Galileo: Consequences of Religion and Science

By Adolph Caso (Presented at Northeaster University, and Bryant College)

 

Was Galileo a revolutionary or a rebel?

     In view of the consequential results of being convicted by an institutionalized corporate Inquisition, we can conclude that Galileo was a revolutionary.

     Galileo Galilei 1564 to 1642 lived during a time that can be called High Renaissance, in which individuals were active in a society that was gaining high cultural levels on one hand and unbearable upheavals on the other. Who were those individuals and what resulted from their actions?

     One of the early ones that come to mind is Christopher Columbus (1451 to 1506)—not because he discovered a route that benefited the world, or because he applied scientific principles to the art of sailing that made the age of discovery possible, but because he was mistreated by the Spanish government and continues to be mistreated by many modern-day revisionists—much as Galileo was mistreated by the Church about 100 years later.

 

In name and in person, Columbus remained an unknown. By discovering a route which introduced Europeans to new land masses, Columbus unwittingly accomplished a great feat, though he was neither a rebel nor a revolutionary. Although his feat may be second only to Christ in importance on world history, for many people, Columbus remains a negative image, even though he had nothing to do with slavery or with the subjugation of millions of Native Americans. And he had nothing to do with the thousands of men and women whose piles of skulls attested to indigenous human sacrifices.

     The logs show that Columbus was hardly in charge of his first crew. Remember that Captain Pinzon continuously disobeyed Columbus’ orders. On his subsequent three voyages, Columbus was only a figurehead. He was never in charge of the thousands of Spaniards whom he landed on the coast of the New World, and he was never in charge of the crew, that could not have sailed, without the captainship of Columbus. In fact, Columbus was imprisoned by those very people and only reprieved by Queen Isabella.

     Ironically, Columbus is maligned by the same people who enjoy an opulence made possible by him. A sadder commentary is that the ancestors, of those who malign Columbus, were no less ruthless and truculent to their own people as they were to all those whom they themselves conquered.

     Columbus was driven by a need to sail, to discover, and to explore, and not to conquer, to subdue or to kill. Remember, it was his Church with its popes that abolished slavery in South America, and not in North America, where slavery increased! Read Columbus’ daily logs, and see for yourselves who were the true scoundrels! Biographical records show that he lodged one claim against the Spanish Crown whose King reneged on fulfilling the terms of their agreement.

     Spain gained untold wealth without giving the agreed percentage to Columbus. At his death, he was neither rich nor honored, but certainly forgotten. Neither the local authorities nor the Spanish Crown made public mention of his passing!

     The results of his actions can be measured in two ways:

 

1.      By the hundreds of thousands of pre-Columbian sacrificially decapitated human skulls, unrelated to military action, found in the New World after his first voyage,

2.      By the millions of other human beings saved from that murderous practice, had Columbus not made his 1492 voyage, and his subsequent uncontested three voyages!

 

     With his first voyage, Columbus showed how to travel from point A to B and vice versa by applying and observing rules he had discovered. He made three more voyages applying the same rules. Later, after the first circumnavigation of the earth, Europeans, like Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo accepted the fact that the earth was round, that the sun and not the earth was the center of the universe. Columbus made that discovery possible even though he did not know he had discovered any new land, or that the sun was the center of the universe. His information reached Americo Vespucci. Having sailed the waters of Columbus, Vespucci deduced that the land masses were new. On giving the information to the German cartographer Waldseemüller, Vespucci gave the Americas their name designation. As for Columbus, he never pretended to have discovered anything!

     At the end of his life, he showed meager profits at best for the work of his lifetime. Had he not gone to sea, he would have had more or less the same amount of wealth that he actually had before going to sea.

     As for the world, it is hard to imagine our history without America’s presence. Columbus guided the Europeans to new lands. Yet, he is rebuked both for the good things he did and for the awful things that others did. A worse fate awaited Galileo. In guiding the Church through his research that opened new frontiers in science, he was rebuked by fellow Catholics who had once been his champion.

 

Because Galileo was a natural critic of every thing he touched, he was a true revolutionary, but one with a conscience. He was aware of his being a creature of God, and especially aware of his surroundings, knowing the causes and effects of actions and consequences, and never to loathe taking sides regardless of the issue.

     In literature (with his critical notes on Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata), or in religion (wherein as a novitiate he received a free Jesuit education without being ordained priest), he saw things differently. This may explain why he was condemned by the Inquisition, why he fathered three illegitimate children without legitimizing two of them, and why he was often at odds on any given subject with friends and colleagues.

     As a scientist, though, he is recognized as the father of modern science. Although he conducted experiments whose results were proven in error, he was an authentic genius for his compulsion to prove hypothesis through scientific experiments and for his sincerity in giving credit and credibility to principles discovered by others.

     Were Galileo born in the eighteen hundreds, he would have been a consummate protagonist of the Age of Romanticism. What made him a tormented soul, however, was that he was a scientist trained by a Church which was being challenged by one catholic rebel from Germany by the name of Martin Luther; he would hold the fate of Galileo in the balance.

     Martin Luther (1483 to 1546) rebelled against the Church because he resented the Vatican’s power over the Germans. Luther could not tolerate Rome’s monopoly over the people of Germany; he especially disliked how the Vatican yielded its rigid, confiscatory, civic, religious, and administrative control over them. Why should a foreign country have so much control over the citizens of another nation? Having discovered the Church’s Achilles heel, Luther placed the blame squarely on the Vatican, and found, as we will see later, at least two ways of displacing the Vatican’s spiritual and physical presence.

     During this time, while the economies were prosperous, the Vatican built superstructures of Churches and religious institutions. When money was available, the Church expanded its overhead. But when that money began to diminish, the Church devised the infamous plan of indulgences to raise the needed money to pay for the bloated structures. If, in looking at the possibility that the Vatican was going bust, we could conclude that Luther was a lifesaver because the system he had wanted to destroy in the end remained strong and dominant. Indeed, he provided a check and balance on the Church’s out-of-control spending. Sounds familiar?

     Thus began the Reformation with its consequent Counter Reformation that saw Northern European Catholics indiscriminately killed by manned pitchforks. The victims can be measured in the hundreds of thousands! It is hard to imagine the carnage that issued from those actions. The consequences were dire for the Catholic religion, and for all other religions, like Lutheranism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Quakerism, Puritanism, the Shakers who doomed themselves to extinction with their non-procreation stand, Calvinism, Zwingli, Baptists, and more denominations and many more non-denomina-tions. While Martin Luther gained new power and honors, Galileo succumbed to the Inquisition which condemned him to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. Why?

 

The plight for Galileo and others began in Greece with Aristotle and in Israel with the assertions that God had made man in his image and that man had dominion over a land in which Israel was its center.

     While the science of Aristotle was disproved, biblical assertions were not—except that Aristotle’s cosmology had become the central part of Judeo-Christian theology.

     While conflicts abound between religion and science nevertheless the Church Fathers incorporated Aristotle into their theology. They should have realized that while science becomes disproved on a regular basis, faith is either rejected or affirmed.

     With Eratosthenes, who gave precise measurements of a round and flat earth, Greek counterparts invented a science, which placed the earth at the center of the universe with a sun rotating around the earth. The Church adopted that concept, and Aristotle became the basis of its theology.

     By making the earth the center of the universe, the Church naturally projected a God with human attributes and, it imposed concomitant restrictions on that image.

     God created things that were seen and unseen, known and unknown, possibly imagined, or even created or re-created by man himself. The latter is what happened with Claudius Ptolemy, the best known scientist of the first century AD. His several books on mathematics, poetry, astronomy and astrology became the backbone of the Church throughout the middle ages up to the Renaissance.

     Ptolemy reinforced the Church’s Aristotelian theory like no other scientist or lay person. His illuminated manuscripts were filled with astronomical illustrations describing the role of the sun and planets revolving around the earth, and all controlled by the earth. His became known as the Ptolemaic system—a geocentric model in which the earth played the key role in the universe. To bolster his System, Ptolemy substantiated his conclusions with mathematical formulas to prove how each astronomical object moved and behaved, and how everything was due to a Christian God of unlimited power.

     Unlike Fibonacci, whose mathematical number sequence known as the Fibonacci numbers have only been deciphered in the first decade of 2000, Ptolemy’s formulas have yet to be proven one way or another. In spite of many attempts to interpret them, scientific analysis seems to be negative while its aesthetics continue to be positive.

     In trying to bolster their theology, advocates made the system an issue of faith. Worse, with the facts disproving the system, instead of accepting the obvious, they spurned their own catholic scientists, often with death threats. One of these scientists was Polish; two were Germans, each impacting heavily on the Church and on Galileo. Ironically they were practicing Catholics in the best tradition of a Church which accepted and financed mathematicians and scientists alike.

     Nicholas Copernicus (1473 to 1543)—a revolutionary from Poland, on publishing a heliocentric theory of the sun and not the earth as its center, upended Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s geocentric models. Yet, he was appointed canon of the Frombork Cathedral—Luther had not yet appeared on the scene. Copernicus also studied law, medicine, and astronomy. A copy of his 1543 book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, was given to him on his death bed. The publication included a preface by Andreas Osiander, a catholic who later became a Lutheran scholar.

     Copernicus spent lots of time in Italy studying law and medicine. In Bologna, he became an assistant to the famous Italian astronomer, Domenici da Ferrara, with whom he published his, On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres. Copernicus did this as a practicing Catholic, without interference from anyone. His book became a seminal work for astronomy and a challenge to the Church itself.

     A German mathematician, Johannes Kepler (1571 to 1630) was to play a bigger role in upending the geocentric theory of Aristotle and of Ptolemy. A mathematics teacher in an Austrian seminary, Kepler was also an expert in optics which resulted in a first-line telescope. On expanding the work of Copernicus, Kepler captured the imagination of scholars, theologians and astronomers. His future, however, was to become inextricably tied to the fate of Galileo.

     The image of God, however, began to enlarge and to change drastically with Giordano Bruno. When Bruno defined a God without dimensions, and with words such as infinity and eternity, he became doomed and paid for it with his life.

     Neapolitan by birth, Bruno was a basic Catholic, having studied with the Augustinians and Dominicans, and being ordained priest in 1572. Because of his research on mnemonics, he made presentations before the Pope. In publishing, On the Infinite Universe, he exponentially increased the power and image of God. Today we see that image continuosly expanding due to space exploration and the likes of radio telescopes.

     The single universe, with its fixed stars in an unmovable firmament, was no longer one universe; it now contained numberless quantities of stars, galaxies, and who knew what else. If the universe was so large, as to be infinte and eternal, with God its creator, the image had to have had attributes commensurate to the new dimensions.

     But, could God run the risk of becoming incomprehensible and inconsequential to human beings? Was God no longer reflective of its biblical human face and Hebrew geography?

 

We need to make two observations regarding the Bible and its role in Western Civilization:

 

1. In slaughtering animals instead of human beings in sacrificial rituals to God,

    Abraham brought mankind on its first step to civilization.

2. In democratizing slaves and nobles in the eyes of God, St. Paul brought about

    sociology to modern man.

 

Before asking more questions, we have to make two additional affirmations:

 

1. We need an image of God, lest we want to be animals!

2. We need a Jerusalem, lest we want to be lost--body and soul!

 

If the universe is infinite, where is its center? Now that the earth and the sun have suddenly diminished in size and importance, in what sphere does God metaphorically reside? If black holes were in existence at the time of Bruno, could God reside at one of its ends? In exploring outer space, is it possible that there may not be a single black hole? If the universe is infinite, would it be more logical to deduce there are no black holes at all, or that there are infinite numbers of them?

     Giordano’s problem was not due to the inability of the Church to process the new speculations and scientific discoveries; his problem did not begin with the Church either. And it wasn’t because he believed in the new science, wherein the sun was the center of our universe and not the earth. And, it certainly was not whether the clergy were corrupt, nor whether the Church was abusive of its power. His problem began in Germany with the rebel Martin Luther, who, as we have seen, challenged the indulgences imposed by the Church.

 

It may have been a pretext, but, in fairness to Luther, his actions were justified. Indeed, the problem began with Luther, with his Reformation, with his attempt to reform the Church through the publication of his, Ninety-five Theses. On being rejected and repudiated by the Church, Luther single-handedly brought about one of the biggest schisms in the history of the Catholic Church, and brought about two results with heavy consequences:

 

      1) He successfully wrested power away from the Roman-controlled Church.

      2) The Church instituted its own devastating Counter Reformation.

 

Those were the results, and he achieved those results by doing three basic things:

 

      1) He implemented the idea of salvation through faith alone, and through the

          intercession of ministers who replaced priests and Popes. (In view of the fact

          that humans need assistance from time of conception to that of death,

          one should also see and accept that as evolving human beings, we may also need

          spiritual assistance).

      2) He established and required obedience to the Bible alone—sola scriptura

          with new ministers to develop, guide, and control human behavior—

          notwithstanding the Bible’s basis on centuries of oral traditions, and

          notwithstanding the fact that there are as many manuscripts of the Bible

          as there were scribes.

      3) He rejected Vatican Bulls as well as the Bible produced by St. Jerome, whose

           Vulgata still forms the basis of St James’ edition, and replaced it with

           an edition of his own.

 

Having seen the danger posed by Luther, the Church Fathers instituted internal defensive programs to silence criticism as well as external offensive programs to curtail the expansion of Protestantism. The Counter Reformation was born, and the consequences were immense. Survival was at stake!

     Having recanted a first time on charges of heresy, Bruno received a reprieve from the Inquisition, which saved his life. On the second accusation of heresy, Bruno was unable to recant—the evidence on his infinite universe was much too clear for his science and for his conscience. On February 17, 1600, he was executed, his body burnt on a public pyre.

     Caught in this vise-grip, worthy scientists were doomed; and revolutionaries, like Giordano Bruno, paid the maximum penalty for having sustained the heliocentric theory.

 

Another scientist at odds with the Church was Bernardino Telesio (1509 to 1588). Calabrese by birth, he was truly a great philosopher; his scientific method was of great importance and was of immense influence on scientists like Bruno, Campanella, and Galileo. Later, he also influenced Francis Bacon and René Descartes. With his attacks on Aristotle’s geocentric theory, Telesio’s publications finished on the Index. Without repercussion, he fared better than Bruno or Galileo.

     Tommaso Campanella (1568 to 1639) also from southern Italy was denounced for his stand against Aristotle and Ptolemy (and for his support of Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo). Campanella was confined to a monastery but his life was spared. In view of what was happening to colleagues who publicly proclaimed the heliocentric theory, many felt that in publishing their works meant committing suicide. These situations were worse than the dreaded witch trials of Europe and later of America! A veritable crucible became the basis of the Inquisition. Its members were charged to defend catholic orthodoxy against all attacks. Protecting the faith became paramount. Once in its grip, no one was spared, not the least Galileo.

     Empiricism!

     The revolution against Aristotle (as much against the Church) started with Kepler and concluded with Galileo. Kepler’s research on optics and Galileo’s subsequent invention and practical use of the telescope became the key to unravel science, to unravel the Church, and to unravel the men themselves.

 

When Galileo looked into the heavens with his telescope and saw that the earth orbited around the sun and not the other way around, he realized his eureka moment. The sun burned into his eyes! How could he deny what he was seeing?

     On giving his newly discovered information to other scientists who confirmed the same results, how could they deny it? But while they all confirmed Galileo’s observations, the Church denied those same scientists, not because its priests disagreed with Galileo but because Martin Luther had become the thorn that brought about their irrational behavior.

     Suddenly, all the work on science had to be rejected, not because the science was faulty, but because it threatened to destroy the Church from within—the same Church that was being destroyed by Luther from without.

     “Eppur si muove!” (Nevertheless it is moving!) Galileo supposedly exclaimed as an aside on being grilled by the Inquisition. Whether he said it or not is not the issue. The issue is that he showed, empirically, the earth orbiting the sun, that nothing, not even the Church, could change that truth. His life on the line, Galileo succumbed to the inquisitors and recanted. Bruno’s image, on the burning pyre, must have made a lasting impression. Having become blind, Galileo spent the rest of his life as a devoted catholic—surely tormented in his faith, but possibly enlightened by his science.

     He had started with what was known as the cannocchiale in local jargon, and ended up inventing the telescope. His fame, however, took off with the experiment he conducted at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

     By dropping two similar balls of different size, he was able to demonstrate that the balls fall at the same rate of speed. He did not attempt to discover whether the balls would fall parallel to each other—an experiment yet to be conducted. Nevertheless, his experiment (conducted or imagined) gave another result contrary to that of Aristotle.

Thus Galileo started what came to be known as the scientific method for which Einstein referred to him as the father of modern science.

     In the persona of Galileo, there are no traits of rebellion, or personal needs to accumulate wealth or power, or to gain control over other people. He was a revolutionary because he used the scientific method, through which scientific speculations made him draw conclusions that were different from similar conclusions derived from intellectual speculations. Yet, because he was a true and devout man of religion, he neither criticized nor rejected his faith. Had Martin Luther not erupted onto the international stage as he did, we can be sure that the lives and times of Galileo would have been different. Better science would have most likely been forthcoming.

     Unfortunately, organizations like Churches, corporations like entities, governments like nations, and social units like families—all evolve from simple cells, into complex structures which in order to exist always require more controlled input and more rigid applications. Once established, these entities protect themselves at all costs.

At times, they succumb to rebels and revolutionaries.

     If Luther had not had the agenda of wresting power away from Rome, he would have had different results. The fact is that he got involved politically and was successful in maintaining and in securing his position, even though he was excommunicated by Pope Leo X in 1521. But, in view of the consequences, the excommunication turned out to be a mistake. The Pope should have established a Lutheran Order, as his predecessors had successfully done with other revolutionaries.

     Lutheranism has become an institution, a structured religion within Christianity. Many more have emerged not because of limitations imposed by the Catholic Church but by the protestations within each newly created structure. The result has been that while the Church has retained its diversity through orders as the Franciscans and Carmelites, the Protestant Church continues to divide into independent religious denominations at odds with each other, all facing the same old reality: buildings are built, organizations established, programs administered, people employed, and all needing funds to function. Look at any religious TV program and you readily see Bible-based histrionics blatantly requesting contributions. How do old indulgences differ from today’s contributions? Compared to our modern preachers, Luther’s reactions to indulgences would pale. Institutionalized religions are no different today; they fiercely protect themselves now as they did at the time of Galileo. Take the issue of science and religion.

 

Galileo became the target of the Inquisition because of Aristotle. Today, Darwin has become a target of newly-born Christians—not because Evolution may or may not be a true science (that is, that the mechanism used to prove evolution may be faulty and that Evolution may be a faulty invention of scientists), but because Darwin likens humans to monkeys. Not created in the biblical image of God, monkeys, apes and all other things also have to reflect God, the creator.

     Singling out monkeys does not seem fair to those animals, and the problem seems obvious. To counter the proponents of evolution, modern religious leaders go to the four corners of the earth to prove otherwise. They are blind to realize that their orthodoxy becomes lame when challenging the theory of evolution through creationism or intelligent design. Pitched battles and skirmishes abound with no end in sight.

     The lessons of Galileo have fallen on deaf ears or on un-thinking hearts. Scientific theories are always revised or overturned. Faith, however, based on belief, is neither reversible nor over turned. God can never be the subject of evolution. Considerations on the Evolution of God have to be purely and insensibly fiction. God’s man-made images may be tested by scientists and believers. God cannot be tested. How do we test immanence?

     When God is defended by individuals of faith or by scientists, corporate science and organized religion suffer. Galileo, the revolutionary, became a victim of that abuse. And Luther the rebel became no less a victim, be it of his own doing! They were simply the victims of their own institutions.

 

In view of the observations above, we should conclude that Martin Luther and the Church were rebels with hidden agendas. Luther purposefully fought to wrest control away from the Church, and the Church fought back to maintain that control. As for Columbus and Galileo, the true revolutionaries with no hidden agendas, they were simply caught in the overpowering struggle of established institutions at loggerhead.

     To think that Columbus to an extent and Bruno and Galileo specifically were made to live their last days under house arrest even though they caused no one to lose his or her life!

 

Because no official of the Spanish Crown, or Luther himself, or any official of the Church was ever brought to trial—the time may be ripe to open such a trial now! After all, Galileo was retried a few years ago and was exonerated. Should not the same procedures be initiated to exonerate the King of Spain, Martin Luther, and the Pope himself!