The Latest on Galileo

Last year saw two new biographies about Galileo by the heavy-hitting professors David Wooton and John Heilbron. I briefly mentioned them in an article I did for Standpoint magazine and the Times Literary Supplement has a more in-depth review (although the reviewer seems ignorant of early modern cosmology with his comments about how Galileo downgraded rather than upgraded the position of the earth).

Heilbron’s book, Galileo, is the more academic and traditional. He tends to underplay Galileo’s scientific achievements while noting that he had many other skills. The style is also rather stilted (Heilbron doesn’t seem to write easy books). He also indulges in post-modern nostrums such as imagined conversations between Galileo and his alter ego. I fear specialists will have to read this but others may find it heavy-going.

I found Wootton’s Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, both more enjoyable and more interesting. Wootton’s last book Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates, is a masterpiece and although his Galileo never quite reaches those heights, there is plenty of food for thought. Wootton is also an excellent writer who makes reading his revisionism a pleasure.

Most controversially, Wootton thinks Galileo was not a Christian, despite his protestations of loyalty to the Catholic Church. The evidence for this is rather thin and depends partly on a conspiracy theory. Wootton says that those of Galileo’s papers that incriminated him as a heretic were destroyed by his biographers keen to protect his name.

More interestingly, Wootton sides with Arthur Koestler in proclaiming Galileo the author of his own downfall (despite giving Koestler and indeed Feyerabend a kicking earlier in the book). As Wootton notes in his concluding chapter:

Galileo overstated overstated his own achievements in the Dialogue and thus provoked the Church into condemning him. This view, which presents Galileo as an overreacher, seems to me essentially correct… The clash, when it came, was not between an impersonal institution, the universal Church, on one hand and a dedicated scientist on the other. Rather it was a falling out between friends, a just punishment, a betrayal. Galileo was indeed a heretic, but worse (for heresy was much more common than historians have realised), he was disloyal and ungrateful. In the world of Counter Reformation Italy, heresy often went unpunished; disloyalty and ingratitude, on the other hand, were never tolerated.

His characterisation of the liberal Catholic school of Galileo studies (of which I am surely a member) is also illuminating. He says that we think Galileo was a better theologian than the Inquisition (because he correctly showed in his Letter to Grand Duchess Christina that scientific questions do not have to impinge on the faith). But we also think that the inquisition was made up of better scientists than Galileo (because they could see that Galileo had no proof that the earth moved when he thought that he did). While this is put rather bluntly, I must plead guilty as charged. And not even Wootton’s entertaining book has convinced me otherwise.

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Who Refused to Look through Galileo's Telescope?

According to popular legend, when Galileo presented his telescope to senior cardinals/Jesuits/Aristotelian philosophers/the Inquisition (delete as applicable) they refused to even look through it. This tale has become a standard trope for when we want to attack anyone who won't accept 'obvious' evidence. As the last chapter of my book will be on Galileo, I thought I should try to nail down the primary sources for the legend. So I asked the internet's resident Galileo expert, Paul Newall of the Galilean Library to chase them down for me. His reply was extremely interesting.

There are three peices of evidence that have gone into the construction of the legend, as far as we can tell. The first concerns Cesare Cremonini, a good friend of Galileo and a Professor of Aristotelian Philosophy at the University of Padua. Quoted in a letter from a mutual friend to Galileo, Cremonini says of the telescope "I do not wish to approve of claims about which I do not have any knowledge, and about things which I have not seen .. and then to observe through those glasses gives me a headache. Enough! I do not want to hear anything more about this." It's clear that Cremonini did look through the telescope long enough to give himself a headache but could not see what Galileo could. Frankly, it was more than Cremonini's job was worth to endorse Galileo because it would have refuted Aristotle.

The second case is Guilio Libri, Professor of Aristotelian Philosophy at Pisa and no friend of Galileo's. He died very shortly after the telescopic discoveries were made public. Galileo was viciously biting when he heard the news, writing to a friend to ask if Libri, "never having wanted to see [the moons of Jupiter] on Earth, perhaps he'll see them on the way to heaven?" Did Libri refuse to look through the telescope or look and not see the moons (which was not easy at all, especially if you were old and without the keenest of eyesight)?

Finally, the senior Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius said of the moons of Jupiter "One would first have to built a spyglass that creates them and only then would it show them." However, the fault was with the Jesuits' first effort to built a telescope. Once they had built themselves a better one, Clavius confirmed that he could see the moons.

So who refused to look through Galileo's telescope? According to the historical record, no one did for certain. The argument was over what they could see once they once they did look.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

Science and Religion – The Movie

Sam Harris's new 'Reason Project' has announced a competition for films that 'promote critical thinking' and 'erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry'. Accordingly, and inspired by the release of Agora, I have written a script for a new film, 'Science and Religion' the movie. Like most Hollywood historical dramas, this is based entirely on fact and no liberties have been taken.

Science and Religion - The Movie

Opening scene – Bertrand Russell is sitting in his study writing his History of Western Philosophy, as the camera pans into the room he looks up expectantly and begins to speak.

Bertrand Russell – The tale I am about to relate is the story of science and reason, an epic of discovery, ingenuity and man’s attempts to probe the secrets of the world around him. It is also a tale of barbarism, arrogance, stupidity and superstition and the way these dark forces have set themselves against the fragile progress of enlightenment. Our account begins in the Greek era, a golden age of philosophy and scientific endeavour’.

The scene dissolves into an amphitheatre in Athens in the fourth century BC. All around are men in togas exchanging philosophical ideas. In one corner a man is demonstrating the principles of Geometry. In another Eratosthenesis is pointing to a picture of the earth drawn in the sand and is demonstrating it’s size. Plato enters the scene and greets Aristotle.

Plato – ‘My pupil, what new and exciting activities of rational enquiry have you been engaged in these past few days?’

Aristotle – ‘Ah, my old teacher, I have been busy laying out an approach for the investigation of all natural phenomena and penned a treatise on virtue and its relationship to well being and happiness.

Plato – ‘Impressive!. With the application of mathematics and deliberate empirical research we will soon unlock the very secrets of the universe. What a glorious future awaits us’.

A Montage shows the Great Library of Alexandria with its 800,000 scrolls. Men and women in Togas walk around in the sunlight reading from papyri and exchanging rational ideas with one another.

Bertrand Russell (voiceover) – And yet, the progress of Hellenic civilisation would prove to be fragile. The minds of the populace would soon be seized by a new and pernicious superstition.

The dark outline of a cross falls across the scene and the music for the Imperial March from Star Wars begins. Jesus is showing leaping manically around in front of a crowd of onlookers in Judea and telling them they are going to hell if they don’t worship him. He is then dragged off kicking and screaming by the Roman authorities. The scene cuts to the apostles who are seen making up the gospels and inserting lurid details into the text. Children are then seen being brainwashed by their parents and forced to memorise the New Testament. Hooded figures stream out of churches and begin to burn temples and kill Pagans.

The scene cuts to the interior of the Great Library of Alexandria. Hypatia is sitting with a group of her pupils and teaching them about ancient learning. She is a slim voluptuous woman in her early twenties and wears a loose fitting toga. She seems oblivious to the flames and the shouting coming from the outside.

Hypatia - ..and so, having built on and significantly improved the treatise of Aristarchus I have proved that the earth and the rest of the planets are in orbit around the sun

Her students clap politely

Suddenly the door bursts in and faith-crazed Christians rush into the library. They begin setting light to scrolls and destroying everything they find. Any philosopher unlucky enough to get in the way is stabbed to death. One hooded Christian comes forward, grabs a pile of papyri from next to Hypatia and beings to tear them to pieces.

Hypatia – ‘Noooo, you cannot destroy these scrolls, on this one is written the works of Archimedes

Crazed Christian – Did you hear that?, that sounded like science and reason to me. Let’s kill her lads!.’

The mob attacks Hypatia and deals a death blow. As this happens the scene suddenly turns black.

Bertrand Russell – With Hypatia’s death, Christianity sapped the intellect of the people and all Pagan learning vanished for a thousand years. This period became known by historians as ‘The Dark Ages’. Only a few candles of reason burned in a world lit by the fire of superstition.

The Dark Ages – The scene is a field outside a monastery. Groups of filthy peasants are shown wearing hoods and slapping themselves in the face with bibles. A hairy man sits in the foreground scratching himself and attempting to copulate with a chicken. To the right, a group of plague infested men and women are busily worshipping the dismembered toe of a saint. This is an age of darkness.

In the monastery two monks are sitting next to each other. One, James of Hannam is shown laboriously copying out the Gospel of Mark. The other, Roger Bacon, is busily reading an ancient text.

Brother James – What is that you are reading Brother Bacon?. That does not look like any book of the bible I am familiar with.

Roger Bacon – Nay Brother James, this is ancient learning, the works of Aristotle.

Brother James – Lord in heaven, what kind of heresy is this!. Did not the great Tertullian say that Jerusalem had nothing to learn from Athens, did not Augustine himself urge caution when dealing with the writings of Pagan Infidels. Why, the Bishop of Paris himself warns that reason cannot be used, all we need to know is contained in the Holy Bible

Roger Bacon – Ah but Brother James, perhaps they were too hasty. Look what wondrous things are contained within this text. Here, look it says that the world is a sphere.

Brother James – A sphere!, heresy!. Does it not say in the Bible that the world is flat. Did not the great Cosmas Indicopleustes demonstrate this without doubt through reference to scripture and did not his treatise win much favour within the church.

Roger Bacon – But I

Brother James – Silence heretic. Brothers, cast him into the dankest cell.

The scene returns to Bertrand Russell’s study.

Bertrand Russell - ‘And yet science and reason could not be held back forever, it lived on it the hearts of those men who were not afraid to challenge the revealed wisdom of their time. One of them, the great Copernicus was about to challenge scripture and shake society to its very foundations.

Dissolve to Copernicus’s observatory. Copernicus is shown making observations of the heavens. As he works on his treatise ‘De Revolutionibus’ he looks over at his opened bible. For a while he seems torn, then he closes the bible abruptly and returns to work on his treatise.

Copernicus (voiceover) - I knew that the treatise I had prepared would destroy the authority of the bible forever and so I asked my assistants to postpone publication until my death. Had I not done so the church would have had me burned for my impudence, and yet I could not let the truth die with me.

Giordiano Bruno is then shown teaching heliocentrism and claiming that there are other planets with life on them. Hearing this a group of inquisitors grab him and burn him in the public square. Galileo watches on in disgust and returns to his house. To his horror a group of the Inquisition are there waiting for him.

Inquisitor – Going somewhere Galileo?. The Pope wants a word with you about your recent dialogue concerning the two world systems.

Galileo – I will present myself to the holy father, I feel sure he will see the light of reason in this matter.

Galileo is led into the chamber of the inquisition. A series of demonic looking inquisitors sit behind a bench. On the table in front of them are a series of grisly looking torture devices including thumbscrews and rusty nails. An Iron Maiden is located in the corner of the room which creaks open as Galileo enters.

Galileo – What is this?, I come to debate matters of science with the Pope

Head Inquisitor – Silence heretic, there will be no such debating here. You will must bow before the authority of scripture or be tortured to death for your impudence.

For a while Galileo puts up a fight and is thrown in jail, but after a while he recants.

Galileo - ‘I submit to your will, the earth is located at the centre of the universe and does not move’

The inquisitors look pleased with themselves and leave

Galileo – (whispered) ‘And yet it still moves!’

Cue heroic music and scenes of the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. The Philisophes are shown debating in coffee houses and Hume is shown writing his ‘dialogues concerning natural religion’. Columbus is shown completely anachronistically, proving that the earth is round to the horror of the Church.

Bertrand Russell – And with those words the enlightenment began, the power of religious dogma would be broken and science and reason were finally allowed to flourish. There was but one final act remaining.

The scene shifts to Darwin’s study. Darwin is sketching in a book, he draws a monkey and a human being and then a line between them with a note saying ‘I think’.

Charles Darwin (Voiceover) - ‘My poor wife. I knew my discoveries had shattered Paley’s design argument and removed all rational basis for belief in God. I decided to delay publication but finally I could contain myself no longer

Cue scenes of Church of England minsters denouncing Darwin from pulpits. The wife of an aristocrat is shown saying:

‘Descended from apes!. My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it may not become widely known.’

The scene shifts to Oxford university Museum and the Wilberforce Huxley debate

Wilberforce – Mr Huxley, may I enquire whether is through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim your descent from a monkey.

Huxley, slowly rises to his feet

Huxley – ‘Sir, I would rather be related to an ape than a bishop!’

For a while, there is a stunned silence, suddenly the room breaks out into laugher. Mayhem ensures. Robert Fitzroy rises in a frenzy shouting "The book! The book!" while holding a bible aloft. Women faint around him. Huxley is carried out in triumph and Wilberforce is defeated.

Bertrand Russell – And so Darwinism had triumphed. All basis for belief in God had been vanquished, and yet the virus of religion remains with us today. Reason and science must continue to thwart the efforts of the faithful to plunge us back into ignorance. To save the world will requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.’

The end

Historical Consultants

A.C Grayling

Andrew Dickson White (deceased)

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The Galileo Affair - (3) The Death-Bed Publication

The heliocentric theory had a profound and negative impact on the Church. It was condemned by the Church, but Copernicus was careful during his life not to incur its wrath, unlike Galileo after him. For fear of censure, he delayed publication of his findings.

Great-thinkers article on Copernicus

Yeah, the objections to heliocentrism were merely academic, and not at all likely to get Copernicus into any trouble (unless you count the derisive laughs of academics as trouble). That Copernicus guy... what a card. He was so afraid of being laughed at that he chose to publish his work only at the very end of his life. Right?

Sarcastic comment by Doctor Logic

It has become widely believed that Copernicus delayed publication of 'On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies' until he was near death because he feared the inevitable reprisal from Rome. This conjures a romantic image of the great man on his deathbed, thumbing through the final published copy of his masterpiece before lying back and closing his eyes for the final time, knowing that the dangerous idea contained within it would cause outrage amongst the establishment. Even he could not have suspected that his treatise would begin the struggle between rationality and superstition and awaken Western Civilisation from its slumbers. Or so the legend goes.

Unfortunately the task of the modern historian is to act as the great killjoy, slicing through the mythology and uncovering the more mundane truth; and, the cynic might say, to construct a few hoary myths of his own. Andrew Dickson White’s portrayal of Copernicus in ‘A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom’ was as a man living in fear for his life. When he eventually did publish his thesis, it was in Nuremberg with a grovelling preface inserted by the Lutheran clergyman Andreas Osiander. Thus, Dickson White wrote, ‘the greatest and most ennobling, perhaps, of scientific truths’ was ‘forced, in coming before the world, to sneak and crawl’. Copernicus’s death placed him ‘beyond the reach of the conscientious men who would have blotted his reputation and perhaps destroyed his life’. This however, is to project a later development onto a past event and as Jerome J. Langford points out in ‘Galileo, Science, and the Church’ A.D White’s assertion is ‘considered false by most serious scholars today’. As the historians of science David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers wrote, in a jointly authored article:

White's picture of unremitting religious hostility to heliocentrism is no longer defensible-if, indeed, it ever was. If Copernicus had any genuine fear of publication, it was the reaction of scientists, not clerics, that worried him. Other churchmen before him- Nicole Oresme (a bishop) in the fourteenth century and Nicholas of Cusa (a cardinal) in the fifteenth-had freely discussed the possible motion of the earth, and there was no reason to suppose that the reappearance of this idea in the sixteenth century would cause a religious stir. Indeed, various churchmen, including a bishop and a cardinal, urged Copernicus to publish his book, which appeared with a dedication to Pope Paul III. Had Copernicus lived beyond its publication in 1543, it is highly improbable that he would have felt any hostility or suffered any persecution. The church simply had more important things to worry about than a new astronomical or cosmological system. Although a few critics noticed and opposed the Copernican system, organized Catholic opposition did not appear until the seventeenth century.

In time Copernicanism would be considered controversial and heretical for reasons we will look at in a future instalment, but within the lifetime of the great astronomer the atmosphere was greatly different. At the time of his death in 1543 the Catholic Church was in the early stages of the Reformation and had not yet adopted the fortress mentality it would later fall into. Not until 1616 and the actions of Galileo was Copernicus’s book to be suspended until corrected and only after the Galileo affair ended in 1633 would Copernicianism be actually declared heretical.

In fact, as the record shows, high officials in the Catholic Church - such as the Bishop of Culm, Tiedemann Giese - actively encouraged Copernicus to develop his model for both intellectual and practical reasons. A good one being that accurate astronomical models were needed in order to be able to predict the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (Easter). In 1530 Copernicus circulated an outline of his astronomy amongst friends called ‘Commentariolus’. This attracted widespread attention and in 1533 Pope Clement VII requested Johann Widmanstadt to deliver a public lecture on the Copernican theory in the Vatican gardens. The Pope having been favourably impressed (he presented Widmanstadt with a rare Greek manuscript) Nicholas Cardinal Schoenburg wrote to Copernicus urging him to publish the complete details. The letter, which was included in De Revolutionibus reads:

Some years ago word reached me concerning your proficiency, of which everybody constantly spoke. At that time I began to have a very high regard for you, and also to congratulate our contemporaries among whom you enjoyed such great prestige. For I had learned that you had not merely mastered the discoveries of the ancient astronomers uncommonly well but had also formulated a new cosmology. In it you maintain that the earth moves; that the sun occupies the lowest, and thus the central, place in the universe; that the eighth heaven remain perpetually motionless and fixed; and that, together with the elements included in its sphere, the moon, situated between the heavens of Mars and Venus, revolves around the sun in the period of a year. I have also learned that you have written an exposition of this whole system of astronomy, and have computed the planetary motions and set them down in tables, to the greatest admiration of all. Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject. Moreover, I have instructed Theodoric of Reden to have everything copied in your quarters at my expense and dispatched to me. If you gratify my desire in this matter, you will see that you are dealing with a man who is zealous for your reputation and eager to do justice to so fine a talent. Farewell.

Rome, 1 November 1536

Having received this letter however, Copernicus still relented to publish. Later on he gave his reasons for his reticence as:

‘the scorn which I had reason to fear on account of the novelty and unconventionality of my opinion, almost induced me to abandon completely the work which I had undertaken’

Without any direct evidence of the earth’s motion, Copernicus was going to find it very hard to convince the sceptics. The academic establishment of the time was conservative and controlled by devoted Aristotelians who were interested in preserving the status quo. As Marie Boas Hall points out in The Scientific Renaissance:

'Copernicus knew that his theory was both novel and strange. He feared lest it should be regarded as absurd as well and he himself, as he put it “hissed off the stage”...Fear of ridicule is not a very noble motive for withholding publication, perhaps, but it can be a real one : Galileo felt something of this half a century later and there seems no reason not to believe Copernicus when he says it influenced him strongly’

Copernicus had been more than willing to circulate his theory in manuscript form. This was his society’s equivalent of submitting a paper to technical specialists. Formal publication however, would expose his ideas to criticism by everyone. As Boas explains:

‘Actual publication of the De Revolutionibus exposed the Copernican system, as its author knew would happen, to comment and criticism by all and sundry – humanists, scholastics, astrologers, mathematicians, crackpots, ecclesiastics – for any educated man in the sixteenth century fancied himself competent to pass judgement on astronomical theories...as a public figure of some not he was vulnerable to public disdain from university professors and his superiors in the church, quite capable of judging astronomical theory. But as he remarked disarmingly in his dedication, the Pope, by his ‘influence and judgement can readily hold the slanderers from biting’

In the event however, the news of Copernicus’s work spread and in 1539 he was visited by a young German professor called Georg Rheticus. Rheticus would become an enthusiastic supporter of the astronomer, and produced a well written summery of his work called ‘First Report’. This having produced interest, Rheticus obtained a manuscript of ‘De Revolutionibus’ and set off in 1541 to obtain its publication. At Leipzig, he secured a professorship and, having become embroiled in a scandal involving a homosexual affair with one of his students, he gave the manuscript to Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran theologian to organise the printing.

Osiander was familiar with Copernicus’s work and had written to him suggesting that to ‘mollify the peripatetics and theologians whose opposition you fear’ he should include some words to suggest the heliocentric theory was a hypothesis. Instead, a suitable preface would placate the scholarly community by empahsising that Copernicus's theory was based on a series of assumptions and hence cannot claim ultimate truth. The aim of this was as Osiander put it:

'In that way, the potential opponents will be lured away from massive criticism to more intensive research; and through newly gained respect and a lack of counter arguments be moved to fairness and ultimately to acceptance...Aristotelians and theologians will be easily placated if they hear that the same motion as perceived can be explained by means of different hypothesis'

Copernicus was unhappy with this since it had always been his aim to show the true structure of the planetary system rather than some mathematical fiction. Kepler, who saw Copenicus's reply to Osiander said that the astronomer had had no intention of complying with his idea and had decided to maintain his own opinion 'even though the science should be damaged'.

In the event however Osiander did publish a unsigned preface suggesting the heliocentric theory was a hypothesis for computation. Rheticus was furious at this and tried to publish a corrected version without success. Bishop Giese was also outraged, describing the preface as a 'fraud' and writing to Rheticus with the aim of having the preface denounced to the Senate of Nuremberg.

In the event however, Osiander's motives were far from malicious. Osiander was following the custom of the Middle ages which was to propound new theories as hypotheses whose truth remained to be tested in the public forum; this reflected a tradition of instrumentalism that had been applied to astronomy since the time of Ptolemy. He was also making an honest attempt to disarm the defenders of the Aristotelian position and at most he was guilty of an error of judgement. In the event, the label 'hypothesis' applied to the heliocentric theory did open a way for the wide dissemination of its main principles and prepared the ground for the acceptance of the new cosmology.

The printing was completed in 1543 shortly before Copernicus’s death . Of the 4 to 500 copies which were printed, that of Rheticus survives. On the flyleaf is a poem in Greek which reads:

Stranger : What is this book?
Philosopher : A new one, with all kinds of good things in it.
Stranger : Oh Zeus!, how great a wonder do I see! The earth whirls everywhere in aethereal space
Philosopher : But do not merely wonder, nor condemn such a good thing As the ignorant do before they understand But examine and ponder all these things

By the time Galileo turned to astronomy in a serious way, the political situation had changed and the ignorant would have their day.


The Galileo Affair - (2) The Cosmic Promotion
The Galileo Affair - (1) The Problem with Heliocentrism

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Jesus and Galileo

I just re-acquainted myself with a quote from the Jesus Seminar's book The Five Gospels. In order to defend their rejection of the supernatural, they appeal to the conflict myth. It reminds me of Rudolf Bultmann's famous quote, "It is impossible to use electrical light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles." The Jesus Seminar makes the same point by appealing specifically to geocentrism and Galileo.

The contemporary religious controversy, epitomized in the Scopes trial and the continuing clamor for creationism as a viable alternative to the theory of evolution, turns on whether the worldview reflected in the Bible can be carried forward into this scientific age and retained as an article of faith. Jesus figures prominently in this debate. The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens.

So their understanding of the New Testament presupposes a discarded and demonstrably false theory of the history of science. Someone should tell them to stop focusing so much on Galileo's telescope and look through Hubble's telescope. If they did, they might discover that the universe is expanding outward after having sprung into being, which in turn suggests that something "outside" the universe brought it into existence. That wouldn't fit the narrative of a "secular heavens" though.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Imagine you are a well educated chap in 1490. What do you know about the universe? You certainly know the earth is a sphere but also that it is stationary and the centre of the universe. You probably don't realise that you don't know about America and all your authorities on geography give no indication that it exists. If you were really up to date and had ready Ptolemy, whose Geographia had only recently been translated from Greek to Latin, you might have seen maps of the world than do not even allow room for another continent between Europe and far East. America also caused theological worries as the status of the natives vis a vis original sin and salvation were rather ambiguous. And of course, the bible also has no idea at all that this other continent is going to exist.

Trouble was that once America had been discovered, there was no denying it. Although there was initially some doubt as to whether Columbus had reached the East Indies as he was hoping, we find no trace of theological efforts to explain away this enormous problem and no efforts to censor the discoveries for fear of upsetting people. It seems that once something was established with good evidence, neither the Church or anyone else was going to gainsay it.

Fast forward to the 1630s and Galileo is told to deny that the earth moves. Now, the theological problems with a moving earth are like nothing compared to the problems caused by America, but this time there is a huge row. Why is the Church kicking up a fuss when it let the more serious difficulty of America pass it by? The reason, it seems to me, is simply that for Galileo the evidence was not good enough and he was making claims that appeared unjustified. The Church was not going to allow that to happen. As the reaction to the discovery of the New World shows, the Church was quite able to adapt to new scientific knowledge. What it could not do was allow Galileo to state terms when the facts had yet to be established.

God's Philosophers - A Review

You have put a builder [Archimedes] before Aristotle who was no less knowledgable in these arts!...After Archimedes, you have put Euclid as if the light after the lantern!'

Julius Caeser Scalinger

In the 16th century, the humanist writer Julius Caesar Scaliger published what would later be described as ‘the most vitriolic book review in the annals of literature’, a tirade against Jerome Cardan’s ‘On Subtlety’. It was over 900 pages in total - twice the length of the book it was reviewing - and it attacked Cardan vehemently for almost every aspect of the book. When Scaliger received no reply from Cardin he managed to convince himself that his efforts had caused his literary opponent to die of shame and decided to write him a glowing epitaph. According to the obituary, the late Cardan had been ‘a consummate master of the humane letter’, ‘a great man indeed’ gushed Scalinger. One can only imagine his horror when he found out Cardan was still alive and well and doubtless wondering why his opponant had so quickly changed his tune. This is just one of many entertaining anecdotes in the pages of James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers which I chuckled over as I read through it. Hence I will not be giving the author the Scaliger treatment, not least because it’s also one of the best narrative histories I have read in a long time.

God’s Philosophers begins with the famous quote by Issac Newton, that his achievements had only been possible because he was ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ (in keeping with the tone of the book, we learn that it was actually Bernard of Chartres who said this first in the 12th century). In contrast the Humanists of the ‘Renaissance’ era felt they were squatting on the shoulders of intellectual midgets; a menagerie of long winded medieval ‘logic choppers’ and ‘wordmongers’ who wrote in ‘barbaric’ Latin and had failed to properly understand the writings of the ancients. This scorn of their forebears began the longstanding myth that the Medieval period constituted an age of darkness and ignorance, a narrative which was adopted wholeheartedly in Enlightenment France and disseminated in the late 19th Century by the infamous Andrew Dickson White. This impression of the Middle Ages remains alive and well today despite having been almost overwhelmingly discredited in the academic community. For example, leading historian of science Edward Grant laments that ‘the medieval period in Western Europe has been much underestimated and maligned, almost as if fate had chosen it as history’s scapegoat’. Another historian, David Lindberg bemoans the fact that ‘the ignorance and degradation of the Middle Ages has become a kind of article of faith among the general public, achieving the status of invulnerability merely by virtue of endless repetition’. Hannam’s objective has been to reverse this trend by bringing the fruits of modern scholarship in the history of science to a wider audience and demonstrating that the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages contributed directly to the achievements of modern science.

In the popular imagination, the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 500 to the arrival of the millennium in the year 1000 is a superb candidate for a Dark Age. Yet Hannam shows – by reference to the changes which took place in his home village of Otham - that significant technological progress took place. Much of the classical heritage of Greece and Rome was cut off from Western Europe, but from the ruin of the Empire there gradually arose a society sustained by improved agricultural techniques and powered by advances in machinery; the horse collar, three field crop rotation and the widespread use of water and tidal mills would ensure that Europe could support more people than ever before.

As intellectual culture was rekindled in the West on the wave of a population explosion and increased stability, a great translation movement emerged which would bring the fruits of Classical learning to Europe through the works of Arab natural philosophers. Before this Medieval intellectuals, such as William of Conches, Adelard of Bath and ‘the mathematical Pope’, Gerbert of Aurilliac, had to make do on scraps from the ill fated Boethius and a few other authors. As the translated texts arrived from Spain and the Mediterranean, they were greedily absorbed into the medieval university; a type of legally autonomous corporation which could foster higher learning and carve out privileges from both secular rulers and the Church. The volatile and pugnacious Peter Abelard had championed logic in his teaching; and, due to a series of calamities and quarrels, he ended up being nocturnally castrated, sentenced to perpetual silence and confined to a monastery. Upon his death, his ideas quickly dominated Christian scholarship. Natural philosophy would also gain an exalted status in the curriculum as the ‘handmaiden’ of theology; a guide to better preaching and a tool to combat the growing problem of heresy.

Yet the philosophy of the ancients was not straightforwardly compatible with the teachings of Christianity. Hannam is strong at outlining these issues and the subsequent efforts of Albert the Great and the more famous Thomas Aquinas to assimilate the new learning into a suitable framework. This came with the publication of the Summa Theologiae which was ‘such a successful amalgamation of Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine that some Catholics have since failed to distinguish between the two’. Yet it was the conservative backlash represented by the condemnations of 1277 which would delineate the boundaries between natural philosophy and theology and explore non Aristotelian physical and cosmological alternatives.

By this time, an international intelligentsia of scholars had emerged using the common language of Latin. They were able to enjoy considerable freedom under the cultural unity and political fragmentation of the period. This section of God’s Philosophers was perhaps the most enlightening, not least because so many of these figures remain undeservedly unknown or misunderstood. A chapter is devoted to demonstrating the syllabus of the medieval university through the life of Richard of Wallingford, a figure who perfected the mechanical clock and ‘left a mechanical legacy without equal’. Peter the Pilgrim became the first to realise that magnets have polarity (a critical insight for medieval navigation). Following in the footsteps of Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger Bacon promulgated a strong rhetoric of experiment and provided a powerful synthesis of optical theory. However, as Hannam shows, he has been mis-portrayed as a modern thinker. The principle motivation for his promotion of the sciences appears to have been his belief that the apocalypse was imminent and that the Jews and Arabs would have to be quickly converted to the true faith before the anti-Christ and his minions showed up (one can compare this to the present day belief of Richard Dawkins that the natural sciences must be used to convert everyone to atheism before the Christian fundamentalists and the Islamists bring on the apocalypse).

In the Fourteenth Century, a series of remarkable individuals emerged who would propel Medieval natural philosophy beyond the achievements of the ancients, combining mathematics and physics in ways that had not been achieved before. The setting for these scholars were the quadrangles of Merton College. Thomas Bradwardine, later Archbishop of Canterbury, tried to establish a formula to properly describe Aristotle’s laws of motion with the first use of a logarithm. Ultimately Aristotle’s laws of motion were completely wrong, but Bradwardine had made an important step forward. Both he and the talented mathematician Richard Swineshead adopted thought experiments and tried to think through the mathematics. William Heytesbury is credited with the first use of the mean speed theorem (though neither he nor his contemporaries had any idea of its immense significance).

Yet it would be Paris, not Oxford which would see ‘the apogee of Medieval Science’ as the ideas of the Merton calculators crossed the channel. It was the rector of the University of Paris, John Buridan, who rejected Aristotelian ideas concerning violent motion. In its place he formulated the concept of impetus and used it to describe how the planets keep moving in their orbits. He also came close to the modern principle of inertia. Perhaps inspired by Bradwardine, Buridan also compared the universe to a giant clock or ‘world machine’ which the creator had wound up, a forerunner of the later mechanical philosophy. One of the issues considered by Buridan was the possible rotation of the earth. This was an idea taken further by his pupil, the brilliant Nicole Oresme who refuted most of the objections to a moving earth, but in the end went with the common sense approach contained in Aristotle and the Bible. His other major achievement was to prove the mean speed theorem in graphical form. This work would spread throughout Europe before the Black Death swept in and decimated the intellectual culture of Europe.

The fifteenth century saw Europe begin to regain it’s poise and the arrival of Nicholas of Cusa, a Cardinal who saw clearly the need for effective measurement in natural philosophy and whose cosmological speculations seem remarkably pertinent. It also saw the emergence of the humanist movement and their efforts to reintroduce ancient Greek into Europe; although as Hannam shows, they were also ‘incorrigible reactionaries’ seeking to ‘recapture an imaginary past’ who destroyed vast numbers of manuscripts and discarded many of the advances made in the Medieval period. Luckily the onset of printing ensured that the natural philosophy would reach the next generation of scholars, even as it was being systematically eliminated from the universities.

God’s Philosophers concludes with a broader sweep through the 16th century to show how Copernicus, Galileo and others used the achievements of the Middle Ages in their work. The term Renaissance after all, was coined partly to contrast the ‘rebirth’ of culture with medieval ‘stagnation’; although as Hannam points out, the Renaissance was ‘as much an age of faith as the Middle Ages and, if anything, more superstitious and violent’. Magical thinking became widespread and astrology and alchemy loomed large in the thought of figures like Jerome Cardan, John Dee and Paracelsus, or to give his full name, Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. In the case of Cardan, this led to an ill-advised attempt to draw up a horoscope of Christ. Their efforts led to advances in algeba, astronomy and new ideas of medicine which challenged the Galenic tradition. Human dissection emerged in the Medieval period (Hannam shows the Church never banned it, in stark contrast to the taboos in effect in much of classical antiquity). Vesalius attempted to perfect the work of Galen with his ‘On the Fabric of the Human Body’ but laid the groundwork for his overthrow. It would be William Harvey who would demonstrate the circulation of the blood and seriously weaken the Galenic edifice. The reader of God’s philosophers may well, as I did, breathe a sigh of relief that things in medicine have moved on. Medical instruction manuals of the period advice doctors to always say that the patient is sick, since if he recovers ‘you will be praised more for your skill’ and if he dies ‘his friends will testify that you had given him up’ (although with NHS cut backs on the way, perhaps this might be revived).

Elsewhere the towering figures of Ptolemy and Aristotle were being severely questioned. Both Peurbach and Regiomontanus had realised that Ptolomy’s astronomical system, with its complex geometry and clumsy equant had serious problems, yet it gave undeniably precise predictions. It would be the Polish clergyman Nicholas Copernicus who would defy expert opinion and propose a heliocentric universe. His motivation for placing the sun at the centre of the universe may have sprung from occult theories about the sun, but his arguments for the rotation of the earth come straight from John Buridan and find their echoes in Nicholas of Cusa. Unsurprisingly, Copernicus was a product of the intellectual culture of the time, although he has so often been portrayed as a lone genius defying all that had gone before.

Another figure often depicted as marking a break from the past is Galileo Galilei, yet as Hannam points out ‘Discourses on the New Sciences’ represents ‘the culmination of four centuries of work by medieval mathematicians and natural philosophers’. In his discussion of free fall, Galileo seems to be familiar with the work of the Merton Calculators and reproduces the conclusions of Oresme and William of Heytesbury. His discussion of Projectile Motion builds on the conclusions of Buridan, Tartaglia and Cardan. His observations on falling objects repeat those made a thousand years earlier by the Byzantine scholar John Philoponus and more recently by Simon Stevin. Galileo’s triumph was to produce an erudite synthesis of what had gone before and provide powerful experimental demonstrations. Similarly his contemporary Johannes Kepler was able to build upon the European Medieval tradition and solve two of the greatest problems of the Middle Ages, the movement of the planets and the explanation of vision.

Modern science emerged as the triumph of three civilizations; Greek, Arab and Latin Christian, yet the last of these is so often left out of the narrative. God’s Philosophers restores the credit the medieval period deserves and has forced me to revise my belief that there was something which could justly be called a ‘scientific revolution’ in the Early Modern period. Hannam’s book persuasively argues for continuities and shows how the achievements of Keplar, Copernicus, Galileo and others were deeply rooted in the intellectual culture which had preceded them. The Middle Ages displayed none of the ‘general decay and degeneracy’ and ‘complete decadence of philosophy and the sciences' which Condorcet and Voltaire unjustly derided it for, rather it prepared the ground for the intellectual successes which would follow.

Yet despite the stirring narrative outlined in God’s Philosophers some will doubtless maintain there was a dark age in Western Europe from 500AD to around 1250 when not very much happened in the intellectual culture of the West. The best course of action in response to this would be to cast the blighters adrift in the ruins of a collapsed civilisation with bloodthirsty barbarian raiders all around them and only a copy of Bill Brysons 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' with which to rebuild society. Then perhaps we will hear no more loose talk about ‘poor benighted Medievals’.

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Laws of Nature

Where do the laws of physics come from? And why those laws rather than some other set?. Most especially, why a set of laws that drives the searing featureless gases coughed out of the Big Bang towards life and consciousness and intelligence and cultural activities such as religion, art, mathematics and science.

You might be tempted to suppose that any old rag-bag of laws would produce a complex universe of some sort, with attendant inhabitants convinced of their own specialness. Not so. It turns out that randomly selected laws almost invariably lead to unrelieved chaos or boring and uneventful simplicity. Our own universe is poised exquisitely between these un-palatable alternatives, offering a potent mix of freedom and discipline, a sort of restrained creativity. Instead they encourage matter and energy to develop along pathways of evolution that lead to novel variety...I can’t prove to you that it is design, but whatever it is, it is certainly very clever’

Paul Davies

To my mind, the most remarkable feature of the universe is that it appears to conform to mathematical laws. That no-one these days seems particularly phased by this astonishing fact is testimony to the human capacity to take things for granted. In most accounts, the laws of nature capture a kind of natural necessity; in other words, they are not mere descriptions but depict the way things must be. Furthermore they appear to be presuppositions of science rather than simply the product of investigation. Not only that but the incredible precision of our particular set of ‘laws of nature’ has been capable of persuading something unimaginably smaller than a subatomic particle to evolve into an unimaginably large universe with 100 billion galaxies, lay down the chemistry for the emergence of carbon based life and channel a process of evolution into conscious beings that are capable of pondering their circumstances. In recognition of this we are entitled to ask the questions, why are there laws?, what makes them mathematical?, what makes them exceptionless and why do they take the special form they do?.

From the very beginning the idea of ‘laws of nature’ was theological in character. When Aristotle’s work was re-introduced to the Latin West in the 11th century, the orderliness of nature was held to be derived from the immanent properties of natural objects; or ‘the order that God has implanted in nature’ as Aquinas described it. Mathematical reasoning was sidelined because of the division of labour in Aristotelian sciences and because Aristotle had thought, going against the mathematical realism of Plato, that mathematics dealt with human constructions. Thus it was that natural philosophy focused on the causes of the motions of the planets and mathematical astronomy considered mathematical descriptions which would be ‘saving the phenomena’, making predictions, but not really giving a causal explanation of the motions. During the Middle Ages, a vocabulary of ‘natural laws’ arose, but these were all confined to the area of morality and the participation of rational creatures in the eternal law of ‘God the ruler of the universe’.

Two movements would combine to challenge these perspectives. The first was a growing emphasis on the omnipotence of God and the divine Will which proved incompatible with the autonomy of the Aristotelian world. The second was a Christian Platonism which promoted mathematical realism in natural philosophy. As the Protestant Reformation gathered force questions were raised about how appropriate it was to adopt the thought of the unchristian Aristotle. Two Greek movements contained ideas that seemed promising for his overthrow, the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus; and the thought of the ancient sceptics.

Atomism suggested that matter was inert and not autonomous as it had been in the Aristotelian view of nature where natural objects contained causal efficacy. God had created the world and ruled it directly; and so, it was argued, he must have issued physical laws similar to the moral edicts in the bible and the ‘natural laws’ discussed in the Middle Ages. And what of mathematics, could it not be that this was the product of the divine mind and therefore manifested in the created order?. If the world is a product of the divine, isn’t the distinction between natural and artificial irrelevant?.

It was this radical re-conception which led to the discovery of the laws of the so called ‘scientific revolution; Descartes Laws of Motion, Hooke’s Law, Pascal’s Law, Boyle’s Law, Galileo’s laws of fall and inertia and Kepler’s Planetary Laws. Kepler referred to the divine Will and the creator as the foundation for his realist mathematical astronomy when he wrote:

'I shall have the physicists against me in these chapters because I have deduced the natural properties of the planets from immaterial things and mathematical figures...I wish to respond briefly as follows: that God the creator, since he is a mind, and does what he wants, is not prohibited, in attributing powers and appointing circles, from having regard to things which are wither immaterial or based on imagination. And since he wills nothing except with absolute reason, and nothing exists except by his will, then let my adversaries say what other reasons God had for attributing powers, etc. Since there was nothing except for qualities’.

Kepler then criticised Aristotle’s inability to conceptualise a world founded on mathematical principles. He had been unable to do so, Kepler said, because he had not believed the world had been created. By contrast Kepler and many of his contemporaries believed that mathematical relations in the universe is assured because God has manifested these in the created order; hence mathematical laws can describe the real relations between physical objects. Keplar wrote that this:

‘is acceptable to me and to all Christians since our faith holds that the World, which had no previous existence, was created by God in weight, measure and number, that is in accordance with ideas co-eternal with him’

Galileo, who took the un-Aristotelian step of introducing mathematics into physics, insisted that mathematical relations are real and God relied upon them when designing the cosmos:

‘the human intellect does understand some of them [mathematical truths] perfectly, and thus in these it has as much absolute certainty as nature has itself. Of such as the mathematical sciences alone, that is, geometry and arithmetic, in which the divine intellect indeed knows infinitely more proposition, since it knows all. But with regard to those few which the human intellect does understand, I believe that it’s knowledge equals the divine in objective certainty, for here it succeeds in understanding necessity, beyond which there can be no greater certainty’.

In both these claims, Kepler and Galileo show the influence of renaissance Platonism. Kepler also conceived of the cosmos as a divinely created machine on the model of a clock. Hence the findings of the mechanical sciences could now be applied to nature.

Following this view, Descartes wrote ‘the laws of mechanics are identical to the laws of nature’ and should be regarded as eternal and immutable features of the natural world rather than human constructs. According to Descartes, these laws originate in the divine will and are underwritten by the immutability of God; something he emphasised most famously in his principle of conservation of motion.

According to Dennis Des Chene:

‘The Aristotelian philosophy takes natural change to be the work of active powers in nature itself, in which God concurs. The Cartesian interprets it as the work of God alone, subject to natural laws, appeal to which will help demonstrate the observed regularities which by the Aristotelian are referred to the intrinsic powers of material things and to the ends toward which they act.

This is demonstrated in a letter Descartes wrote to his friend Mersenne in which he said:

‘the mathematical truths which you call eternal were established by God and totally depend on him just like all the other creatures’

Malebranche echoed this sentiment, maintaining that God directly imposed his will on brute matter in systematic ways that could be described as ‘laws’.

In contrast to Descartes who believed that the laws could be derived from the divine nature by intuition, Newton believed that the laws must be discovered by experimentation in order to reach a high level of certainty, yet here also he spoke of ‘ an infinite and omnipresent spirit in which matter is moved according to mathematical laws’; although in the Principia he more modestly said that:

‘gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers’.

The early modern idea of laws of nature was grounded in a particular conception of divine activity, one specific to the west; although there are hints of it in Islamic theology. Lawfulness is not something which was a self-evident feature of the universe but was an implication of specific conceptions of God. Later the laws would become simply laws intrinsic to nature and become reflections of human ingenuity rather than reflections of the divine. Shorn of its theological underpinnings, we are now left with a system that ‘just happens’ to be the way it is.

As John Barrow concludes:

We see now how it is possible for a Universe that displays unending complexity and exquisite structure to be governed by a few simple laws - perhaps just one law - that are symmetrical and intelligible, laws that govern the most remarkable things in our Universe - populations of elementary "particles" that are everywhere perfectly identical. There are some who say that because we use our minds to appreciate the order and complexity of the Universe around us, there is nothing more to that order than what is imposed by the human mind. That is a serious misjudgment.

Were it true, then we would expect to find our greatest and most reliable understanding of the world in the everyday events for which millions of years of natural selection have sharpened our wits and prepared our senses. And when we look towards the outer space of galaxies and black holes, or into the inner space of quarks and electrons, we should expect to find few resonances between our minds and the ways of these worlds. Natural selection requires no understanding of quarks and black holes for our survival and multiplication.

And yet, we find these expectations turned upon their heads. The most precise and reliable knowledge we have about anything in the Universe is of events in a binary star system more than 3,000 light years from our planet and in the sub-atomic world of electrons and light rays, where we are accurate to better than nine decimal places. And curiously, our greatest uncertainties all relate to the local problems of understanding ourselves - human societies, human behaviour, and human minds - all the things that really matter for human survival. … . Our first attempts to grasp the laws of nature are often incomplete. So, in our religious conceptions of the Universe, we also use approximations and analogies to have some grasp of ultimate things. They are not the whole truth but this does not stop them being a part of the truth: a shadow that is cast in a limiting situation of some simplicity.

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The Galileo Affair - (2) The Cosmic Promotion

Our ancestors lived out of doors ... [And to them, it seemed,] the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and the stars are part of some elegantly configured cosmic clockwork ... put here for a purpose, for our benefit. Who else makes use of them? What else are they good for?

This satisfying demonstration of importance, buttressed by daily observations of the heavens, made the geocentrist conceit a transcultural conceit—taught in the schools, built into the language, part and parcel of great literature and sacred scripture. Dissenters were discouraged, sometimes with torture and death. It is no wonder that for the vast bulk of human history, no one questioned it.

Carl Sagan

The great paradox of humanity is that all the greatest of our intellectual endeavours are perversely mirrored by a crippling diminution of what it is to be human. Having emerged by a slow, bloody march from the primeval slime of the earth we are informed in gloating terms of our complete and total insignificance. Copernicus, we are told, banished the earth from the centre of the universe; Darwin told us our closest ancestors were ‘damn dirty’ apes and Freud informed us that we all secretly fantasise about sleeping with our mothers; although that last vignette might tell us more about the scale of his cocaine habit than the state of the human condition.

The problem is that the first of these humiliations, the overthrow of Geocentrism, doesn’t appear to have been the affront to our ‘naïve self love’ and ignorant religious worldview which Freud portrayed it as. The first crucial point is that the Jewish and Christian scriptures are not supportive of anthropocentric egoism. Instead they proclaim the smallness of mankind, its weakness and its moral incapacity in comparison to the greatness and omni-benevolence of the creator. As the psalmist declares to God:

‘when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them’.

The ancient Jewish picture of the world was vertical. God was above and the abyss lay below. The human race was in-between both in place and value. Among created things we were lower than the angels and higher than plants, animals and inanimate objects. In no sense were we at the centre.

Nor was Aristotle’s system of physics in any way a prop to human arrogance. The earth was at the centre of the universe purely because that was where heavy things would collect by their nature. Since our planet was heavier than water air and fire, it would tend to remain motionless at the centre. Was this an exalted position to be in?. No. The further from the centre the more sublime and beautiful things were, while the closer they were to the centre, the baser and grosser. More refined substances like fire tended upwards while heavy, earthly things tended towards their natural place at the centre of the earth

As Moses Maimonides asserted:

‘In the case of the universe..the nearer the parts are to the centre, the greater is their turbideness, their solidity, their inertness, their dimness and darkness, because they are further away from the loftiest element, from the source of light and brightness’.

The centre of the universe was by far the worst place to be.

As Jim points out in his essay, neither Aristotle nor Ptolemy thought the Earth to be a large part of the universe. Aristotle thought it was of "no great size" compared to the heavenly spheres. Ptolemy says in the Almagest that "The Earth has a ratio of a point to the heavens."

Following this theme of self deprecation, Thomas Aquinus declares that:

‘in the universe, earth – that all the spheres encircle and that, as for place, lies in the centre, is the most material and coarsest (ignobilissima) of all bodies’

According to the accepted cosmology of the period therefore, our miserable sphere was located at the bottom of the celestial hierarchy, considered too unworthy to be part of the heavens due to its imperfect and sinful nature and with hell and purgatory placed by Dante at the its core, the very centre of the universe. Our planet stood in dismal contrast to the heavenly firmament above, a realm of perfection derived from Plato's Theory of Forms with the realm of God beyond.

As Michael de Montaigne wrote:

"The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man and withal the proudest. he feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, the most remote from the heavenly arch"

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola followed this theme, referring to earth in delightful terms as occupying ‘the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world’

Thus, as Dennis R Danielson points out in a recent essay ‘The Copernican Demotion of Humans’:

‘the greater obstacle to Copernican theory was almost two millennia of a physics according to which the gross earth was obviously down and the glorious sun was obviously up. Accordingly the first semi-official response to the Revolutions, written by a Dominican friar but framed in transparently Aristotelian terms complained that “Copernicus puts the indestructible sun in a place subject to destruction”. Rather scandalously , heliocentrism was seen as ‘exalting’ the position of humankind in the universe and pulling the earth out of the cosmic slump that Copernicus’s predecessors thought it occupied- and conversely placing the sun into that central yet tainted location’.

In order to counter this impression, Copernicus and his assistant Rheticus were keen to enhance the status of the centre by suggesting it was a throne, a fitting place for the majestic sun to govern the planets. The earth had been effectively promoted to the status of a star ‘moving among the planets as one of them’.

As Danielson explains, the relocation was often seen in positive terms except by those who preferred that the gross earth be put in its proper place. The English clergyman John Wilkins for example, opposed those who presumed that ‘the earth is of a more ignoble substance than any other planets, consisting of a more base and vile matter’ that ‘the centre is the worst place’ and that is where the earth should be.

Kepler saw the new cosmology as offering humanity a new cosmic advantage. Because man had been created for contemplation:

‘he could not remain at rest in the center..but must make an annual journey on this boat, which is our earth, to perform his observations…There is no globe nobler or more suitable for man than the earth. For, in the first place, it is exactly in the middle of the principal globes…Above it are Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Within the embrace of its orbit run Venus and Mercury, while at the centre the sun rotates.’

Galileo railed against those who argued:

‘principally on the grounds that it has neither motion nor light, that the earth must be excluded from the dance of the stars. For I will prove that the earth does have motion, that it surpasses the moon in brightness, and that it is not the sump where the universe's filth and ephemera collect.’

Since the earth’s meteoric rise from a cesspool at the centre of the Aristotelian universe to an exalted position amongst the stars looks like a stunning promotion, where did the idea of cosmic demotion come from?. Like a substantial number of the world’s delusions it appears to have come from the French enlightenment. According to Danielson:

‘it was Cyrano de Bergerac who associated pre-Copernican geocentrism with the “insupportable arrogance of Mankinde, which fancies, that nature was onley created to serve it’. Most influentially, the science popularizer Bernard de Bouvier de Fontenelle’s Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds complimented Copernicus who ‘takes the earth and throws it out of the center of the world’- for his’ design was to abate the vanity of men who had thrust themselves into the chief place of the universe’.

This retrospectively imposed dethronement became the standard account during the enlightenment. The myth serves a valuable purpose. It allows the proponent to wallow in smugness and intellectual superiority at the naivety of his forebears. It also forms a great centrepiece in the grand narrative of materialism; the inevitable unmasking of humanity and exposure of its cosmic insignificance. Yet it is not at all clear that the great scale of the universe is any cause for despair. For example, when Cotton Mather looked out at the stars through his telescope he proclaimed:

'Great God, what a variety of world's hast thou created!. How stupendous are the displays of thy greatness and of thy glory'

Calvin's conclusion about the human condition was that:

"If God had formed us of the stuff of the sun or the stars, or if he had created any other celestial matter out of which man could have been made, then we might have said that our beginning was honourable. ... But ... we are all made of mud, and this mud is not just on the hem of our gown, or on the sole of our boots, or in our shoes. We are full of it, we are nothing but mud and filth both inside and outside."

Ironically we do appear to be made out of stardust. The universe we see is greater than anything he could have imagined; provided, that is, you ditch the misery tinted spectacles.

The Galileo Affair - (1) The Problem with Heliocentrism

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