6 ms·

Except the standard narrative is fairly honest, if reductionist. Of course the details are far more interesting, but I find there's this new historic revisionis

Except the standard narrative is fairly honest, if reductionist. Of course the details are far more interesting, but I find there's this new historic revisionism that's trying to whitewash Catholic history and its fairly repugnant. Look at your comment. Putting in qualifiers like Galileo was a jerk and those selfless Vatican officials were just a little "thin-skinned" is making excuses to promote a pro-Church narrative and to blame Galileo. You are aware we are discussing the Inquisition here which, if we include the entire church all through Europe, led to the deaths of over 125,000 people. This wasn't some protocol slight taken overly-wrongly, but an active system of censorship, oppression, imprisonment, and mass murder Galileo was on the receiving end of. I hate when the "Oh, there's more to this story" attitude is used to defend the wrong narrative. I see it all the time on the internet. Edison is on par with Hitler for some reason, Lincoln is a war mongering criminal for going against the peace loving Confederate states, etc. The larger narrative is dismissed for smaller details that are presented in a way to distract or contradict the larger narrative. Its purposely viewing the trees and ignoring the forest. Sadly, its a popular way for disingenuous people to promote their views.

bonzini 10y ago
Not really, there were actual problems with the Copernican system, mostly because it still required epicyclics. The favored system at the time was the Tychonic system, and what actually allowed heliocentrism to prevail was Kepler's introduction of elliptical orbits. Some of Galileo's points, for example his explanation of tides in term of heliocentrism, were downright wrong---which is fine, but trying to mix theology and astronomy, which he did, and putting the pope's theory in the mouth of a character called "Simple" were not the best political moves.
- cygx 10y ago
  The audacity of a layperson to quote Augustine!
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Except the thing is, Galileo's model was not supported by science. They had neither a proper theoretical model for deriving it (Newton's and Kepler's work on gravity and celestial movement, which came after Galileo), nor did the Galileo's model agree with available observational data. From the point of view of scientists of that age, his model was more like a crackpot theory. Which turned out ok, but only much later. So if anything, Galileo's story is about the Church being on the side of science, not against it.
- dotancohen 10y ago
  I came to post this. There is another important detail: Galileo did not contradict scripture (religion), rather he contradicted Aristotle (science). The Catholic church was actually rather interested in science at the time, and were far from the anti-intellectuals that the common narrative makes them seem.
  - arjie 10y ago
    His judgment explicitly states that he was convicted of contradicting scripture.
  - toyg 10y ago
    Aristotle is not just "science" - it's long been at the center of Christian theology, carrying the main argument that could reconcile Christian faith with the empirical world. Until very recently (and certainly by Galileo's times), contradicting Aristotle meant doing away with the entire building of Christian theology.
    - michaelsbradley 10y ago
      Well, in Western Christianity the thought of Aristotle has been important since about A.D. 1,100. Not so much in Eastern Christianity, which has favored the thought of Plato for nearly 2,000 years.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    Galileo's push for heliocentrism were in direct opposition to doctrine (Ptolemaic/geocentrism) and most interpretations of scripture. If the Catholic Church didn't take that as a threat to their legitimacy I'd be surprised. Similar shit happens today where people who question the efficacy of e.g. capitalism are effectively silenced (media control and subtlety allows voices to be silenced without imprisoning or killing people these days)
jcranmer 10y ago
There's a fallacy in our history textbooks that Copernican astronomy was so obviously superior to Ptolemaic astronomy. The truth is, it wasn't. The Copernican model held that planets moved in circular orbits at uniform angular velocity--which is sufficiently wrong that it required only a few less epicycles than Ptolemaic astronomy. You can't fall back on "it's more accurate" since the results weren't really any more accurate. Yet, for this inaccurate results, a Copernican would have to explain: * The lack of stellar parallax * How the Earth can rotate around the sun * Why we don't fall off the planet * Why the rotation of the planet doesn't throw us off the planet The Copernicans had no good answers for these questions--the latter were eventually explained by Newton's Law of Gravitation which proved to cement the transition away from geocentrism (the accuracy of Kepler's elliptical orbit also provided another major impetus for the transition, since it didn't need any epicycles. Incidentally, Galileo saw Kepler as a Copernican heretic and viewed his model of planetary orbits as utter rubbish). Stellar parallax was resolved when we actually found it--in the 1700s. The Copernican attempts to explain it were weak and sometimes involved actual heresy on the nature of God, declared as such by the Catholic church 100s of years prior. Tycho Brahe gave a fairly comprehensive, scientific denunciation of Copernican astronomy based on his stellar observations. Incidentally, your number for the deaths caused by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition is off by over an order of magnitude. The Spanish Inquisition appears to have executed only around 2000 people, and that for all of the major executions put together doesn't seem more than around 10,000 people. In general, the Inquisition's goal was mainly getting heretics to convert, not executing them: only around 5% of guilty sentences produced executions in the first place.
- antognini 10y ago
  That's a good summary. I would only add that Brahe himself developed a sort of "compromise" model between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems in which the planets (aside from the Earth and the Moon) all revolved around the Sun, which then revolved around the Earth. The Tychonic system explained the lack of observed parallax, but kept the computational simplifications of the Copernican system. This was the model preferred by most of the learned men in the Church at the time.
- cygx 10y ago

bonzini 10y ago

Not really, there were actual problems with the Copernican system, mostly because it still required epicyclics. The favored system at the time was the Tychonic system, and what actually allowed heliocentrism to prevail was Kepler's introduction of elliptical orbits. Some of Galileo's points, for example his explanation of tides in term of heliocentrism, were downright wrong---which is fine, but trying to mix theology and astronomy, which he did, and putting the pope's theory in the mouth of a character called "Simple" were not the best political moves.

cygx 10y ago
The audacity of a layperson to quote Augustine!

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Except the thing is, Galileo's model was not supported by science. They had neither a proper theoretical model for deriving it (Newton's and Kepler's work on gravity and celestial movement, which came after Galileo), nor did the Galileo's model agree with available observational data. From the point of view of scientists of that age, his model was more like a crackpot theory. Which turned out ok, but only much later. So if anything, Galileo's story is about the Church being on the side of science, not against it.

dotancohen 10y ago
I came to post this. There is another important detail: Galileo did not contradict scripture (religion), rather he contradicted Aristotle (science). The Catholic church was actually rather interested in science at the time, and were far from the anti-intellectuals that the common narrative makes them seem.
- arjie 10y ago
  His judgment explicitly states that he was convicted of contradicting scripture.
- toyg 10y ago
  Aristotle is not just "science" - it's long been at the center of Christian theology, carrying the main argument that could reconcile Christian faith with the empirical world. Until very recently (and certainly by Galileo's times), contradicting Aristotle meant doing away with the entire building of Christian theology.
  - michaelsbradley 10y ago
    Well, in Western Christianity the thought of Aristotle has been important since about A.D. 1,100. Not so much in Eastern Christianity, which has favored the thought of Plato for nearly 2,000 years.
- r00fus 10y ago
  Galileo's push for heliocentrism were in direct opposition to doctrine (Ptolemaic/geocentrism) and most interpretations of scripture. If the Catholic Church didn't take that as a threat to their legitimacy I'd be surprised. Similar shit happens today where people who question the efficacy of e.g. capitalism are effectively silenced (media control and subtlety allows voices to be silenced without imprisoning or killing people these days)

jcranmer 10y ago

There's a fallacy in our history textbooks that Copernican astronomy was so obviously superior to Ptolemaic astronomy. The truth is, it wasn't. The Copernican model held that planets moved in circular orbits at uniform angular velocity--which is sufficiently wrong that it required only a few less epicycles than Ptolemaic astronomy. You can't fall back on "it's more accurate" since the results weren't really any more accurate. Yet, for this inaccurate results, a Copernican would have to explain: * The lack of stellar parallax * How the Earth can rotate around the sun * Why we don't fall off the planet * Why the rotation of the planet doesn't throw us off the planet The Copernicans had no good answers for these questions--the latter were eventually explained by Newton's Law of Gravitation which proved to cement the transition away from geocentrism (the accuracy of Kepler's elliptical orbit also provided another major impetus for the transition, since it didn't need any epicycles. Incidentally, Galileo saw Kepler as a Copernican heretic and viewed his model of planetary orbits as utter rubbish). Stellar parallax was resolved when we actually found it--in the 1700s. The Copernican attempts to explain it were weak and sometimes involved actual heresy on the nature of God, declared as such by the Catholic church 100s of years prior. Tycho Brahe gave a fairly comprehensive, scientific denunciation of Copernican astronomy based on his stellar observations. Incidentally, your number for the deaths caused by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition is off by over an order of magnitude. The Spanish Inquisition appears to have executed only around 2000 people, and that for all of the major executions put together doesn't seem more than around 10,000 people. In general, the Inquisition's goal was mainly getting heretics to convert, not executing them: only around 5% of guilty sentences produced executions in the first place.

antognini 10y ago
That's a good summary. I would only add that Brahe himself developed a sort of "compromise" model between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems in which the planets (aside from the Earth and the Moon) all revolved around the Sun, which then revolved around the Earth. The Tychonic system explained the lack of observed parallax, but kept the computational simplifications of the Copernican system. This was the model preferred by most of the learned men in the Church at the time.
cygx 10y ago