NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/sci/skeptic/19702

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Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Where has Galileo been all these years?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
From: [e-mail] (James J. Lippard)
Date: 16 Nov 1992 22:54 MST
References: <[e-mail]>
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In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (John Baskette) writes...
>
>The following was posted to soc.religion.christian:
>
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Stephen Kingston) writes:
>>clh writes:
>>> However there's been enough ill-informed discussion in other groups
>>> about this topic, that it's probably worth having someone who knows
>>> the background giving us an explanation of the real history behind the
>>> original judgement against Galileo, and possibly some explanation of
>>> why the Church decided to act now.  I'm not going to be willing to
>>> accept comments based on erroneous assumptions.  --clh]
>>
>>The following article was posted to the group bit.listserv.christia
>>by James Kiefer maybe two or three years ago:
>>
>>---
>>
>Since the subject of Galileo has come up, I should like to try to
>clear up some misunderstandings.
>
>My chief reference here is THE CRIME OF GALILEO, by Giorgio
>Santillana, Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts
>Institute of Technology, available in paperback from Midway Reprint
>Service, University of Chicago Press, for 14 dollars.  Since I have lost my
>own copy in the usual way (lent it to someone who did not return
>it), I write from memory.
>
>In Galileo's day, almost every government required a permit to
>print a book, and the Papal States (central Italy, ruled directly by
>the Pope as temporal sovereign) were no exception.  When Galileo
>finished his book, A DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE TWO GREAT WORLD SYSTEMS
>(meaning the earth-centered system of Ptolemy and the sun-centered
>system of Copernicus) he applied directly to Pope Urban VIII, with
>whom he was personally acquainted, for the necessary permit.  The
>Pope granted the permission, on condition that the book give a
>balanced presentation, and in particular that it contain his own
>favorite argument against Copernicus, one that he had invented
>himself and was particularly proud of.  Galileo agreed and got the
>permit.  When the book came out, the Pope was chagrined to find that
>his argument was indeed presented, but not as he had expected.  The
>book was written in the form of a conversation among friends, and
>the Pope's argument had been put into the mouth of a character
>called Simplicio (=the idiot).  Moreover, the other speakers then
>covered the argument with ridicule.
>
>The Pope responded (or so it appears) by giving the Inquisition
>orders to get Galileo for something or other.  He was accordingly
>brought up on charges, but could properly plead that he had sought
>and obtained a permit for the book.  The prosecution replied that
>about sixteen years earlier he had received a private admonition
>from Cardinal Bellarmine that his views were of questionable
>orthodoxy, and that if the Pope had known of this, he would have
>been more cautious about giving the permit, and therefore Galileo's
>failure to mention the Cardinal's admonition amounted to obtaining a
>permit by fraud, which invalidated the permit, etc.  Galileo said
>that he could not remember receiving any such admonition, but under
>pressure admitted that he could not swear he had not.

Some more of the details:  Galileo did remember that Bellarmine had
said that he could not believe or propound the Copernican theory
*as fact*, but the Inquisition claimed he had been told that he
also could not teach it in any way.  Galileo had a certificate signed
by Bellarmine which supported his recollections.  The papers in the
Vatican show a document *not signed by anyone* which goes the way
the Inquisition said; this document was apparently forged by the
Inquisition.

>The upshot was that Galileo signed his famous "recantation" and was
>condemned to life imprisonment.  This was a blatant injustice, but
>not as harsh as it sounds.  The prison was one of the Pope's summer
>palaces, which was turned over to him for life, and he continued to
>conduct experiments, to receive visitors without restriction, and to
>publish on any subject except astronomy.  He here developed and
>perfected his works on terrestial physics, works which undermined
>the theoretical basis of Ptolemaic astronomy.

This account leaves out the part where Galileo was shown (twice) the
instruments of torture before he recanted.  Things don't appear to
have been quite so jolly as this account makes it seem, below.

>The wording of the "recantation" is of some interest.  The key
>sentence reads pretty much as follows:
>
>   I, the undersigned, Galileo Galilei, renounce and condemn the
>   belief that the sun is at the center of the world, and that the
>   earth rotates on its axis, and also has a daily motion.
>
>Now the word "world" (=mundus) is ambiguous.  It can refer to the
>universe, or to the earth.  Similarly, the daily motion of the
>earth, according to Copernicus, is precisely its rotation once a day
>on its axis.  It is therefore false (according to Copernicus) to say
>that the earth has two motions, one rotation and the other a daily
>motion.  It is also false to say that the sun is at the center of
>the earth.  Thus Galileo should have had no difficulty about signing
>the document.
>
>Is there any evidence that this is not just ingenious twisting of
>words?  Four considerations come to mind.
>      (1) Torricelli, Galileo's friend and pupil, best known as the
>inventor of the barometer, when he heard that Galileo had repudiated
>Copernicanism under oath, said, "Alas, he is damned.  He has sworn
>falsely."  But when he saw the text of the recantation, he said, "Oh
>joy, he is not damned."
>      (2) When the tribunal presented Galileo with their draft of a
>recantation, he flatly refused to sign it.  He then negotiated a
>revised text, which he did sign.
>      (3) Both Galileo and the members of the tribunal were men who
>chose their words carefully, and who knew the art, essential in
>politics whether ecclesiastical or otherwise, of wording a document
>to as to convey the impression of saying more, or less, than is
>actually said.
>      (4) At least some of the tribunal members (Santillana argues a
>majority of them) were themselves of the Copernican persuasion, and
>would be sympathetic to a resolution of the matter that gave the
>Pope his personal revenge but without forcing Galileo to repudiate
>what he and they believed to be the truth.
>
>The Galileo episode has often been cited as evidence that Science
>and Religion (some prefer to say, Science and Theology) are by their
>very nature irreconcilable enemies.  In fact, a close look at the
>Galileo episode seems to me to yield two morals both quite different
>from this.
>
>One moral, of course, is that if you need a permit from a board in
>order to do something, whether publish a book or have your property
>rezoned, it is unwise to pull the nose of the chairman of the board
>in public.
>
>Another moral is that if you establish a government committee to
>safeguard public morals, the committee members will assume as
>self-evident that nothing could be more subversive of public morals,
>and therefore of the very foundations of society, than a deed that
>strikes at the guardians of morality by making the members of said
>committee look personally ridiculous.
>      Example:  The Watergate scandal began because the press was
>obtaining confidential reports out of the Nixon Administration, and
>high officials were determined to learn who was responsible.  In the
>process of trying to learn, they cut corners.  One might have
>expected the investigating committee to be keenly aware that there
>are things more important than stopping leaks to the press.
>However, some stories appeared in the press about the committee,
>including, for example, a statement by one committee member that
>another member was apparently incapable of answering any question,
>including, "What time is it?"  without first frowning and staring at
>the ceiling for several seconds.  (A perfectly correct observation,
>by the way, which is precisely why it caused such a commotion.) The
>committee responded by taking off a full week from the job of saving
>the country to conduct a full-time investigation into the question
>of who had been betraying his sacred trust by reporting confidential
>information to the press, information that, by making the committee,
>the guardians of the Constitution, look silly, amounted to an attack
>on the Constitution itself.  (My source here is an article in the
>WASHINGTON MONTHLY at the time.)
>
>The over-all theological atmosphere of Galileo's time and just
>before was far from a rigid commitment to the idea of a fixed earth.
>Nicolas of Cusa, who died a century before Galileo was born, wrote,
>"When we say that the earth does not move, we mean simply this, that
>the earth is the point from which man makes his observations of
>celestial phenomena." A modern physicist discussing relativity
>theory could not improve on that.  During Galileo's lifetime, the
>Inquisition was officially asked whether someone who revealed in the
>confessional that he held the Copernican view and was not about to
>give it up should be denied absolution as an impenitent heretic.
>The official answer was "no".  I conclude that the punishment of
>Galileo was based, not on any conflict between his view and Church
>doctrine, but on the Pope's regrettable but unsurprising conviction
>that anyone who publicly makes a laughing-stock of the Pope is
>striking at the foundations of all that is good and decent and must
>not be permitted to get away with it.  Urban VIII is by no means the
>only public figure to reason like this.  I feel the urge to give
>several more examples, but this post is already too long.
>
>
> James Kiefer
>
>---
>>
>>Stephen
>>
>
>John

Jim Lippard              [e-mail]
Dept. of Philosophy      [e-mail]
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721