I didn’t contradict you. I just asked you a question because I wanted to know the answer. What is your problem?
Tomndebb, I find your insights fascinating, and agree with you on more than a few points. The O.J. Simpsonism, rest assured, was certainly not an attempt at ridicule. But I do believe that asking Galileo for direct observation of stellar parallax was excessive. And the reason why we are discussing this point is that the suppression of science has been posited in this thread as a contributing factor that made the Dark Ages dark. I don’t want to lose the forest for the trees, but the point is very interesting.
I also agree with up to a certain extent on Tomndebb’s comparison to the Darwin issue. I think the difference here is that Darwin was arguing a point that was probably much more difficult to prove than Galileo’s. The reason I say that is that with the correct mixture of intuitive and scientific reasoning, it is fairly easy to determine in a short while that the Earth is not at the centre of the Solar System. It is more problematic to prove Darwin’s theories because, as those accursed Creationists gleefully cackle in their typical and prematurely victorious tone, it is fairly difficult to see evolution in action. We can, however, readily detect much evidence that indicates the Earth moves around the Sun. If Darwin’s critics had spent 8 years studying barnacles to teach themselves science, and then tackled the complicated problems of origins after spending years exploring isolated systems on islands, they might have better understood his arguments.
If we look at the motivation behind the strange Galileo affair, we see that the Church had everything to lose had Galileo’s views been confirmed and accepted. The fanatical creationists probably felt the same way about Darwin. Doctrine, after all, rules supreme only as long as people place their faith in it. If the Church’s cosmological model collapsed suddenly at the hands of a lone man with an irreverent sarcastic edge in his writing, the Church could have found itself in trouble (note: if anyone can remind me of the book by Cyrano deBergerac in which the theory of the time is mocked by comparing it to a room spinning around a fireplace, I would be very grateful). Did they raise the bar in asking Galileo for more evidence on top of the evidence already provided? I believe they did. The Ptolemaic system, after all, has a difficult time accounting reasonably for retrograde orbits and the phases of the planets and their moons. I stated some of the evidence drawn from Copernicus and Galileo in an earlier message.
Atoms, the theoretical objects named by Democritus around 5th century BC, had a similarly poor relationship with the Church, who at times seemed (it seems to me, anyway) to worship Aristotle and his most peculiar beliefs. Aristotle did not believe in atoms, in spite of the fact that they were, even 2500 years ago, a fascinating and eerily accurate concept. Medieval Christian Europe rejected the ancients’ atomic theory and suppressed it as the work of mechanical atheists, choosing instead the god-inspired or revealed reason of Aristotle. Ironically, it was once again Galileo who encouraged progress in the field of atomic theory by announcing his belief that vacuums could exist, which then sparked the development of better air pumps that came ever closer to achieving a vacuum, which was a necessary item (or lack of one, to be precise) for belief in atoms, etc. Over the next hundreds of years, without a single atom ever having been spotted, the atomic theory of matter was developed and accepted on the basis of supporting evidence. We can somewhat “see” atoms today, but John Dalton and Amedeo Avogadro and hundreds of other scientists never saw one, nor ever experienced one directly.
They had strong supporting evidence for the existence of atoms however, and their reasoning made an excellet case–enough for other scientists to investigate the issue. In the case of atoms, Dalton was correspondingly less accurate than Galileo had been in the case of heliocentrism, although Galileo too made some errors.
It is a bit too convenient for someone who has cause not to believe in atoms to say, “Show me an atom or else I will not believe its existence”. How much a priori thinking and thought experiments will be necessary to convince that person? How many calculations? The Church did not want Galileo to turn the official cosmological model on its head; that was almost certainly their motivation in suppressing heliocentrism. Similarly, the Church did not like the idea of atoms, and suppressed that concept too (a French priest tried to reconcile the two sides of the argument by stating that atoms were indeed likely to exist, and that they were created by God).
Galileo had proof. Owing to limitations in technology–the telescope had just been invented–he did not have the ultimate proof (stellar parallax), but he did have other supporting evidence that, added up, formed what is generally considered a very valid case for heliocentrism. The Church, on the other hand, did not have scientific proof for their geocentric hypothesis; all they had was the illusion that the Earth is motionless and that the Sun and moon move in the sky. An illusion is hardly scientific evidence. The rest of the Church’s evidence for their case was fabricated with this simple and treacherous illusion as a starting point, and carefully tailored over the ages until the completely fictional system worked passably well in the real environment. One of the rules of logic states that if you start with incorrect premises, you can prove whatever you want. Our eyes provide us with the incorrect premise: the sun appearing to move in our sky. The mind concludes the argument with as much detail and as much logic as it wants, but its result is still flawed. The Church refused to face that truth and admit that its entire cosmology was based on an illusion. This must have been infuriating to Galileo.
It is much like saying that the Earth is flat because it looks flat to us, and then formulating a bunch of laws that say that, if the Earth is round, it is logical to see people on the other side of the planet standing upside down–and perhaps falling off. Logical, but simply impractical. Galileo cut deep by saying the equivalent of “if the Earth is flat, why then do we see the sails of a ship over the horizon before we see the ship itself?” (substitute planets and their moons and eclipses etc. instead of ships and sails)
When Galileo confronted them directly with more evidence in favour of his case than they themselves had for their own case, the Church had to employ an O.J. Simpsonism in the hope of shutting Galileo up. If that happened to me, I would probably lose my temper and demand them to stop this foolishness as well, tell them to give up and accept the truth of the matter. It would not be the correct thing to do–the correct thing to do would be to explain calmly the impossibility of providing this evidence–but it is understandable how a man of Galileo’s intellect (and temper) might have resorted to concluding that his argument was final when faced with such a stone wall. I am not excusing this behaviour; rather, I believe that the ideal scientific mind ought to have resilience against such infuriating arguments. But that’s neither here nor there nor in the Dark Ages.
I recall being told in Religious Education (Catholic school) that the Bible was taken off the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by the 2nd Vatican Council during the 1960s.
As I understand it, the Bible was placed around the time of the first European crusades (against the Cathars, etc), in the 12th & 13th C. This was supposedly done to prevent erroneously translation into other, or vernacular, languages, especially by heretics.
The Bible was apparently taken off, in line with a greater move to phase out Latin.
I don’t know if this helps the debate about suppression of knowledge by the Church, but these links to the Catholic Encyclopaedia might (though given its bias, I doubt it):