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This is very poor history. A constant theme among apologists for the 17th Century Catholic Church is the claim that the Church was somehow defending scientific

This is very poor history. A constant theme among apologists for the 17th Century Catholic Church is the claim that the Church was somehow defending scientific rigor. That idea is quickly dispelled by simply reading the Inquisition's 1616 findings on heliocentrism: > Proposition to be assessed: > (1) The sun is the center of the world and completely devoid of local motion. > Assessement: All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology. > (2) The earth is not the center of the world, nor motionless, but it moves as a whole and also with diurnal motion. > Assessment: All said that this proposition receives the same judgement in philosophy and that in regard to theological truth it is at least errouneous in faith. The Church wasn't calling for scientific rigor. It was calling for adherence to orthodoxy - in this case, its interpretation of Scripture. Graney and others make an ahistorical argument: they cherry-pick one observation (the apparent angular diameter of stars), and then apply modern arguments not known to people at the time (the actual size of stars) to say that Galileo's scientific argument was weak. They ignore all the other observations that strongly favored heliocentrism at the time (the phases of Venus, the discovery that Jupiter and its moons form their own Copernican system, the greater parsimony of the heliocentric system when it comes to explaining things like retrograde motion of planets, and so on), and focus on the argument about sizes of stars. But Galileo had a perfectly reasonable answer to the star-size argument: the stars might be very large, and different measurements of stellar angular diameters were inconsistent with one another. Countering with modern knowledge about the true sizes of stars doesn't give any insight into who had the stronger argument in the early 1600s. On balance, the argument for heliocentrism was already much stronger at the time. And of course, forcing Galileo, under threat of torture, to publicly accept the Church's interpretation of Scripture did nothing to aid science.

josefx 7y ago
> It was calling for adherence to orthodoxy - in this case, its interpretation of Scripture. This paper[1] points out that the "proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy" is denouncing its scientific rigor. Of course they are also pissed at him for reinterpreting Bible verses, that is how the church got involved in the mess first place. [1]https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1402/1402.6168.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1402/1402.6168.pdf
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  The very next clause is > and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture The paper that you cite, claiming that the "proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy" refers to scientific rigor, is written by the same person who gave the interview OP linked (Graney). With all due respect to Graney, his arguments about Galileo come across as anachronistic apologia, trying to interpret the early-17th-Century Church as being interested in scientific rigor, rather than orthodoxy. Recall that the Galileo Affair occurred during the Counter-Reformation, a time when the Church was reeling due to the spread of Protestantism and was obsessed with orthodoxy and stamping out heresy. If you want a more neutral and historically accurate depiction of the Galileo Affair, read Maurice Finocchiaro's writings.
  - josefx 7y ago
    > read Maurice Finocchiaro's writings. That is one of the authors he cites on the scientific rigor bit.
hhas01 7y ago
Linked website is nothing but religious apologetics. Very disingenuous, definitely not science. Shame on whoever posted it.
jacobush 7y ago
Even if the views presented in the site are not "good", this whole discussion on HN was very interesting to me and I learned a great deal. Indeed, I had a very simplistic view of the whole Galileo affair, from the science of it to the politics. Probably because I learned about it at a very young age and never researched more into it.
foldr 7y ago
You're also cherry picking a bit. For example, Galielo failed to observe any parallax effect. More broadly, it's a classic case of parsimony vs empirical coverage. Galileo's model did not enable better predictions, in the short term. Parsimony arguments are always more persuasive in retrospect, when we know that the theory in question is correct. There are many parsimonious but wrong theories. It was not unreasonable at the time to think that Galielo's theory might have been one of them. >then apply modern arguments not known to people at the time (the actual size of stars) to say that Galileo's scientific argument was weak I think you're misreading the argument. They point out that Galileo's theory appeared to require all other stars to be much bigger than the Sun, which seemed implausible at the time. This point was made by Galileo's contemporaries, so it can't be anachronistic.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  > Galielo failed to observe any parallax effect. That's the same issue - the size argument. Without the argument about the sizes of stars, not observing parallax is not a problem at all. One can simply say that stars are far away. > Galileo's model did not enable better predictions, in the short term. Galileo did not have a model. He advocated Copernicus' heliocentric model, though I think his general attachment was more to heliocentrism than any particular heliocentric model (he appears not to have been particularly aware of Kepler's model). > They point out that Galileo's theory appeared to require all other stars to be much bigger than the Sun, which seemed implausible at the time. This point was made by Galileo's contemporaries, so it can't be anachronistic. Galileo measured much smaller stellar angular diameters than Tycho had, which very much called into question the reliability of the measurements. Arguing, based on modern knowledge, that stars are not so large, and insisting that this is the decisive argument, does come across as anachronistic to me. At the time, there were many other arguments in favor of heliocentrism that were very quickly accepted by a large part of the scientific community (particularly in Protestant Europe, beyond the control of the Church). Heliocentrism was widely accepted long before the star size objection was definitively answered (by an understanding of diffraction), and hundreds of years before the measurement of parallax. It was widely accepted even before a proper theory of gravity had been developed.

josefx 7y ago

> It was calling for adherence to orthodoxy - in this case, its interpretation of Scripture. This paper[1] points out that the "proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy" is denouncing its scientific rigor. Of course they are also pissed at him for reinterpreting Bible verses, that is how the church got involved in the mess first place. [1]https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1402/1402.6168.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1402/1402.6168.pdf

DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
The very next clause is > and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture The paper that you cite, claiming that the "proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy" refers to scientific rigor, is written by the same person who gave the interview OP linked (Graney). With all due respect to Graney, his arguments about Galileo come across as anachronistic apologia, trying to interpret the early-17th-Century Church as being interested in scientific rigor, rather than orthodoxy. Recall that the Galileo Affair occurred during the Counter-Reformation, a time when the Church was reeling due to the spread of Protestantism and was obsessed with orthodoxy and stamping out heresy. If you want a more neutral and historically accurate depiction of the Galileo Affair, read Maurice Finocchiaro's writings.
- josefx 7y ago
  > read Maurice Finocchiaro's writings. That is one of the authors he cites on the scientific rigor bit.

hhas01 7y ago

Linked website is nothing but religious apologetics. Very disingenuous, definitely not science. Shame on whoever posted it.

jacobush 7y ago

Even if the views presented in the site are not "good", this whole discussion on HN was very interesting to me and I learned a great deal. Indeed, I had a very simplistic view of the whole Galileo affair, from the science of it to the politics. Probably because I learned about it at a very young age and never researched more into it.

foldr 7y ago

You're also cherry picking a bit. For example, Galielo failed to observe any parallax effect. More broadly, it's a classic case of parsimony vs empirical coverage. Galileo's model did not enable better predictions, in the short term. Parsimony arguments are always more persuasive in retrospect, when we know that the theory in question is correct. There are many parsimonious but wrong theories. It was not unreasonable at the time to think that Galielo's theory might have been one of them. >then apply modern arguments not known to people at the time (the actual size of stars) to say that Galileo's scientific argument was weak I think you're misreading the argument. They point out that Galileo's theory appeared to require all other stars to be much bigger than the Sun, which seemed implausible at the time. This point was made by Galileo's contemporaries, so it can't be anachronistic.

DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
> Galielo failed to observe any parallax effect. That's the same issue - the size argument. Without the argument about the sizes of stars, not observing parallax is not a problem at all. One can simply say that stars are far away. > Galileo's model did not enable better predictions, in the short term. Galileo did not have a model. He advocated Copernicus' heliocentric model, though I think his general attachment was more to heliocentrism than any particular heliocentric model (he appears not to have been particularly aware of Kepler's model). > They point out that Galileo's theory appeared to require all other stars to be much bigger than the Sun, which seemed implausible at the time. This point was made by Galileo's contemporaries, so it can't be anachronistic. Galileo measured much smaller stellar angular diameters than Tycho had, which very much called into question the reliability of the measurements. Arguing, based on modern knowledge, that stars are not so large, and insisting that this is the decisive argument, does come across as anachronistic to me. At the time, there were many other arguments in favor of heliocentrism that were very quickly accepted by a large part of the scientific community (particularly in Protestant Europe, beyond the control of the Church). Heliocentrism was widely accepted long before the star size objection was definitively answered (by an understanding of diffraction), and hundreds of years before the measurement of parallax. It was widely accepted even before a proper theory of gravity had been developed.