On the topicality of Galileo

"I was astounded to discover how topical the issue of Galileo's trial still is in the Vatican", writes Colin Blakemore in the Observer. He is plugging his Channel 4 documentary, part of the History of Christianity series (uneven, but generally quite good) in which he tackles the thorny issue of religion v science.

I must say it doesn't surprise me. It would only surprise someone who thought the question at issue was whether the sun revolved around the earth, or vice versa, and that once that question was settled (it turns out that the earth revolves around the sun, sort of) there was nothing left for the church to do but issue a humiliating apology. But it was much more significant than that. More than anyone else, Galileo can be blamed (or congratulated) for driving a wedge between science and religion. Before his trial, the church neither endorsed nor condemned the heliocentric theory. Officially it taught the Ptolemaic universe, which seemed to be compatible with the Bible (it wasn't) and which matched closely with other facets of its theology (the notion that Jesus had "come down" from heaven, for example). But it was not a point of dogma: late medieval Christianity was not a form of Biblical fundamentalism.

Galileo deliberately set out to destroy the cosy consensus by which the ideas put forward by Copernicus were generally tolerated (if not officially supported) by the religious authorities and challenged them to disprove his version. In an open letter addressed to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany he argued that scientific statements apparently incompatible with scripture should either be accepted (in which case scripture would be reinterpreted) or repudiated - if they could be disproved. For him there was no middle way. He wrote:

As to propositions which are stated but not rigorously demonstrated, anything contrary to the Bible involved by them must be held undoubtedly false and should be proved so by every possible means.

The corollary of this was that:

Before a physical proposition is condemned it must be shown to be not rigorously demonstrated.

Galileo was (so he thought) challenging his detractors in the church hierarchy to put up or shut up. In that sense he was much closer to Dawkins than to the non-confrontational Charles Darwin, who never claimed that natural selection was incompatible with Christianity. He was not an atheist, but he was an early proponent of the view that science and religion had battles to fight on territory that overlapped. He would have had no truck with the argument that science and faith represented separate "magesteria" - that the one explained the "how" of things while the other explained the "why". For him, there was only one magesterium, one worldview in which everything had to be explained. And when the findings of observational science were set against the writings set out in scripture, scripture must ultimately cede the field.

By stressing the need to accept or to disprove his ideas about the nature of the solar system, for which he thought his discovery of the moons of Jupiter provided irrefutable evidence (it didn't) Galileo forced the church authorities back into a position of fundamentalism and opposition to science. Since they had most of the power, and since the Counter-Reformation was then in full flow, his stand could only be described as foolhardy. I suppose that is why he has gone down as science's great hero-martyr.

In a speech he made in Parma in 1990, the then Cardinal Ratzinger claimed that the trial - which ended with Galileo forced to recant his scientific discoveries, and confined to years of house arrest - was "little regarded at the time" and only later became a "myth of the Enlightenment... the force of progress and liberation of humanity from the chains of ignorance that kept it impotent in the face of nature". The future pontiff also quoted approvingly the words of the philosopher Paul Feyerabend

The church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Gaileo was rational and just, and revisionism can be legitimized solely for motives of political opportunism.

When these remarks were dredged up years later, the pope was roundly condemned as an obscurantist, defending one of his church's darkest hours. In fact he was thinking like a postmodernist. He was denying the special status of scientific knowledge - arguing that since Galileo was not right in every particular he was not, in some fundamental sense, right where the Inquisition was wrong. He went on to describe the current status of the trial as "a symptomatic case that illustrates the extent to which modernity’s doubts about itself have grown today in science and technology", and even entertained the speculation that if the church had been tougher on Galileo there would have been no atomic bomb.

Ratzinger a postmodernist? Bizarre, I know, but there you are.

It is trivial to say that Galileo was right about the mechanics of the solar system. It is much less trivial to argue that, therefore, Galileo was correct in seeing his scientific discovery as a defeat for religion. The church of the time, a less confrontational account of the trial might say, overreached itself by trying to exert control over an area of knowledge that did not belong to it. It knew about theology and salvation: by attempting to control science it was acting outside its natural competence. Today, the same charge is made against the "new atheists". His opponents charge Richard Dawkins with "scientific fundamentalism", of asserting that there is no limit to what might be brought within the sphere of scientific explanation.

While it is clearly nonsensical to describe Dawkins and the Ayatollah Khomeini as occupying two extremes of the secular-religious continuum, scientific realists and scriptural literalists do have something in common with Galileo and his clerical opponents: a unitary conception of knowledge. All religions make claims that are incompatible with science, however much they pretend to themselves and others that this is not so. It is incompatible with science (as it is currently understood) to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, or was born of a virgin, or that an angel dictated the Koran, or that the human body is inhabited by a soul that previously dwelt in other bodies.

Ultimately, the notion of non-overlapping magesteria will not work, because it rests upon a denial of the possibility of absolute truth which both science and religion assert. Either the consistency of the laws of physics is dependent upon the forbearance of a Supreme Being (science is a subset of religion) or religion is a purely human construct/ genetic predisposition which might have valuable points to make about morality and personal behaviour, but is ultimately wrong. Religion and science may have different general concerns, but at important points - such as the nature of the universe, or the nature of human beings - they are interested in the same things, but expect different answers. Conflict is therefore inevitable.

It's not surprising to find Colin Blakemore in Galileo's camp. He writes:

Perhaps we humans come with a false model of ourselves, which works well as a means of predicting the behaviour of other people - a belief that actions are the result of conscious intentions. Then could the pervasive human belief in supernatural forces and spiritual agents, controlling the physical world, and influencing our moral judgments, be an extension of that false logic, a misconception no more significant than a visual illusion?

I'm dubious about those "why" questions: why are we here? Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? Either they make no sense or they can be recast as the kind of "how" questions that science answers so well.

For him, in other words, religion is something that science will ultimately explain, or even explain away. That is not the inevitable outcome, however likely it may appear. Even the bus slogan only claimed that there is "probably" no God. Dawkins believes that there is almost certainly no God. Other scientists believe that there is a God. That is a perfectly reasonable belief to have; what is more questionable is the assertion that God will always be outside or beyond scientific explanation. If God exists, or the soul exists, then they can in principle be known. Science is the procedure by which knowledge is discovered. If God exists, science will one day find him. Science has nothing to fear from such an eventuality, although scientific atheists would find themselves with some difficult explaining to do.

The danger for religion, of course, is that science will one day - perhaps soon - discover a theory of consciousness, a theory of cosmology, a theory of the origin of morality and of religious experience that, put together provide an entire explanation of both the nature of things and the phenomenon of religion. That really would be curtains for the God hypothesis; and I personally doubt that religion could survive it. It would have been exposed as a placebo, and placebos only work if you believe that they are genuine drugs.

The result is a strange inversion of Pascal's famous wager. One should bet that science, rather religion, is true, because while science may one day either prove, or destroy, religion, religion will ultimately have to accept science's answer.