Sure, but you kind of rolled it out like a gotcha… I think we’re all aware that there were legal and social ramification for not carrying the orthodoxy of the day, because that’s true, even today (even if our orthodoxies might differ from what was in the past). So, yeah, much like capitalism shapes scientific endeavor’s today, a certain relationship to religious organizations shaped it then…
Again, which no one said…
Much like centers of power today, yeah, which are related to capitalism and its needs. It’s why when the state has been pulling back funding for university funding (at least in the states and western Europe), corporations are filling in the gaps. I know that much of the time of tenured profs in the sciences (and in the humanities, too) is spent working on funding grants, and more and more of those are coming from private funding, not from the NSF (National Science foundation, if you’re not familiar - humanities fields have a similar org run by the government the National Endowment for the humanties), but from private corporations. That will inevitably shape the nature of the scientific inquiry… It’s why you see computer science programs growing so rapidly lately…
Well, sure, but that’s always true. Especially during the post-Columbian period, when all this new information is flooding in that seemed to contradict or at least call into question knowledge already established. All these new people, animals, foods, etc… New centers of power emerged because of the New World and the wealth found there.
But I think maybe, we’re largely in agreement here? The relationship between science and religion isn’t necessarily at odds, but developed along a particular historical process that isn’t so black and white as the narrative often is told (science supplanting religion as the primary purveyor of knowledge about the truth of the world). And that power and politics play something of a central role in how all this played out. Honestly, the whole idea of faith and science being firmly in contradiction and science-based people all being atheists, and religious people rejecting science, just… doesn’t hold up under historical scrutiny. It’s a much messier and complicated picture and religion being “dead” is not really what’s going on with this…
None of that changes what I said though? Galileo was being censored before he wrote his Dialogue, not just afterward like you implied. The church was apparently less open to discussing ideas like that than it was in Copernicus’s time. Even so, the preface Osiander added stressing that De Revolutionibus was purely meant as a calculation system was dedicated to Pope Paul III, who died in 1549 before Galileo was even born…it might not have been required yet, but that makes me wonder if you are sure about the timeline of when that became a concern.
Weren’t they more Deistic, though? I think that the rise of Deism had a lot more to do with scientific progress not clashing with religion than closeted Atheism.
And then the US had the Great Reawakenings rejecting Deism in the 19th Century, but those movements didn’t really catch on as much in Europe, and then going from Deism to Atheism is a smaller step than going straight from Theism to Atheism.
In general at the time, even though the Church frowned upon people expounding on alternative explanations of the world, you could get away with quite a lot by adding precautionary caveats along the lines of “all of this is just idle speculation and should certainly not be misconstrued in any way as an attempt to contradict the teachings of the Church” to your possibly-contentious books. Osiander as the publisher probably didn’t want to get in hot water. Then again, copyright wasn’t really a thing yet at the time and it is reasonable to assume that not every copy of De revolutionibus in circulation at Catholic universities in the final decades of the 16th century actually had all of Osiander’s preface, especially as the content of the book seemed to gain a certain amount of traction in academic circles.
In any case, De revolutionibus only attracted the attention of the “Congregation of the Index”, the official body within the Catholic Church tasked with censoring suspect publications, during the Galileo affair in the 1610s (and not for want of trying on the part of Copernicus’s detractors since a few years earlier – the Congregation of the Index itself was only established by Pius V in 1571). It should also be mentioned that the “Index”, the list of publications considered inappropriate for Catholic readers which was promulgated by the Congregation of the Index, was not mandatory but a set of recommendations that Catholic countries could adopt as a whole or pick and choose from as far as enforcement was concerned. For example, De revolutionibus was disallowed in Rome but continued to be available in Spain, and remained on the curriculum of the university of Salamanca.
Yeah, that’s how most people tell it. When you only talk about how Copernicus’s ideas were reasonably well received, you make it sound like there was no hot water to be in. Plainly then the church must have already opposed such questioning enough to make publishers nervous, even if they could often get away with it. Between that and later Galileo already being censored before the Dialogue, I am going to say presenting all the trouble with heliocentrism as if it started with that is ahistorical scapegoating, thanks.
We’re not talking about all the trouble with heliocentrism. What we started with were Galileo’s problems with heliocentrism, and these really only began with the Dialogue. (What happened to him before was, by comparison, an inconvenience.)
Galileo published Sidereus Nuncius in 1610. This book detailed various observations he made with his new telescope, including Jupiter’s moons, and the problem with it was mainly that while former publications on heliocentrism were careful to present the idea as a mere hypothesis or at best an aid to calculation rather than an explanation of the real world, having actual evidence of heavenly bodies going around heavenly bodies other than the Earth was, on its face, heretical. (His publication on the phases of Venus in 1613, as well as his observations of sun spots, just added to that.) The Church didn’t like the implications of Galileo’s observations but the observations themselves were difficult to argue against (the official astronomers eventually had to concede that there was something to them). As usual, the solution as far as the Church was concerned was to admonish Galileo sternly not to talk or write about his ideas. This is presumably what you mean by “Galileo already being censored before the Dialogue”.
Even so, the cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, had been an admirer of Galileo’s from 1610 or so, and this friendly relationship persisted even after he ascended to the papacy. Urban VIII arranged for Galileo to be allowed to write about Copernicus’s theory again as long as he added the usual precautionary caveats. This arrangement seems to have worked fine until Galileo published the Dialogue in 1632, at which point the Pope was offended and Galileo’s goose was really cooked – the Roman Inquisition tried him in 1633 and put him under house arrest until he died in 1642.
At the same time, the facts were beginning to overtake the various objections that had been made against the heliocentric system. In 1627, Kepler had published his Rudolphine Tables, describing the movement of the planets based on his own theory of elliptic orbits as well as Tycho Brahe’s very exact measurements, and these were far more accurate than anything that existed before. Kepler died in 1630 and Galileo basically had no time for his ideas; even so, Kepler’s writings gained a lot of traction during the following decades, and when Newton published the Principia Mathematica in 1687, including a derivation of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion from his own theory of gravity, the geocentric model was done from a scientific POV whether the Church liked it or not.
I attended my church’s parochial school for 2nd and 3rd grades. This was in ‘60 and ‘61.
My 3rd grade teacher, the appropriately named Mrs. Smoke, would tell us this, but alternately would say they were placed there by Satan to deceive us. Most of the kids in class and IIRC all of the boys were huge dinosaur fans, so she wasted a lot of time trying to set us straight. Several kids brought it up with their parents, who knew that Lutheranism got along fine with dinosaurs, many millions of years of life on earth, and generally accepted evolutionary theory, while doing a little toe dance around the question of humanity’s origins. The authorities were alerted and she didn’t return the next year. Neither did I. That was probably not the only reason for her dismissal, as she was seen as a sub-par teacher overall, while we good Lutheran children were, of course, all above average.
That’s quite a phrase. To most of us being told not to talk on threat of much worse happening to you is already bad, even if it’s not by comparison with the much worse happening. Let me remind you of how you started:
This is very much phrased as if he wasn’t in any trouble before, versus what you’re now admitting:
The simple fact is in all these paragraphs, you have only mentioned positive things about the relationship of the church with heliocentrism and carefully omitted everything else right up to the Dialogue, save talking around ones I brought up. These omissions are much too selective for me to see them as anything other than pushing a narrative to excuse the church for its part in all this. That’s not history, that’s apologetics, and I have no interest in distorting things like that.
I was bolstering that part of your response to Milliefink. That is, that Lutherans don’t go that way, don’t deny the science. Sorry if out of context. I had only read the thread up to that point, didn’t realize it went on and on.
Are these Young Earth creationists not aware that the Coelocanth, dragonfiles, crocodiles and horseshoe crabs are evident in the fossil record? In other words, various “dinosaurs” have been discovered.
And freshwater eels, bichirs, snakeheads, some killifish…it’s really not that unheard of a thing at all. And yet. Lots of selective knowledge happening there, is my point. It’s never good when you assume a conclusion first and then try to make the world fit it.
I think we’re all aware that there were legal and social ramification for not carrying the orthodoxy of the day, because that’s true, even today (even if our orthodoxies might differ from what was in the past). So, yeah, much like capitalism shapes scientific endeavor’s today, a certain relationship to religious organizations shaped it then…
