accurate to claim that the Church was equally hostile to science.

26

The Dark Ages were intellectually dark not because the church stifled thought- it was because society, the economy and political order had collapsed to such an extent that a literate urban culture became impossible to maintain. The church did not suppress classical learning, it was the only institution which managed to preserve a bit of it.

After the Dark Ages ended and the High Middle Ages began, the church was indeed harsh against direct heresy in religious matters, but it did not stifle thought in other areas.

As Tom mentioned, Roger Bacon- a Franciscan friar by the way- published openly. Many of his ideas were forerunners of modern observational empiricism. Another Franciscan monk- William of Occam- put forth a keystone of modern scientific philosophy, Occam’s razor. Another philosopher, Nicholas of Cusa, speculated about an infinity of other worlds around the stars. The church didn’t suppress him; it made him a cardinal if I recall correctly.

27

Perhaps a period dominated by atheistic or agnostic scholars was known as the Enlightenment because there was less religious baggage to warp the thinking of these scholars.

As far as concerns the Church stifling progress and knowledge, in the chapters of the Inquisitions alone there is enough material to bitch about for the next 300 years straight.

Tomndebb wrote:

I’ll say, that is quite the opinion. A document found in the Inquisition files warns Galileo “not to hold, teach, or defend” the Copernican theory “in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.” Now you CAN claim that the Copernican Heliocentric system is an “error”, but I would like to see you try to justify a geocentric system. Galileo did not give up though, and continued to pursue knowledge through other avenues. It seemed like a stroke of luck that one of his good friends became Pope Urban VIII.

Not so. The reason that the Church soured against Galileo once again is that in his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican”, Galileo put the theory held by the Pope in the mouth of a character who had been ridiculed repeatedly in the book. This was the only literary device through which Galileo could make a scientific point while maintaining the “politically correct” stance that the Church had ordered him to assume. The Church quickly organized an examination of the book, and decided that Galileo had DARED to treat Copernican Theory as anything other than hypothetical. A case was brought against him by the Inquisition, for daring to discuss Copernican theory!

Galileo was able to defend himself because he had in his possession a letter from a Cardinal stating that he should merely avoid supporting Copernican theory. Eventually, hopeful for release, Galileo admitted that he might have overstated the case (if anything he UNDERstated it) and received the barest modicum of mercy: he was imprisoned for life and made to abjure formally.

In this case it’s certainly not Galileo who made an “error” without enough evidence–Galileo contributed as much as anyone to the scientific method. Shall we check on how the Church stifled the ideas of Kepler and Copernicus as well?

At any rate, Galileo lived hundreds of years after the time of the Dark Ages, but with attitudes like the ones held by the Church at the time it is easy to see why they were called “Dark”. The Church was quick to put a stranglehold on the populace, and by the 3rd-4th Century, as the Roman Empire crumbled, the Church was collecting revenues all over the place. One of their stratagems was to seize the lands of a deceased man who had no male sons (and for that reason, it has been suggested, they pushed the concepts of monogamy–lower chances of having sons). It is no wonder that the bipolar ruling of Church and State developed fairly quickly. Shall we also discuss the incredible lack of achievement that the Church had in the medical field? When the Europeans hopped on their crusades the entire Arab world laughed at their foolish superstitions and complete lack of common sense in the areas of healing. Were the Europeans extremely stupid in general, or were they hampered by the most frighteningly powerful forces known to Man: Ignorance and the Church? So much for fostering the development of knowledge and so much for “biased” agnostic/atheist historians eager to meet their own agendas! A person who has no beliefs will have a significantly less complex truth-seeking agenda than a person who does have beliefs.

In several cases, it must be noted, religious scholars have been very diligent and have contributed much to science (notably orders like the Franciscans monks). However the Church in the Dark and then the Middle Ages existed almost exclusively to control the populace and feed itself on the sweat and blood of the plebeans–certainly this was the intention at the elite levels. Its followers occasionally developed a thirst for scientific knowledge, but this seems to have happened to the lower ranks rather than the high levels.

28

Galileo was supported by the Church in the early days. When one zealot got him brought up on charges, those charges were, effectively, thrown out. The letter found in his file, later, has all the earmerks of having been a forgery inserted for the purpose of the second trial. That is the work of one or a few individuals, not “the church.”

Galileo’s second trial occurred when he parodied the pope and mocked everyone else in sight after insisting that the church “had” to accept his specific solar-centric theory (which included the error that all planetary orbits were perfectly round–a fact known to be false at the time of his rantings). Before the trial, he was told that he could publish it as an alternative view, but they would not accept it as a replacement view until he could prove it. He did not provide the evidence of stellar parallax (which was not finally discovered for more than a hundred years), but offered proofs that could be easily dismissed. When his faulty proofs were rejected, he then went on to write the parody and get in trouble. The statement at his second trial that he was guilty of heresy was, again, inserted by a court that overstepped their bounds. The church had never “taught” geocentrism as a religious truth.

Galileo and truth were not suppressed. When the stellar parallax was finally observed, the church accepted the evidence without any attempt to suppress it. One cranky old man got himself in trouble by trying to insist that the church change its religious doctrine to fit his unsubstantiated theories.

As to the other charges, the church has absolutely suppressed freedom of thought on many occasions. However, the suppression of religious thought has already been noted. There is still no evidence that the church suppressed scientific thought during the “dark ages.”

29

I’d like to confirm the other details of your post, but until then, I’ll note that the church/court threatened Galileo with torture if he did not take back his claims. After that, he was sentenced to a kind of house arrest.

30

Except that every historian I have read acknowledges that the display of the instruments of torture were a pro forma ritual of the Inquisition–which was carried out in the manner of all civil and religious trials of the time. Even the worst “heretic sniffer” had no intention of putting Galileo to torture.

Here are several sites that deal with the event. (The last is too pro-Catholic even for me.)

Galileo Affair

Galileo against the Universities

Galileo Controversy

31

Phobos- this is not to defend the church, but simply to correct an anchronistic view. Taking what the church was doing in the 1500’s and automatically concluding that it was doing the same in the 1200’s is not good history.

Yes, the church could be quite brutal in suppressing theological innovations or challenges during the Medieval period. It did not attempt to suppress scientific or naturalist thought because those fields had not yet developed to the point where they challenged the core of the church’s beliefs- that did not occur until the Renaissance, and especially until after the Reformation when the church became quite defensive.

To be sure the scientific speculations mentioned in previous posts were not really followed up or widely accepted during the Middle Ages, but that was not because of religious suppression. Rather it was because the scholarly community itself was still wedded to Aristotelean or Platonic philosophies and rejected the innovations.

32

In the Dark Ages, crop yields in many places were as low as 2 or 3/1. That means for every seed planted, two or three would be harvested, the rest being lost to bad weather, birds, etc. With yeilds like that there was not enough surplus for many people to take time out of the fields to do things like learn to read. The church did not have to repress the “teeming millions”; the “teaming millions” were repressed by nature.

The theroy of how the “Irish saved Civilization” is very popular with the Irish; however, there were many areas where learning was preserved; Ireland was one of them, but far from the only one. Had it been hit by a meteor in 700, we would not all still be on the manor. Hell, they couldn’t even get thier tonsures right.

Jayron said

Not quite: which group you belonged to–who your “people” were-- was more important in the Dark Ages than later. For example, every group had different laws, and which law code (set of laws and punishments) you followed depended on who your people were, not where you were. In Ostrogothic Italy, at the very begining of the Dark Ages, the invading Ostrogoths lived under thier Law Code and the Romans they ruled lived under Ropman Law. This seemed perfectly natural to everyone involved. It was not until much later that the idea developed that it was where you lived that made you who you are, not who your parents were. Remember that lands were named after tribes, not tribes after lands.

33

Oh. So it was like Massachusetts?

Mandy Jo’s point about crop yields props up what I’ve always been told – the Renaissance was actually caused by the Black Plague – which killed one in four Europeans. Thus, the crop yield per person was greatly increased – and culture could make a great leap forward.

34

This is an interesting thread. The problem (generally) with discussing these things is that people are so misinformed and have simplified things to such a degree that it is all meaningless.

Most people do not want to deal with the complexities of the Galileo affair when they can sum it up in a couple of phrases: he discovered the Earth orbits the Sun and the RC Church punished him because that contradicted the bible.

There are many other historical episodes that have become so distorted by misconception, propaganda and ignorance that it is hopeless to try to discuss them with everyday people.

Both the history of the RC Church and the history of Spain at that time are severely distorted in the minds of Americans. Both were the enemies of England at that time and England made sure to depict them in an ugly light.

Never mind that later historians have studied the period much more objectively. The simplified legend remains because it is easier to remember and understand than the complexities of the truth. Children in school are being taught that kind of history which can summarize things in a couple of sentences: William the conqueror was a good thing, the pope was a bad thing, the Spanish were a bad thing because they enslaved the indians and tried to screw the english etc.

I have always loved to read history and it is very enriching to understand the complexities of an age. But for most people, they prefer the abridged version that neatly labels things as good or bad.

One of such simplified notions is how bad the Spanish Inquisition was. Everybody knows that! Of course when you start to look at things more closely you realize there was no such thing as the Spanish Inquisition for several reasons. The Inquisition (or holy office, as it was called for short, full name: holy office for the defense of the faith) was an arm of the RC Church which existed everywhere where the Church had a presence and not only in Spain. Furthermore, at that time, there was no such thing as “Spain” which was divided into several Kingdoms which had very different laws and systems. They had a common King who was in no way absolute but was bound by the laws of each Kingdom. So, we can discuss the Spanish Inquisition but not in terms where you can summarize it in a couple of phrases. At this point most people, instead of realizing how little they know and leaving it at that, just go back to their preconceived notions. Besides “everybody knows how bad the Inquisition was”.

Maybe I should open another thread on this topic except that it seems the topics I find interesting never get much response… or maybe it’s just me managing to bore people even with interesting topics… but while I am rambling some disjoined thoughts here I will add some more.

Yes, in the middle ages it was normal for different peoples to have their own laws. They did not share our values of equality. In medieval Spain the Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together and each subject to their own laws and this was seen as the normal thing.

Even within Christians it was seen as normal that different groups had different laws (privilege means private law). The Church had their own jurisdiction, the nobles had their own, many cities had their own…

Also, They did not see religion as something as separate from “civil” life as we see it. Some conflicts were indeed about questions of faith but in many cases the struggles were purely political and religion was the mere label.

Just like today Jews and Arabs in Israel, catholics and protestants in Ireland. They are not discussing fine religious points, they are groups of people who clash and religion is just a secondary part of it.

The Pope was a prince of a temporal kingdom as much or more as a spiritual leader and everybody seemed to understand that at the time even better than today. Charles, emperor of “Germany” and king of “Spain”, that most catholic monarch, has his armies invade the papal states and sack Rome. He understood business is business and separate from religion.

Sorry if I am talking about stuff that happened during the renaissance and after the middle ages… Anyway, as I said, interesting thread and interesting posts.

35

Tomndebb said:

“Paradocs, can you point to any knowledge that was withheld from the populace? Are you aware of any actual rules forbidding secular scholars from pursuing studies at monastic libraries?”

No, not off the top of my head. However, I don’t believe monastic libraries would lend you any book you wanted so long as you returned it in two weeks. :slight_smile: I do recall reading that the universities formed in much of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were still under the rather rigid control of the ecclesiastical authorities, and the universities in the Venetian Republic were the first to offer intellectual freedom – and nurture the Renaissance.

Tomndebb also said:
“Roger Bacon published his findings openly. In the late pre-Renaissance, the Church supported Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo (at least, until Galileo demanded that the Church accept some of his errors as truth without sufficient evidence).”

The biography section of my Merriam-Webster’s dictionary gives the following dates:
Roger Bacon 1220-1292
Copernicus 1473-1543
Kepler 1571-1630
Galileo 1564-1642

All but Roger Bacon fall after period usually defining the “Dark Ages.” Bacon was indeed a bit of an anomaly. I’m glad you brought him up; I didn’t know much about him, and looked up some references. I found the following at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/bacon1.html:

"After twenty years of study and experiments…Bacon joined the Franciscan Order, a step which he evidently lived to repent. His superiors forbade him to publish anything, and he would have died unknown but for the intervention of Pope Clement IV, who had heard of him before his elevation to the papacy, and who in 1266 sent a letter bidding him write down his ideas “without delay, and with all possible secrecy, without regard to any contrary precept of your Superiors or any constitution of your Order.”

Tomndebb also said,
“There is no question that the Christian church was (too often literally) death on people holding different religious views. However, there is very little evidence that that same intolerance carried over to matters of engineering or science. In every case that I am aware that a scientist was persecuted, religious belief (and, usually, politics) was tied up in the issues.”

And Nebuli said:
“Yes, the church could be quite brutal in suppressing theological innovations or challenges during the Medieval period. It did not attempt to suppress scientific or naturalist thought because those fields had not yet developed to the point where they challenged the core of the church’s beliefs- that did not occur until the Renaissance, and especially until after the Reformation when the church
became quite defensive.”

Seems to me that, by siphoning off the intellectual endeavors of the literate into theology rather than science, the Church would have had a not entirely benign effect on innovation. No data for that.

In addition, apart from persecution of scientists, the Judeo-Christian notion of the all-powerful Being, whose creation of the world, its botany, and its zoology out of nothing was to be accepted without question, is fundamentally inconsistent with a search for natural laws unbreakable even by the Deity. Particularly as practiced by pious persons of the medieval Church. If you believe God to be Almighty, capable of parting the waters, curing the incurable, inflicting scourges on those who reject His Word or harm His Chosen, etc., etc., why would you go searching for means of curing the sick? Apparently it is His Will the they suffer. Medicine is one of the most immediate of the sciences; all men have a direct connection with the function and dysfunction of their own bodies - and yet there was almost no progress between Galen (the Greek, not the Doper :wink: ) in the 2nd century and Vesalius’ publication of De Humani Corporis Fabrica in 1543. Why? Sherwin B. Nuland, the Yale surgeon/historian, does a nice job of explaining in his book Doctors: The Biography of Medicine. Essentially, antagonism always exists between mysticism and rationalism (why don’t the Kansas Board of Education and the creationist wahoos from my hometown understand that this is atavistic and that each deserves its own forum???) Christianity’s doctrines emphasized the importance of the soul to the detriment of concern for the corporeal body. They were perfectly happy to accept Galen’s teleological theories of human anatomy and physiology, even if they didn’t go so far as to ban dissections. This was the kiss of death for progress in medicine. Likely other fields were stifled in the same ways, quite apart from overt suppression of science.

[BTW, it would be a grave mistake to misinterpret what I’ve written as an attack on sprirituality. I am in fact a very spiritual person. Rather, it is an attack on organized religion and the paucity of capacity for complexity in mass mysticism (believing that a God is omnipotent, and that’s that, rather than being interested in studying the wonderfully complex patterns of life that we have been able to elucidate thus far.)]
Now…after all that…I will say that I agree to some extent with those who identify the ‘Dark Ages’ as a socioeconomic consequence of climate, disease, and invaders; not just the accessibility of learning. Don’t have Jarad Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” in front of me, but doesn’t he make some interesting points about climate change, and the spread of disease along the horizontal axis of Eurasia that had previously favored the spread of agriculture and husbandry?

Complicated stuff, ain’t it? :slight_smile: Very cool to think about, though, and I appreciate the opportunity to try to tease things out while trying to avoid the great demon of over-simplification!

36

Galileo was supported by the Church when some of his early works drew popular attention. His concept of “new science” brought him fame and recognition. Not all activities the Church engaged in were a conspiracy against knowledge of course. However it is indisputable, apart by many religious sources such as the ones quoted above by Tomndebb, that Galileo’s New Physics and the New Astronomy were silenced and that Galileo was forced to recant the ‘Copernican hypothesis’, or the heliocentric theory of the universe. Which, no matter how many hairs you split and how many sources you doubt, is the generally correct view of the solar system in the final analysis. Copernicus and Galileo were right (even if they may not have got some details quite right). The Church was wrong. Yet the Church used its considerable power, including the various arms of the Inquisition, to silence these heliocentric theories, and numerous Church officials told Galileo and others that some systems should not be investigated at all. If that does not sound like the repression of scientific thought, what does?

I am not discussing that Galileo was actually poking fun at the Pope and the Church. As I said above, this is not an uncommon literary device, ESPECIALLY when one is confronted with suppression, as there is absolutely no doubt Galileo was. Galileo’s crimes were essentially the same as Socrates/Plato’s. He was discussing an issue that the elders/the Church disapproved of. He employed satire and irony as literary devices to poke fun at the established authorities and their clearly incorrect “scientific” (philosophic) views. How different was Galileo’s approach from “the Republic”? Cephalus and a host of other characters that Socrates discusses with are represented as incomplete beings who therefore have an incomplete view and must be taught extensively. Their purpose is to be Socrates-fodder so that we, the readers, may understand through the Socratic Method. Of course this is an unacceptable rhetorical technique today, but Galileo may have had little choice 400 years ago. Sometimes in an argument you have to stoop to ridicule when other methods fail–as they did for Galileo after his first warnings against treating heliocentrism.

The fact that Galileo’s books on science eventually had to be smuggled out of Italy and published abroad doesn’t sound like the repression of scientific inquiry?

The same goes for the other scientists. I am not saying that Galileo was the perfect scientist. He stole some ideas from other scientists, and he had a notoriously bad temper. Tycho Brahe, the man who argued against Aristotelian doctrine and who early in his career calculated that a supernova he witnessed lay in the realm of the fixed and immutable stars, was a drunkard and a brawler who ended up exiled from his home country, and IIRC choked on his own vomit after a night out. They weren’t perfect, nor were their methods. These early scientists had to invent many of the methods we take for granted today. Tycho, for example never fully accepted the Copernican system. But such people, in spite of their faults, were bringing humankind a lot more progress than the Church ever did. In fact, for most of these astronomy cases, the Church felt threatened by the (very simplified) ideas that A) the Earth is not God’s centre of attention and the centre of the Universe, and B) the heavens are not perfect and immutable, and therefore the entire concept of God as an imperfect and mutable primum mobile was doubtful. These were absolutely terrifying concepts for a body that at the time based its power on its relationship with God, its authority as concerns God’s creations (including humans and the heavens), and the fact that humans are the favourite of all God’s creatures. Repression followed whenever these fundamentals of power were threatened by the development of new scientific knowledge.

37

Sailor, what’s up with this?:
http://www.jewishgates.org/history/jewhis/inqui.stm

There are also references to it in the Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm

Are we talking about completely different things or periods in history?

38

From Paradocs:

I’m not sure what your point is. Bacon joins an order that, for reasons possibly ranging from anti-science to simply a misguided concept of what “humility” and “obedience” should mean to a friar, tells him not to publish. The pope then asks that all his papers be forwarded to Rome, telling him not to let his superiors know, thus avoiding the political brouhaha of the pope and the priors having a public battle, and somehow this becomes “the church” suppressing knowledge.

Religious orders run on their own rules for their own agenda. The Franciscans, at that time, had a number of political battles going on in the educational community. I have never seen his orders to not publish linked to an opposition to his ideas, as such. If they were instigated by opposition to his science, it remains that the church (the pope) did not suppress his works, whatever his particular priory or order may have tried.
Abe, the effect of Galileo’s second trial was to suppress the publication of his work (after it had already made the rounds of the leading mathematicians and astronomers, so that the knowledge was already in circulation). Galileo was forced to recant. I have never tried to claim otherwise. The issue is not that what happened was a “good thing”. The issue is that what happened to Galileo was not an attack on science by the church.

Galileo demanded that the Church immediately acknowledge the heliocentric theory. Borromeo told him that the church would do that as soon as he proved that it was true. Galileo’s proofs were wrong. When the pope would not overrule Borromeo and declare the heliocentric theory as Truth, Galileo went on the attack and brought down a political trial on his head.

That was Bad Science on the part of Galileo. He did not have proof for the theory, but he demanded that the church proclaim his theory as true.
It is the equivalent of someone demanding that Continental Drift be taught as True in the schools in 1950, before the explanation of Plate Tectonics was developed and proven in the 1960’s. Even when a good intuitive idea is put forth, it needs to be subjected to trial. Galileo’s good idea failed his own trials, yet he demanded that it be accepted.

Yes, several of the judges were anti-science. However, the judgement was based on the letter (now suspected to be a forgery) that allegedly told him to not publish. The church never made any effort to prevent the investigation of the heliocentric theory. When it was finally proved, (and not with Galileo’s errroneous attempts), it was accepted without any issue. Galileo’s attacks were not a defense of the truth, they were simply snide remarks that offended the non-scientific people in authority so that his actual opponents were able to arrange to bring him back to trial again.

On the court, several judges refused to go along with the decision and after the verdict was rendered, others pointed out that the court had overstepped their bounds by declaring “heresy” when there was to doctrine that Galileo had violated. Since Galileo had violated the instructions the (forged?) “letter” however, the judgment was allowed to stand.

Meanwhile, the mathematicians and astronomers who had dealt with (or debated with) Galileo went on making the same observations and following his math (with no hindrance from the church) until his theory was finally proved with the discovery of the stellar parallax.

This is not hair-splitting; it is setting straight the record.

39

Oh, and thanks for the smile at this line:

Contrary to Plato’s excellent propaganda and the platitudes of generations of first-year Philosophy instructors, Socrates was not persecuted for seeking Truth or opposing those terrible money-seeking sophists. Socrates got in trouble for “corrupting the youth of Athens” when one of his students attempted an armed coup, citing the principles that he claimed to have learned from Socrates.

The trial of Socrates violates every principle most of us believe about Free Speech and Academic Freedom, but it was not an overkill reaction to some gentle seeker of truth. It was a specific response to the apparent source of a violent act against the government.

40

tcburnett, yeah, what about that? Did you read them? I had a very quick look at both links and both seem to confirm what I said. Can you tell me if you see anything that contradicts it?

The Inquisition was an arm of the Church (quote: “In 1483, the Church appointed Torquemada to be head of the Inquisition in Spain”) and Spain as an entity did not exist, rather it was a confederation of kingdoms with their own laws.

I know it may come as a shock to you that many things everybody knows to be true and which are even in print may not be true after all.

If you are interested in discussing that period in Spanish history I will be very happy to oblige as it is a period I know something about and have plenty of reference books. But you are going to have to dig a bit deeper than that. If you want to contradict me please make clear exactly what point you are contradicting and exactly where your view is supported. I could not find anything in those pages that contradict what I know (unless you count the title as being technically inaccurate).

I am very willing to discuss this topic but, if we are going to do it we should probably start a new thread because i feel we are hijacking this one. In fact, let me start a new thread and we can continue there.