
Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious - rfreytag
https://aeon.co/ideas/opposition-to-galileo-was-scientific-not-just-religious
======
edko
There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the
Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable
exceptions.

José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of
Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo,
so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools.

Moreover, when Galileo fell in disgrace, Calasanz instructed members of his
congregation to assist him. When Galileo lost his sight, Calasanz ordered the
Piarist Clemente Settimi to serve as his secretary.

~~~
baldfat
Also worth mentioning: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not
scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was
Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the
Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the
camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back
in those times.

Here is the article on Artistole's thoughts on The Heavens.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens)

"Aristotelian geocentric view that the earth was the center of the
universe..."
[https://books.google.com/books?id=MHnwAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchw...](https://books.google.com/books?id=MHnwAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Aristotelian+)

~~~
gumby
Aristotle was always such an obvious idiot ("women have fewer teeth than men"
is my favorite nonsense) I have always+ wondered why anyone paid attention to
him, ever.

\+ Well since I was a teenager anyway

~~~
Bluestrike2
Interestingly enough, while Aristotle's conclusion was in fact wrong, it was
rather scientific for its time. That passage in particular gets mocked a lot,
but if you look at the source, you'll note that the conclusion was based on
physical observation, even though the accounts he relied upon were
demonstrably false:

"Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and
swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made: but
the more teeth they have the more long-lived are they, as a rule, while those
are short-lived in proportion that have teeth fewer in number and thinly
set."[0]

He got it wrong, but the way he went about getting it wrong is significant.

The Aristotelian method might not have been the scientific method as it's
understood today, but there's little doubt that it was [i]a[/i] scientific
method. Truthfully, it's difficult to overstate just how significant an impact
Aristotle's writings, and other Greek philosophy (particularly metaphysics),
had on the later development of empiricism and the scientific tradition. I
doubt that there was a single early modern philosopher (those who birthed what
we'd consider modern science) who wasn't extremely well-read of Aristotle.

Aristotle must be read within his historical context. Both in terms of what he
was responding to (Plato, various pre-Socratric philosophers, and his
contemporaries), as well as what came after. His shadow is a long one, felt
even to this day. Early modern philosophers, medieval Islamic scientists, and
the others who helped lay the groundwork for the scientific method were all
influenced by the Greeks, even when they disagreed.

0\. Aristotle, History of Animals, Bk. II, Pt. 3.
[http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.2.ii.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.2.ii.html)

~~~
roel_v
_He got it wrong, but the way he went about getting it wrong is significant._

I'm probably just dense - how did he go about getting it wrong?

~~~
countingteeth
Observation: counting teeth. This was before modern dentistry.

~~~
mikevm
Ugh... isn't that what one is supposed to do before making such a claim?

~~~
emodendroket
Hell, why didn't he just Google it?

------
smallnamespace
Stupid question: given General Relativity, and in particular that _all
reference frames are equally valid_ , including rotating and accelerating
ones, in what sense is heliocentrism more 'true' than geocentrism?

E.g. you can pick a geocentric reference frame and all the math works out
(albeit you'd need to define large fictitious forces, etc., but again, they
are only 'fictitious' from the perspective of a different reference frame; in
the chosen frame they look quite real!).

Isn't the choice between geocentrism and heliocentrism purely one of
convenience, and we can simply pick and choose whichever reference frame is
most convenient for calculation purposes?

For example, if I'm interested in things happening in daily life, I pick a
reference frame at rest with respect to the ground beneath my feet. If I am
figuring out satellite orbits, I use a geocentric frame. If I'm calculating a
trip to Mars, I use a heliocentric frame (perhaps a rotating one).

If so, why do we still define heliocentrism to be more correct? Is the
argument really an implicit throwback to Newtonian absolute space and time,
which Relativity rejected?

~~~
Chinjut
I think the answer is precisely the realization that heliocentrism is a
convenient framework for specifying the correct relationships. If one
formulated their geocentrism-with-epicycles model to be precisely equivalent
to heliocentrism in all physically observable details, just with Earth as the
origin to their coordinate system, and acknowledged this equivalence, then
that would be perfectly correct as well, albeit unduly cumbersomely framed.
But the useful thing is that insight, that what happens is equivalent to the
clean heliocentric model, whatever coordinates you might prefer to think of it
in terms of.

~~~
mannykannot
Is it possible for a geocentric, epicyclic model to get the 3D positions of
the solar system bodies approximately correct, as opposed to just their
angular motion with respect to Earth?

~~~
mannykannot
I cannot edit my post any more , but I can still reply to it, and it seems the
answer is yes:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw)

\- but you need eccentricity to get the speeds right:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHmjGUxWRAI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHmjGUxWRAI)
(10 minutes in.)

Furthermore, the result is not equivalent to the heliocentric model because it
has many more parameters.

------
jkot
Earth-Centric model was actually scientifically better at that time. With
Occam's razor you would prefer it.

\- Even church agreed that Earth is not static, but is rotating.

\- Nobody observed star parallax, major proof for Copernican model was missing
until 19th century.

\- Ptolemaic model with its epicycles provided better predictions.

\- Copernican model is also wrong, planets are orbiting around center of
gravity, which is outside of sun..

~~~
colechristensen
>planets are orbiting around center of gravity, which is outside of sun..

The only planet with a barycenter with the sun outside it's radius is Jupiter.
And that only slightly. (with an altitude of 0.07 of the sun's radius)

The earth-sun barycenter is 0.0006 times the sun's radius from it's _center_

~~~
jahnu
Even then the definition of the surface is different than the definition of
the surface of, say, the Earth, so I'm not sure what "outside" the Sun means
precisely.

~~~
ekianjo
The sun is roughly a sphere of a fixed size. What is there not to understand ?

~~~
lojack
I believe he's referring to the "fixed size" part of it, really only an
argument a true pedant would make.

~~~
jahnu
Pedant? Or maybe just making conversation about the interesting differences
between human experience and understanding of terms and what definitions
astronomers use. Why do so many people on HN react as if every comment is a
competition?

------
santaragolabs
This is basically the thesis of Paul Feyerabend who used it as his main
argument against there being a scientific method. His book "Against Method" is
one of the best works on Philosophy of Science I've read during my university
education.

~~~
api
For quite a while I've suspected that you might be able to support
Feyerabend's argument using modern learning theory. In particular I suspect
that this is relevant:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)

Science is essentially a learning process. Since every learning method has a
performance envelope and fares better against some fitness landscapes than
others, restricting science to a singular method effectively prohibits
learning over fitness landscapes whose structures lie outside that method's
envelope.

In layman's terms: a single scientific method will be unable to learn certain
things, or at least unable to learn them in a reasonable amount of time.

This is also why I am eternally skeptical of all business and management
"methodologies." If there were a closed-form methodology that always yielded
successful businesses there would be no entrepreneurs. Large companies and
investment funds would simply execute this closed-form method
deterministically and reliably pump out successes while retaining 100%
ownership. Entrepreneurs exist because creating successful companies is an "AI
complete problem" that requires the full multi-approach multi-paradigm multi-
methodology capabilities of a human intellect... and even then it's hard.

(E.g. I put down Lean Startup when I realized I was just reading a description
of gradient descent in the business domain. Gradient descent only works over
very regular fitness landscapes with clear peaks and well-connected paths to
those peaks. In a rocky fitness landscape you will get stuck at a local
maximum almost instantly and never go any further.)

~~~
vslira
>(E.g. I put down Lean Startup when I realized I was just reading a
description of gradient descent in the business domain. Gradient descent only
works over very regular fitness landscapes with clear peaks and well-connected
paths to those peaks. In a rocky fitness landscape you will get stuck at a
local maximum almost instantly and never go any further.)

Funny, that's exactly how I interpreted the book, but I didn't see that as a
bad thing. Of course, a naive gradient descent won't solve everything, but
will help on a lot of things satisfactorily. Maybe LS won't help you build the
next Airbnb, but not all business must reach Unicorn Status. Pretty clever on
Ries' part

------
jordigh
I tl;dr'ed the article (sorry), but I wanted to say one thing about epicycles.
They are not wrong and certainly can be used to explain motion, but the
problem with them is that you can keep adding epicycles to fit any continuous
orbit at all (this actually is because a Fourier series can converge to any
continuous periodic function). This is my favourite visualisation of this
fact:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw)

~~~
dacohenii
Exactly. From a geocentric perspective, it's not wrong as long as you're
explaining past events (which, as you noted, can be done by adding epicycles).

The reason the model is not so useful (to paraphrase my college physics
professor) is that you can't use it to predict things in advance with
reasonable certainty (i.e. you don't know what epicycles you need until after
you've observed it).

------
dragonwriter
It was also personal and political, not just scientific _or_ religious. There
were, of course, people that were opposed to Galileo publishing _because_ of
his models (whether for religious or scientific reasons), but there were also
(and perhaps more critically) people that were against his model being
published _because_ of Galileo.

~~~
radarsat1
Also I think it's important to keep in mind that it's a bit anachronistic to
draw such a strong distinction between science and religion. In those days
they were much more strongly related. Science and understanding the universe
was likened to developing a better understanding of God. Therefore religious
logic and "internal logic" (rational and empirical) would hold similar weight.

------
amoruso
The opposition to Galileo was not really religious or scientific. More than
anything, it was political. You can't understand what happened outside the
context of the religious wars of the time. His findings undermined the
authority of the Catholic Church.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion)

There are plenty of examples of political suppression of science in our own
time. The Nazis and Communists were two extreme examples.

In our own society, religion doesn't have this kind of power any more. But
there are still political pressures on researchers to be PC. I'll let you
think up some examples yourself.

------
woodchuck64
> But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes.
> The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if
> they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun.

What?? Oh, Wikipedia fills in some crucially missing info in this hypothesis.

> However, early telescopes produced a spurious disk-like image of a star
> (known today as an Airy disk) that was larger for brighter stars and smaller
> for fainter ones. Astronomers from Galileo to Jaques Cassini mistook these
> spurious disks for the physical bodies of stars, and thus into the
> eighteenth century continued to think of magnitude in terms of the physical
> size of a star.
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_\(astronomy\))

~~~
novaleaf
Thank you so much for this. I was wondering about this so much and it really
gnawed on me that the article didn't bother explaining further.

------
eric_the_read
Mike Flynn has a very long and detailed story of Galileo and more generally
geocentrism vs. heliocentrism at [http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-
great-ptolemaic-smac...](http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-
ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html)

Among the things I learned:

* The Copernican model had _more_ epicycles than the Ptolemaic

* Galileo thought tides were caused by those same epicycles.

------
emodendroket
The idea that science and religion are distinct spheres, or even things that
might be in opposition to each other, has been so thoroughly established in
our modern consciousnesses that it's easy to forget that in the past they
didn't really make such a distinction.

~~~
jmcdiesel
Science and Religion aren't at odds with each other, they never have been.

What has been at odds is religion and scientific discoveries that contradict
or disprove the religious story. Heliocentric system flew in the face of the
bible, and that created the problem.

Bruno was burned alive for holding fast to the idea that there are more solar
systems than just our own, and that the universe is basically infinite, both
ideas that contradict the church's story

To say that religion is anti-science would be disingenuous, but to say that
religion isn't often at odds with science or that it hasn't stifled scientific
progress in the name of maintaining the myths of its teachings would be
equally so...

~~~
PakG1
_Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the
problem._

Rather, in the face of a specific interpretation of the Bible. There are other
literal interpretations of the Bible that are much more in tune with
scientific knowledge of astronomy and origins, but they are not well-
understood among less educated religious folk that follow the Bible. Likewise,
certain interpretations of the Koran lead to terrorism, while other
interpretations don't. It's interpretation that matters, especially if
believers insist on literal interpretations. Sadly, few people are willing to
be open-minded enough to consider the possibilities, and that often goes for
all sides of a debate.

~~~
oldmanjay
Belief virtually requires a closed mind, since an open mind would allow
observation that contradicts the belief. It's not sad, it's a feature.

~~~
PakG1
Let's say that blind belief requires a closed mind. Everyone at the end of the
day relies on faith at some level or other. Even scientists believe in their
hypotheses until their hypotheses are proven wrong. Then they change their
beliefs. The fact of the matter is that everyone still believes in something
at all times. I have yet to meet a scientist who precludes his everyday
thoughts with, "well, then again, it's also possible that we're in the Matrix
and this is all a computer simulation, or that I'm not real at all, even
though I appear to have agency, etc, etc, but barring all of that, which
requires a higher burden of proof, here's what I currently think and
believe..."

~~~
EdHominem
> I have yet to meet a scientist who [...]

And yet you've also never met a scientist who says: "This is my current
hypothesis so I've vanquished all possibility of doubt. I'm going to publish
it without even testing because it MUST be right."

You should entertain the notion that the word means something entirely
different to religious people than to others.

> The fact of the matter is that everyone still believes in something at all
> times.

Even if that were true, the only reason you're saying it is to show that even
scientists make that mistake. You're trying to drag them down to your level,
hoping the equivalence lends weight to your unsupported ideas.

The difference, to the degree that belief isn't just an empty word to a
scientist, is that it's not seen as a good thing in the scientific community.
You might believe that god ensures your slippers remain under the bed where
you left them but if you use that in an argument nobody will take you
seriously and there's no social pressure to do so.

~~~
PakG1
_You should entertain the notion that the word means something entirely
different to religious people than to others._

You have a very narrow definition and/or experience of what religious people
are like. You should entertain the possibility that there are religious people
who are more open-minded than you think.

 _Even if that were true, the only reason you 're saying it is to show that
even scientists make that mistake. You're trying to drag them down to your
level, hoping the equivalence lends weight to your unsupported ideas._

I don't say this lightly: you have issues, man. We should not propose that we
know what's going on in other people's minds. It leads us to become spiteful,
frustrated, unhappy people.

~~~
EdHominem
> Everyone at the end of the day relies on faith

> We should not propose that we know what's going on in other people's minds.

Both are you, and incompatible with each other. It seems that you think you
should tell other people what's in their minds, but that nobody should tell
you what you think...

And yes, we should not under normal circumstances. But when someone tries to
tell us something crazy, such as that we are belief focused, we should examine
their motives and see if they have a reason to want us to think we do... You
obviously do because you're trying to normalize the idea of belief.

> I don't say this lightly: you have issues, man.

Yes, apparently you do. You don't even read the thread again before saying it,
to see if you were the one throwing stones.

------
c0ff
Of course there was scientific opposition to Galileo. Scientific ideas get
hammered out through debate and disagreement. New ideas in science often take
decades or even centuries to fully develop and reach broad acceptance.

That is why it is important that new ideas can be discussed freely, which
wasn't the case in Galileo's time.

~~~
SpeakMouthWords
They are now, but the uninformed reader can't assume that that's static
throughout history. There will have been some point where that became fully
true, some point where it wasn't, and some continuous function of time
defining the extent to which that's true in between. Can you define any of the
latter two things on the list?

~~~
imagist
> They are now, but the uninformed reader can't assume that that's static
> throughout history.

Scientific ideas _are not_ discussed freely. They are driven by funding, which
is disproportionally awarded to novel results. Non-novel results or failures
to reproduce are overly ignored and under-funded.

------
michaelsbradley
Many persons who were very serious about religious faith in that time period,
e.g. Catholic priests, also had great enthusiasm for rigorous mathematics and
scientific advancement.

For example, Fr. Paul Gudin, a Jesuit priest, was a mathematician and
astronomer. He was interested in and supportive of the work of Johannes Kepler
and provided him with a telescope when Kepler was experiencing financial
difficulties[+].

[+]
[http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/guldin.h...](http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/guldin.htm)

~~~
eric_the_read
In fact, Kepler, a Lutheran, was named Imperial Mathematician of the Holy
Roman (i.e., Catholic) Empire.

~~~
jcranmer
After the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the HRE effectively sanctioned the
ability of princes to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism. It should be
noted, though, that the Emperors tended to be fanatical Catholics, which leads
to the Thirty Years' War (tl;dr: Protestant King of Bohemia dies, gets
inherited by Catholic Emperor, Bohemia rebels). At the end of that war, the
Peace of Westphalia effectively guarantees freedom of religious worship for
Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, independent of the religious beliefs of
rulers.

------
triplesec
This article serves as quite a fascinating reminder of the problems of new
scientific paradigms (see quote pulled out below). All the argumentation about
the history of the churrch seems a lot less relevant to me than how if YOU
were an astronomer at the time, how sceptical would you have been at this
weird thing?

Excerpt: "Copernicus proposed that certain oddities observed in the movements
of planets through the constellations were due to the fact that Earth itself
was moving. Stars show no such oddities, so Copernicus had to theorise that,
rather than being just beyond the planets as astronomers had traditionally
supposed, stars were so incredibly distant that Earth’s motion was
insignificant by comparison. But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of
certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant
and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one
dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a
favourite of the Establishm"ent, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger,
a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever
survive in the face of the star-size problem.

------
bbctol
This may either calm or further motivate people concerned about the issues
with replicability in science, the current "reproduction crisis" in biology
and psychology. Scientific progress today is certainly messy, slow, filled
with political drama, and lacking a good philosophical footing, but it would
be a mistake to think it was ever the noble act of discovery we sometimes get
nostalgic about.

The whole metaphor of "discovery" in science is incorrect. You don't suddenly
"see" the truth once you get better telescopes or a new imaging method.
Everything you see is an accurate depiction of universal laws, as filtered
through the distorting layers of our own internal models. Every new
"discovery" in science must be slowly generated, models emerging and feuding
for generations, before future scientists have enough research to look back on
the past and deem some visionaries and others crackpots.

------
lootsauce
By far the best writing on this subject I have found is over at the fantastic
Renaissance Mathematicus blog.

Galileo, the Church and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide.
[https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-
church-a...](https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-and-
heliocentricity-a-rough-guide/)

Galileo, Foscarini, The Catholic Church, and heliocentricity in 1615 Part 1 –
the occurrences: A Rough Guide.
[https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/galileo-foscarini-
th...](https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/galileo-foscarini-the-catholic-
church-and-heliocentricity-in-1615-part-1-the-occurrences-a-rough-guide/)

And part 2 [https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/galileo-foscarini-
th...](https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/galileo-foscarini-the-catholic-
church-and-heliocentricity-in-1615-part-2-the-consequences-a-rough-guide/)

Acceptance, rejection and indifference to heliocentricity before 1610.
[https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/acceptance-
rejection...](https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/acceptance-rejection-
and-indifference-to-heliocentricity-before-1610/)

------
antognini
Strangely, the article omits a reference to the preferred model of the time,
namely the Tychonic system [1]. In the Tychonic system, all the planets
revolve around the Sun, but the Sun and moon revolve around the Earth. It was
seen to be a very tidy theory that took advantage of the best aspects of the
Copernican theory, but resolved the problem of the lack of observed parallax.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system)

~~~
dumbmatter
The article does mention it:

 _Brahe had theorised that all planets circled the Sun, while it circled
Earth. Locher noted that Brahe might be right, but what was clear was that the
telescope supported Ptolemy._

------
Houshalter
A somewhat better article on this is here:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_the_side_of/)

There were also politics involved. Galileo insulted the pope and did some
other controversial stuff. He wasn't persecuted for his scientific beliefs.

------
jnordwick
What about the Orthodox?

"The Church" is really an anachronism. You are speaking of the Roman church
which is about only half of Christianity at the time: Western Europe.

What about the other half of the Church? Eastern Europe, Russia, Asian,
Norther Africa, the Middle East, Greece?

How did they receive Galileo?

I've always been fascinated by this total amnesia over the Orthodox Church as
if it didn't exist or was only a few percent.

~~~
jcranmer
Actually, given the time frame, focusing on the Catholic church is already
meaningless in Western Europe. The Reformation was already well underway,
indeed Galileo was outspoken during the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

The Lutheran church was very anti-Copernican; Martin Luther himself condemned
it as heresy 80 years before the Galileo affair.

------
geodel
I watched a course on Coursera and it made similar argument regarding
opposition to Galileo by Church. I think it makes very important point and is
noticeable everyday where deeply political arguments are passed off as
scientific or logical.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Not just where arguments are deeply political, but when we seek to punish
people for simply saying or thinking things we don't agree with.

------
richman777
The amazing thing about the entire discussion is how it really was a
scientific discussion that evolved over time.

There are clearly scientific ideas that we take as simple truths now that will
be disproved in the future. They are clearly going to be a little more nuanced
than planetary motion but it's great to see how the scientific community has
and will evolve.

------
pippopascal
Ultimately, the argument for the helio-centric model is aesthetic. It _is_
more elegant than the geo-centric when describing the dance of the stars.

So, are both systems equally right and equally wrong?

\- Ultimately we're talking about a change in reference frame, which is a
vector subtraction. They're mathematically transformations of each other.

\- Since the Sun doesn't have infinite mass it, in fact, also orbits the Earth

\- Neither system is an inertial reference frame. If we assume the Earth is
infinitesimal, at the very least the Sun orbits the Jupiter-Sun barycenter
(which is almost outside the Sun proper). So if anything we should speak of a
"J-S centric model"

\- Both are useful. The geo-centric model is quite useful and still used in
astronomy (Never-mind tracking satellites, try understand your coordinates in
the heliocentric reference frame.)

\- The "corrections" of the geo-centric model are higher order harmonics, and
can fit any motion and it's an early application of harmonic analysis. In
fact, they're not actually corrections to the model, they are motions that
naturally arise when describing circular motion wrt a point outside its axis.

\- What's wrong with non-inertial reference frames anyway? Consider them
"fictitious" or consider them real, we can calculate and consider the non-
inertial forces.

------
nsxwolf
The comments here are very good and I'm glad people care about the real story
and its nuances. For too long people have been taught that Galileo dared to
contradict the bible, the church threw him in prison, and that's that.

------
jhbadger
The problem with saying that there was scientific in addition to religious
opposition to Galileo kind of misses the point. That would like saying there
was scientific in addition to ideological opposition to genetics in the Soviet
Union in the Lysenko years. The reason while both Galileo and Soviet
biologists were put on trial was because the power structure at the time
opposed them, not because of legitimate scientific concerns.

------
acqq
Oh, please. First, the article quotes the opposition of only one person, and
from that it doesn't follow its title at all. The realistic title would be
"The Opposition to Galileo also at least once appeared as scientific, not just
religious."

Now why I say "appeared" there? Because the arguments quoted in the text
"looking through the telescopes it appeared that epicycles existed" isn't
"scientifically" meaningful argument. As soon as we accept the relativity of
motion, it's clear how meaningless the statement "it looks so from here" is.

Moreover, "scientific opposition" doesn't result in the house arrest by the
church.

Both the Bible and that-other-newer-book- which-is-not-politically-correct-to-
be-named have the verses that reflect the false understanding of the nature,
and that is indisputable. It's true that there are today enough people that
don't take these verses seriously, but in fact, the reasonable people did so,
like seen in the article, already at least some 400 years ago.

Good for us, because otherwise most of us would be peasants today.

------
louprado
This reminds me of the story of Hippasus, who was sentenced to death by his
fellow Pythagorean philosophers because he discovered irrational numbers.

------
neves
The ironic thing in this debate is that almost all arguments in Galileo
"Dialog" were wrong. [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/galileo-big-
mistake.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/galileo-big-mistake.html)

Do 2 wrongs make a right?

------
ktRolster
Totally related:

[http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/bro-
science](http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/bro-science)

[http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/cardio-
arrest](http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/cardio-arrest)

------
yawaramin
So, here's the funny thing. The Church has been vilified over this for
centuries, but as it turns out they weren't actually wrong to believe in
geocentrism; in a relativistic worldview either belief is equally correct.

------
Amorymeltzer
Anyone who is interested in Astronomy and development of historical models of
the heavens should check out this season of the Scientific Odyssey podcast
([http://thescientificodyssey.typepad.com/](http://thescientificodyssey.typepad.com/)).
I found it through HN and Chad Davies does a fantastic job of creating a
narrative from early civilization, and we are just now discussing Galileo.
It's very niche but fairly accessible, and one of my favorites.

------
meetri
Do you have to believe that the sun orbits the earth in order to believe that
the earth is the center of the universe? Is it possible that the Earth _is_
the center of the universe given all light in the universe points in the
direction of Earth.

------
lazyant
I found the book "Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith,
and Love" by Dava Sobel fascinating, really clarifies many misconceptions
about Galileo.

------
Numberwang
Scientific opposition is a good thing. Religious is not.

------
gsmethells
The opposition was not scientific. Read the book "The War on Science" and keep
thr enlightenment from slipping away.

------
gpvos
The importance of this article for our current times is in the last two
paragraphs.

------
Iv
I am tired of the Catholics trying to rewrite history. I got deep into this
issue several times.

First, go to the source. We have the documents from Galileo trials, so first,
read what was actually said.
[http://www.tc.umn.edu/~allch001/galileo/library/1616docs.htm](http://www.tc.umn.edu/~allch001/galileo/library/1616docs.htm)
Here is the most relevant part:

    
    
      Proposition to be assessed:
    
        (1) The sun is the center of the world and completely 
      devoid of local motion.
    
        Assessement: All said that this proposition is foolish 
      and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it 
      explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy 
      Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words 
      and according to the common interpretation and 
      understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of 
      theology.
    
        (2) The earth is not the center of the world, nor 
      motionless, but it moves as a whole and also with diurnal 
      motion.
    
        Assessment: All said that this proposition receives the 
      same judgement in philosophy and that in regard to 
      theological truth it is at least errouneous in faith.
    

Here, "philosophy" more or less means science. So, yes, Galileo was criticized
on scientific grounds, which is totally fine as indeed, there were some
problems with his theory (like the lack of movement of stars).

But Galileo was called an heretic because he contradicted the literal meaning
of the bible. _" formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many
places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the
words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy
Fathers and the doctors of theology"_ : this is your regular creationist
saying that the bible has to be interpreted literally and that you are a
heretic if you don't. Problem: said creationist can throw you in jail if you
don't abide to his worldview.

That's why from this time (from a bit earlier actually) universities found it
primordial to gain independence from the clergy and that science and religion
diverged from each other.

Is this religious assessment coherent with others? Of course not! Religion is
not much about coherency. Copernicus heliocentrism was well accepted by the
church as he was less confrontational, richer and more religious.

Did Galileo act like an asshole? Maybe, though church did need some trolling
at this time. Was his condemnation political? Most certainly! But the salient
point is that the motivation may have been political, the justification was
religious. And that was unacceptable to scientists that you could justify
dogmatism and rewrite science books for political motives. The refusal of this
is what gave us modern science.

------
imagist
> What were those problems? A big one was the size of stars in the Copernican
> universe. Copernicus proposed that certain oddities observed in the
> movements of planets through the constellations were due to the fact that
> Earth itself was moving. Stars show no such oddities, so Copernicus had to
> theorise that, rather than being just beyond the planets as astronomers had
> traditionally supposed, stars were so incredibly distant that Earth’s motion
> was insignificant by comparison. But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots
> of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly
> distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last
> one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era
> and a favourite of the Establishment, thought this was absurd, while Peter
> Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system
> could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem.

This is a fascinating observation, and given the information they had at the
time, I can see where Locher is coming from. Given two possibilities, one
involving absolutely enormous stars and one involving a earth that circled the
sun, both extraordinary claims, and no sure way (yet) to evaluate which was
true, it's human that he supported the more comfortable hypothesis, and he
wasn't provably wrong given the information they had.

> That is unfortunate for science, because today the opponents of science make
> use of that caricature. Those who insist that the Apollo missions were
> faked, that vaccines are harmful, or even that the world is flat – whose
> voices are now loud enough for the ‘War on Science’ to be a National
> Geographic cover story and for the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to
> address even their most bizarre claims – do not reject the scientific
> process per se. Rather, they wrap themselves in the mantle of Galileo,
> standing (supposedly) against a (supposedly) corrupted science produced by
> the ‘Scientific Establishment’.

The problem with this is that it conflates the public social debate with an
internal scientific debate. Galileo vs. Pope Paul V is not the same debate as
Galileo vs. Locher. The former is a debate driven by social needs that tries
to drive opinion starting from what the pope wanted rather than observation
(which is in fact a rejection of scientific process). The latter is two
competing scientific hypotheses.

Likewise, picking one of the example debates (do vaccines cause autism?) there
are two possible debates. The public debate is driven by social needs--mostly
people trying to find meaning in the suffering caused by their child's autism,
and people trying to take advantage of that need. This is absolutely a
rejection of scientific process: scientific process attempts to explain
phenomena, not find explanations that make people feel better. The internal
scientific debate is largely not a debate, because the evidence that vaccines
don't cause autism is, at this point, so overwhelming.

"Wrapping oneself in the mantle of Galileo" IS inherently an unscientific
position: being pro- or anti-establishment is irrelevant to scientific
process. The fact that Galileo happened to be anti-establishment at the time
is irrelevant to the fact that ultimately his hypotheses were proven correct.

The real problem here is that a large part of the scientific community doesn't
recognize that the social debate and the scientific debate are two different
debates. Scientific evidence which is persuasive in a scientific context
(studies have shown no correlation between vaccines and autism) does not
persuade everyone in a public social context. Emotional approaches are also
necessary (would you rather your child died of whooping cough? Or as one
person with autism said, "It's painful that some people would rather have a
dead child than a child like me.").

------
jomamaxx
An amazingly reasonable thread for what could be just ignorant mud-slinging.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Agreed. Came here hoping to see a good discussion, was not disappointed.

------
imaginenore
Let's not dilute the term "scientific". Scentific method is relatively recent,
and consists of very specific sets of steps. So no, Galileo's opposition was
not scientific.

~~~
eugeneionesco
Definitely not true. Please study the work of Johannes Kepler on planetary
motion, he lived in the same period.

------
jabbanobodder
Scientific opposition is expected, that is the method in which science works.
Scientist want proof for a claim, the church didn't want to be wrong.

~~~
bduerst
That's not true at all. In fact, the church was okay with Galileo's models,
but they were not okay with how he was slandering the leadership.

------
drzaiusapelord
To be fair, the Church's influence in what we would call science back then was
incredibly powerful. I think its unrealistic to see 17th century science as
this secular institution like we have today. Of course the 'scientists' of the
age followed a church friendly narrative. It was in their interests to do so.
I think we will never really understand the chill on speech and research the
Church had during the medieval and later periods. I would say its significant
considering that the ancient Greeks (Aristarchus of Samos) were able to figure
out the heliocentric model, arguably because they didn't have a large
Christian Church structure working against them.

I find that modern revisionism to make religion seem less villainous is fairly
common nowadays. I don't know where this is coming from or why its on social
media so frequently, but its concerning. I think splitting hairs to make the
Church look good is a questionable narrative and a form of feel good politics
for certain religious people and certain types of habitual contrarians the
internet is so fond of. I imagine we're witnessesing a pendulum shift towards
more religiosity considering how the west has swung the other way for so long.

Regardless, its still wrong and the hundreds years of fighting to secularize
science and to progress past religiously acceptable models wasn't done because
Locher was a bad guy, but because the Pope and and the religious establishment
was, regardless of the individual merits of the many monks and priests, who
ultimately had to tow the party line regardless of their own findings,
mathematical skills, or opinions. Blasphemy was certainly a serious charge
back then. The wonderful thing about secular science is that there's no
serious punishment for being wrong or going against the grain, flawed as it
may be. The worst you can expect is being punched by Buzz Aldrin and even then
you really have to earn that.

~~~
michaelsbradley
That's really a lot of nonsense, though I'll grant you that "progress-
stifling, working-against-science church" is a long-entrenched meme[+].

[+] [https://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-
progr...](https://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progress-in-
Europe-in-the-Middle-Ages-3/answer/Tim-ONeill-1)

~~~
lmickh
Would also add that much of the Dark Age myth originated from the renaissance
humanists.

I've always found it funny that so much of the movement was examining original
sources instead of what someone wrote about them, yet so many people read the
renaissance works and don't look back to the original sources just before
them.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
A lot of the myth of the "Dark Ages" has been exaggerated to show how the
Reformation "saved" us from them. A lot of this historical revisionism comes
from the Enlightenment era.

The Renaissance itself didn't occur ex nihilo in a benighted world of ignorant
superstition either; it was a wholly organic evolution of the great learning
and development that occurred before it, especially in the 12th and 13th
centuries. The period we call the "Dark Ages" were certainly more chaotic than
the era of classical antiquity, etc., but by no means did culture and learning
stagnate.

