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Basically the church wasn’t as crazy or evil as they’re portrayed now with their persecution of Galileo: he didn’t actually have convincing evidence because the

Basically the church wasn’t as crazy or evil as they’re portrayed now with their persecution of Galileo: he didn’t actually have convincing evidence because the real theory took hundreds of years later to be accepted. It’s important and satisfying to see our ancestors weren’t simply superstitious mystical fools, just people who were behaving somewhat reasonably with the information they had at the time. The incentives around them played a role but didn’t consume every facet of their decision making. Great article.

bombcar 3y ago
The amount of "made major discovery, never published or told anyone, found in his files after death" that keeps happening also shows an entirely different outlook on science that we don't really have anymore, I feel. Sure, some may have been trying to build some grand unified theory and keeping everything close to their chest (and then died), but I suspect a majority were just doing this stuff because it was damn amazing and they really didn't feel the need to tell anyone about it in particular.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  Many probably didn’t want to risk being publicly shown they were wrong I suppose.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  "Science" didn't really exist for another couple centuries. This was just wealthy dudes having a fun hobby. The same way people of means today have "charitable organizations" to play around with, wealthy people back then liked to dabble in "natural philosophy"
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- shjake 3y ago
  A lot of those discoveries couldn’t be proven for many years after the deaths of their authors. So it was hard to tell how significant they were. A lot of the things that Galileo said couldn’t be proven either. In fact some were outright wrong and some could be directly disproven based what was know at the time (e.g. reconciling the size and distance of stars). So either they couldn’t tell anyone because nobody would believe them, they weren’t sure about how significant it was or maybe it was just irrelevant at the time (e.g. the Ancient Greek steam engine)
kerkeslager 3y ago
> Basically the church wasn’t as crazy or evil as they’re portrayed now with their persecution of Galileo: he didn’t actually have convincing evidence because the real theory took hundreds of years later to be accepted. Sorry, what? They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. That's absolutely crazy. "Evil" isn't a word I generally use, but if I had to apply it to something, it could reasonably be applied to this as well. Whether or not there was adequate evidence for his theories at the time is irrelevant: you don't imprison someone for an astronomy theory.
- karpierz 3y ago
  > They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. No, they put him under house arrest because he wrote a book about for the Pope is a moron for not agreeing with him, after the Pope explicitly asked him to write a factual account of the theories at the time. Tyrannical? Sure, like any monarchy. But not anti-science.
  - pelasaco 3y ago
    One of the biggest issues in our history, was to call the middle ages "Dark ages" and what came next "Renaissance". Thomas Aquinas, Boethius were such great writers, for instance, among many others[1], they contested their faith and believes all the time. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/
    - lliamander 3y ago
      Only the early middle ages were actually the "dark ages" (roughly 500AD to 1000AD, I think). They are called that only because of the relative lack of written material we have from that time.
      - pelasaco 3y ago
        Is that your interpretation, or you read it somewhere? I'm not saying that you are wrong, just that you find others interpretations - those that I was mentioning and that concerns me - everywhere. stuff like, "The Middle Ages are often said to be dark because of a supposed lack of scientific and cultural advancement. During this time, feudalism was the dominant political system" is pretty common, even Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
They burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for hypothesizing that the sun was a star. Anyone willing to do that over an astronomy disagreement is evil.
- lliamander 3y ago
  That's not why they burned him at the stake. If anything it was because of his hermeticism.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    There's a whole bunch of stuff that would have ruffled feathers: > While Bruno began as a Dominican friar, during his time in Geneva he embraced Calvinism.[5] Bruno was later tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
sharikone 3y ago
The church defended a scientific assertion based on theology and used their (absolute) political power to curb other worldviews. Even assuming that Galileo could not prove beyond reasonable doubt heliocentrism as a physical model, and that the Church accepted that the Ptolemaic model wasn't valid - the Church took an active part in asserting that "heliocentrism is heresy". They could have said it's not their own matter to pontificate about and they instead went after Galileo asserting that he overstepped his boundaries. It's very possible that Galileo (and the stories about him in later epochs) was not 100% in his assertions and his arguments. And it's important to look at the history from an objective point of view. However if you look at it as a battle for freedom to do experiment-based research, yes, the church was evil at that time.
- shjake 3y ago
  > the Church accepted that the Ptolemaic model wasn't valid - the Church took an active part in asserting that "heliocentrism is heresy". It was not that straightforward. The Tychonic model was already accepted and generally the church was quite tolerant (by premodern standards) towards scientific debate and the heresy decision was mainly an outcome of political/personal squables. The next pope, Urban VIII had no issues with allowing measured debate of heliocentrism. What landed Galileo in house arrest was him writing a book which directly mocked the people (at least everyone thought that it did). > However if you look at it as a battle for freedom to do experiment-based research, yes, the church was evil at that time. Which disregards the fact that it didn’t have much issue with other scientists doing that. In fact generally the Catholic church and its affiliated institutions were almost the only places where any scientific research was done at all for quite a while..
peterfirefly 3y ago
Sure, but we are still talking about an uppity sect of superstitious people (with great learning in their superstition but not much else). They had no business locking people up at all, no matter how much the Pope didn't like being called Simplicio.
oh_sigh 3y ago
Galileo didn't have evidence of his theory? Surely he had a little and didn't just pull it out of thin air. How much evidence was there for the Ptolemaic system?

bombcar 3y ago

The amount of "made major discovery, never published or told anyone, found in his files after death" that keeps happening also shows an entirely different outlook on science that we don't really have anymore, I feel. Sure, some may have been trying to build some grand unified theory and keeping everything close to their chest (and then died), but I suspect a majority were just doing this stuff because it was damn amazing and they really didn't feel the need to tell anyone about it in particular.

SiempreViernes 3y ago
Many probably didn’t want to risk being publicly shown they were wrong I suppose.
mrguyorama 3y ago
"Science" didn't really exist for another couple centuries. This was just wealthy dudes having a fun hobby. The same way people of means today have "charitable organizations" to play around with, wealthy people back then liked to dabble in "natural philosophy"
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
shjake 3y ago
A lot of those discoveries couldn’t be proven for many years after the deaths of their authors. So it was hard to tell how significant they were. A lot of the things that Galileo said couldn’t be proven either. In fact some were outright wrong and some could be directly disproven based what was know at the time (e.g. reconciling the size and distance of stars). So either they couldn’t tell anyone because nobody would believe them, they weren’t sure about how significant it was or maybe it was just irrelevant at the time (e.g. the Ancient Greek steam engine)

kerkeslager 3y ago

> Basically the church wasn’t as crazy or evil as they’re portrayed now with their persecution of Galileo: he didn’t actually have convincing evidence because the real theory took hundreds of years later to be accepted. Sorry, what? They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. That's absolutely crazy. "Evil" isn't a word I generally use, but if I had to apply it to something, it could reasonably be applied to this as well. Whether or not there was adequate evidence for his theories at the time is irrelevant: you don't imprison someone for an astronomy theory.

karpierz 3y ago
> They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. No, they put him under house arrest because he wrote a book about for the Pope is a moron for not agreeing with him, after the Pope explicitly asked him to write a factual account of the theories at the time. Tyrannical? Sure, like any monarchy. But not anti-science.
- pelasaco 3y ago
  One of the biggest issues in our history, was to call the middle ages "Dark ages" and what came next "Renaissance". Thomas Aquinas, Boethius were such great writers, for instance, among many others[1], they contested their faith and believes all the time. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/
  - lliamander 3y ago
    Only the early middle ages were actually the "dark ages" (roughly 500AD to 1000AD, I think). They are called that only because of the relative lack of written material we have from that time.
    - pelasaco 3y ago
      Is that your interpretation, or you read it somewhere? I'm not saying that you are wrong, just that you find others interpretations - those that I was mentioning and that concerns me - everywhere. stuff like, "The Middle Ages are often said to be dark because of a supposed lack of scientific and cultural advancement. During this time, feudalism was the dominant political system" is pretty common, even Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

They burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for hypothesizing that the sun was a star. Anyone willing to do that over an astronomy disagreement is evil.

lliamander 3y ago
That's not why they burned him at the stake. If anything it was because of his hermeticism.
- throw0101b 3y ago
  There's a whole bunch of stuff that would have ruffled feathers: > While Bruno began as a Dominican friar, during his time in Geneva he embraced Calvinism.[5] Bruno was later tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

sharikone 3y ago

The church defended a scientific assertion based on theology and used their (absolute) political power to curb other worldviews. Even assuming that Galileo could not prove beyond reasonable doubt heliocentrism as a physical model, and that the Church accepted that the Ptolemaic model wasn't valid - the Church took an active part in asserting that "heliocentrism is heresy". They could have said it's not their own matter to pontificate about and they instead went after Galileo asserting that he overstepped his boundaries. It's very possible that Galileo (and the stories about him in later epochs) was not 100% in his assertions and his arguments. And it's important to look at the history from an objective point of view. However if you look at it as a battle for freedom to do experiment-based research, yes, the church was evil at that time.

shjake 3y ago
> the Church accepted that the Ptolemaic model wasn't valid - the Church took an active part in asserting that "heliocentrism is heresy". It was not that straightforward. The Tychonic model was already accepted and generally the church was quite tolerant (by premodern standards) towards scientific debate and the heresy decision was mainly an outcome of political/personal squables. The next pope, Urban VIII had no issues with allowing measured debate of heliocentrism. What landed Galileo in house arrest was him writing a book which directly mocked the people (at least everyone thought that it did). > However if you look at it as a battle for freedom to do experiment-based research, yes, the church was evil at that time. Which disregards the fact that it didn’t have much issue with other scientists doing that. In fact generally the Catholic church and its affiliated institutions were almost the only places where any scientific research was done at all for quite a while..

peterfirefly 3y ago

Sure, but we are still talking about an uppity sect of superstitious people (with great learning in their superstition but not much else). They had no business locking people up at all, no matter how much the Pope didn't like being called Simplicio.

oh_sigh 3y ago

Galileo didn't have evidence of his theory? Surely he had a little and didn't just pull it out of thin air. How much evidence was there for the Ptolemaic system?