Fr Sean Fernandez: a Church that fears science? Look again

The trial of Galileo is usually put forward as an exemplar illustrating the hostility of the Church to the sciences. On one side there is the noble, clear-sighted scientist, and on the other side you have the reactionary, dogmatic Church. I beg to disagree with this picture. There has not been a long history of conflict between the sciences and the Church. The Galileo case is more the exception than the rule.

At the outset I should say what did not happen to Galileo: he was not tortured or executed. The punishment the Holy Office of the Inquisition imposed on him was that of house arrest in the Villa Medici – a Roman palazzo belonging to the family of his patron and employer. Shortly afterward he was allowed to repair to the residence of a friend, the Archbishop of Sienna, before eventually being confined to his own home.
I am not making light of the punishment. House arrest was not inconsequential and the injury to his reputation did pain Galileo. The greatest grief for him may have been the Inquisition’s requiring him to abjure his own theories and not disseminate them further.
The issues surrounding Galileo’s hypotheses and trial are complex and I cannot go into great detail here. If you wish to read up on these events, I would recommend a book by William Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome.
Did the sun and planets revolve around the earth – as Ptolemy and Aristotle taught and the Scriptures presumed – or did the earth revolve around the sun – as conceived by Copernicus?
Galileo developed a heliocentric model along Copernican lines.
I would like to address a few issues with regard to the Galileo affair. First, the clash was not one between pure science and pure faith; nor did it pit the lonely hero, Galileo against the might of the institutional Church.
Galileo had his supporters in the Church hierarchy and many of those who disagreed with his ideas admired the man and his formidable intellect.
He was very intelligent, but he was not tactful and he offended many powerful people. For example, he mocked Pope Urban VIII in his book The Dialogues; it is never wise to beard powerful princes and in the case of the Pope it was also unkind for he had shown Galileo favour.
Other theologians and natural philosophers such as Cardinal Bellarmine, had sought to counsel Galileo, urging patience; he was seeking to overturn the thinking of centuries and to succeed he was going to need cast-iron proof, proof he did not at that time have. He was advised to suggest that his heliocentric system was simply a useful calculational tool. However, he wanted to say that it was more than that; it was a true description of the solar system. This was too radical and led to his condemnation for heresy.
Galileo continued to be much admired after his condemnation. Indeed the execration of his book, The Dialogues, made it all the more highly sought after.
Despite the result of the trial, the Church was not so wedded to the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model of the solar system that it would ignore accumulating evidence. It did not take long for the condemnations to be quietly dropped, though Galileo was not to survive long enough to see his model adopted.
Galileo was not the only keen observer of the skies, though he may have been the greatest of his age. Before Galileo burst onto the scene, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII had promulgated a new calendar based on astronomical observation which is the very calendar we use today. A key figure in the calendar reform was Christoph Clavius SJ; Clavius was a mathematician at the Roman College – later the Gregorian University (to give my alma mater a plug).
The Observatory of the Roman College was to witness much groundbreaking work including Fr Angelo Secchi’s pioneering work on stellar spectroscopy. To this day the Vatican operates an observatory, one of the oldest in the world. The Church has had an interest in the other sciences as well; in 2003 the Vatican celebrated the 400th anniversary of the prestigious Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
There are many examples of a positive relationship between the Christian faith and science: there are more than 35 lunar craters named after priest-scientists (most of them Jesuits). The list of churchmen who have craters named after them reads like an honour roll: One finds Fr Jacques de Billy SJ – the mathematician who produced several solar and lunar tables; Fr Francesco Maurolico – a Benedictine who was a close observer of the heavens and first sighted a supernova in Cassiopeia in 1572; and Fr Gregor Mendel – an Augustinian whose work on heredity helped lay the groundwork for genetic research.
I have written of priests, but there were many more Christian laymen who contributed in manifold ways to scientific discovery. These saw no conflict between science and faith. Many would have shared Galileo’s belief that “Sacred Scripture and nature both derive from the Divine Word, the former as dictated by the Holy Spirit and the latter as the faithful executrix of God’s commands.”
We must not forget the lessons which Galileo’s trial teaches.
The Second Vatican Council taught that “by the very circumstance of their having been created, all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order. Man must respect these as he isolates them by the appropriate methods of the individual sciences or arts.
“Therefore, if methodical investigation within every branch of learning is carried out in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, it never truly conflicts with faith, for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God” (Gaudium et Spes 36).
When Darwin posited his evolutionary hypotheses, Church teachers – I am speaking of the Catholic Church – were not greatly perturbed. The centuries have made us more serene about such things.
Those who reject evolutionary theories based on a fundamentalist reading of Genesis would do well to read the story of Galileo.
Two final points: I think that there is strong evidence to back the claim that modern science was born of the transformation wrought by the Judaeo-Christian vision. One can trace this transformation back to the creation stories.
These are extremely sophisticated ‘myths’ and stand in sharp contrast with other myths of the Ancient Near East. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, for example, the world is born of blood and violence; it has a precarious existence, prey to the whims of the gods.
This is in contrast to the serene vision of the first book of Genesis where the one God creates and orders by his word. This view, taken up into the Christian vision and radicalised, would inspire the search for knowledge, the systematic ordering of human knowledge and the development of the scientific disciplines, for it spoke of a reasonable world which the human person with his God-given intelligence could seek to understand and order.
Note that I am not claiming a monopoly on research on behalf of Christendom, there were contributions made to the sciences from many other cultures. However, the sciences found their systematic form in the Christian milieu.
So how did the opinion that the Church is hostile to science become a commonplace?
Professor Martin Rudwick in his tome on the history of geology, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, discusses this very issue. He argues, cogently in my opinion, that the perception of perpetual conflict between faith and science is a projection into the past by contemporary historians of their experience of the fundamentalist brand of Christianity which is currently influential in the United States.
In his book he shows that up to the 19th century universities were not primarily places of research, but of teaching. Amateurs did the research, and these same men (and they were men) advanced scientific research.
One finds many clerical and lay Christians amongst these amateurs including Fr Julian Tenison Woods.
History teaches that the idea of conflict between the Christian faith and science is an invention of the last century and of atheists with their own agendum.
We need to know our history. The history of the Ccshurch over two millenia is not always edifying, but it also shows that it was the Gospel – the treasure held in earthenware vessels – which changed the world into one which made it possible for the sciences to arise.
Galileo in Rome is available from The Record Bookshop for $39.95. Contact 9227 7080 fore more information.