Why Catholics Built Astronomical Features into Churches
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
In college, though, I discovered that many influential Catholics strongly reject the idea that Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic Church because the Church disagreed with his theory or felt it threatened to undermine its teachings:
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/the-galileo-controversy
tl;dr - It's more complicated than the typical anti-Catholic narrative suggests. The episode was primarily a clash of personalities (Galileo was a jerk and insulted thin-skinned Vatican officials who misused their power to punish him), rather than a dispute about science, or even a dispute about the intersection of science and religion.
The statue faces the Vatican, which is apparently not an accident.
Perhaps astronomy wasn't the only reason, but clearly the church was against any message, however scientific, that conflicted with their message. Scientists have this nasty habit of having evidence that complicates shutting them up while they live.
EDIT - Grammar
You bet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism#1616_ban_against...
In February 1616, the Inquisition assembled a committee of theologians, known as qualifiers, who delivered their unanimous report condemning Heliocentrism as "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture."
This even landed Copernicus a spot on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (posthumously) even though he had been a Catholic cleric himself.
Another interesting bit of trivia: far from being a medieval artifact of ignorance and oppression, the Index existed until 1966. Galileo received an apology in 1992, and as far as I'm aware Giordano Bruno remains unpardoned.
But by all means, let's go back to the business of rehabilitating Christianity on the grounds that Bruno was a heretic, Hypatia a pagan, and Galileo an annoying jerk who got what was coming to him.
Another thing worth remembering is the historical context we're talking about. The list of books banned by Catholicism had a far more important meaning when the Catholic church was a state (or an instrument of the state). It hasn't been that for a very long time.
† (or, if you like, mainstream organized religions)
As for why monarchies (and theocracies) do inquisitions, just imagine what would happen if there were a Catholic majority in British parliament, a Muslim majority in parts of Spain back then or some non-Muslim majority in Saudi Arabia. The Church of England would be disolved by act of parliament and those territories would rebel and institute their own monarchs under their religions. The existing governments are not so stupid as let such things happen, so they to try to stay well ahead of them, both then and now. That way all of the existing bureaucrats will keep their jobs and everyone in the business of selling religious objects of the state religion will continue to meet quarterly earning expectations.
I usually try to steer clear of non-technology comments on the internet, but I felt that my 2 cents were sorely needed in this discussion. This back and forth fixation on inquisitions in Catholic countries ignores the larger picture where the religion that the government of the particular country chooses is irrelevant to whether any sort of inquisition is done.
> an easy one since slandering the Church is acceptable and even respectable today
Slandering the church...
They have opposed science... molested children and protected molesters... Started wars... controlled countries... and if you are an atheist you might think that the very idea of religion is peddling in lies. I happen to think that.
Any secular group protecting molesters or starting a single war would not exist long enough to be slandered. They committed crimes and rode Jesus to avoid prosecution. Many of those individuals died hundreds of years and avoided justice, but the organization that enabled it still exists.
> It's all too common that people think it's okay to slander anyone you don't like or disagree with.
I am not for slandering the church. I acknowledge that the organized religions are a net loss for humanity and I would see them dismantled. What little good they do I would see replaced with secular institutions that are accountable for their negative actions.
You never hear about a school, corporation or non-profit NGO immolating or imprisoning people they disagree with. A group of otherwise moral people burning a human alive requires god.
We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo ... have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture
Also of interest, Galileo's recantation: http://law2.umkc.edu/Faculty/projects/FTrials/galileo/recant...
Other documents, such as those where Galileo was supposedly forced to abjure under threat of torture, use language which could be considered legal boilerplate of the day. He was not tortured nor was he in any real danger of being tortured. Galileo, old and frail, was put under house arrest and assigned a servant. As Alfred Whitehead put it, “In a generation which saw the Thirty Years’ War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honourable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”
Because history is a stage of many actors and many forces, it is also worth noting that Copernicus dedicated "De Revolutionibus" to Paul III, and that his theory was met with interest by Clement VII as well as several cardinals (e.g., Schoenberg). Luther, on the other hand, vehemently rejected heliocentrism. Tycho Brahe argued against it. The point here is that the story of Galileo is repeated ad nauseum by people all too eager to believe in the fairy tale of the big, bad Church and the narrative that the West has been progressively liberating itself from its grip, beginning with the Reformation and followed by the Enlightenment. The more one becomes acquainted with the story of Galileo, the more one sees that it is to a large degree a story of an ornery scientist who was scientifically irresponsible in his aggressive promotion of an unproved hypothesis and who lent fodder to his enemies and made enemies of his friends by engaging in harassment and personal attacks. That does not perhaps justify his condemnation and subsequent house arrest, but all things considered and during an age when brutal punishments were the norm, it seems a little more than ridiculous to hold this up as an example of great conflict between the Superheroes of Science and the Villainous Church. Indeed, it is no accident that science flourished in the West. I refer those interested to Duhem who traces the ideas of physicists such as Newton to scholastic thought.
Too many people saw that Cosmos episode which was amazingly inaccurate.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/giordano-bruno-cosmos-heret...
"Agora" and Hypatia - Hollywood Strikes Again
http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/05/agora-and-hypatia...
Hypatia and "Agora" Redux
http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2010/05/hypatia-and-agora...
The big bang theory and a ton of other scientific discoveries have been made by catholic clergyman and laity.
Obviously, burning anyone at the stake is majorly screwed up, but it wasn't to cover up science.
Firstly, I say that the theories on the movement of the earth and on the immobility of the firmament or sky are by me produced on a reasoned and sure basis, which doesn’t undermine the authority of the Holy Sciptures […]. With regard to the sun, I say that it doesn’t rise or set, nor do we see it rise or set, because, if the earth rotates on his axis, what do we mean by rising and setting[…].
That was part of his defense recorded during the interrogations shortly before his executions. Sadly, I don't read Italian, so the primary source Il sommario del processo di Giordano Bruno by Angelo Mercati is inaccessible to me.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20120615050646/http://www.bruno-g...
Narratives are a model. Some are more accurate than others, but ultimately all of them are just models which simplify history (sometimes in verifiably false ways).
We have a word for that: propaganda.
I hate when the "Oh, there's more to this story" attitude is used to defend the wrong narrative. I see it all the time on the internet. Edison is on par with Hitler for some reason, Lincoln is a war mongering criminal for going against the peace loving Confederate states, etc. The larger narrative is dismissed for smaller details that are presented in a way to distract or contradict the larger narrative. Its purposely viewing the trees and ignoring the forest. Sadly, its a popular way for disingenuous people to promote their views.
Some of Galileo's points, for example his explanation of tides in term of heliocentrism, were downright wrong---which is fine, but trying to mix theology and astronomy, which he did, and putting the pope's theory in the mouth of a character called "Simple" were not the best political moves.
So if anything, Galileo's story is about the Church being on the side of science, not against it.
If the Catholic Church didn't take that as a threat to their legitimacy I'd be surprised.
Similar shit happens today where people who question the efficacy of e.g. capitalism are effectively silenced (media control and subtlety allows voices to be silenced without imprisoning or killing people these days)
Those prove heliocentrism. The fact that Galileo's model had worse predictions for the planets positions was much weaker than that observation.
AFAIK the first serious "proof" (as far as we can talk about proving that the Sun is the center of everything) was the observation of stellar parallax some century later. In Galileo's time parallax was too small to detect and it was an open question whether stars are too far to observe it (postulated by Copernicus) or Earth is actually immobile (postulated by Tycho Brahe et al).
His was the find the exception that contradicts the rule kind of science/theorem proving.
They weren't completely incorrect. There are two aspects you want to look at when evaluating those models. The first is their predictive power, which was the best for the times, and better than the stuff Galileo proposed[0]. Which made Galileo's model incorrect in this regard. The second aspect is explaining the model in terms of more basic laws - this they did not do at all, and nor did Galileo's model. The required theories that allowed to derive heliocentric model from first(er) principles were only formulated later by Newton, which only then invalidated the geocentric models.
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[0] - from mathematical point of view, all models that give the same results are equally correct; the only thing one cares about is which one is simpler / more useful for you.
This isn't mere pedantry, a good example of epicylic type theories being used to modify the system under study, can be found today in modern economics.
I think the idea that if his heliocentric model was more accurate it would have meant the Church instantly accepting him is extremely faulty. He was convicted of going against geocentrism in the bible, not being a bad scientist. The idea that the Catholic system was a strict meritocracy open to change is ridiculous. It defended its status quo and its scripture unfairly using absurdly powerful institutions like the Inquisition, in which it is more or less impossible to get a 'fair' trial, even by the low standards of theocratic justice.
Being an asshole to a very powerful politician (especially one that knows you personally) generally gets you into trouble, no matter the day and age.
> Thirdly, to Catholic Apologists :
> (1) Avoid the mistake of minimizing the official action of the Church authorities, or of understating the ground of their condemnation. The official documents plainly embody the view that the Copernican theory was not only "false" but also "heretical" because "altogether contrary to Scripture"; and Galileo was condemned as "grievously suspected of heresy," which heresy is defined as holding that the earth moved and the sun stood still." It is precisely in this dogmatical pronounce ment on the heretical character of the new astronomy that their blunder consisted.
> (2) Do not try to cloak this blunder by arguing that Galileo brought all the trouble on himself by meddling in theology, or by his aggressiveness of manner. The clash with theology was inevitable, and must be forced upon him ; and his defence on this point was entirely sound and unexceptionable. His aggressiveness explains the amount of human passion which was aroused against him, but does not extenuate the act of condemning officially as heresy a doctrine which we all now know to be totally free from heresy. That Galileo was imprudent in forcing an official pronouncement does not diminish the error which the official pronouncement contains.
> (3) Avoid also laving too much stress on the fact that Galileo was contumacious to Church authority. His contumacy might justify a disciplinary punish ment ; but once more, it does not cloak the blunder of charging his doctrines with heresy.
> (4) There is no reason for trying to exonerate the Popes from all share in the action of the Congrega tions. Although their names do not appear in any official capacity, there is no doubt that they were fully conversant with what was being done ; that they partly directed the proceedings ; that they approved and sanctioned the decrees issued and the sentences pronounced. Our defence on this point lies simply in the fact that the Pope's approval of the acts of a Congregation does not raise them to ex cathedra definitions.
The Copernican model held that planets moved in circular orbits at uniform angular velocity--which is sufficiently wrong that it required only a few less epicycles than Ptolemaic astronomy. You can't fall back on "it's more accurate" since the results weren't really any more accurate. Yet, for this inaccurate results, a Copernican would have to explain:
* The lack of stellar parallax
* How the Earth can rotate around the sun
* Why we don't fall off the planet
* Why the rotation of the planet doesn't throw us off the planet
The Copernicans had no good answers for these questions--the latter were eventually explained by Newton's Law of Gravitation which proved to cement the transition away from geocentrism (the accuracy of Kepler's elliptical orbit also provided another major impetus for the transition, since it didn't need any epicycles. Incidentally, Galileo saw Kepler as a Copernican heretic and viewed his model of planetary orbits as utter rubbish).
Stellar parallax was resolved when we actually found it--in the 1700s. The Copernican attempts to explain it were weak and sometimes involved actual heresy on the nature of God, declared as such by the Catholic church 100s of years prior. Tycho Brahe gave a fairly comprehensive, scientific denunciation of Copernican astronomy based on his stellar observations.
Incidentally, your number for the deaths caused by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition is off by over an order of magnitude. The Spanish Inquisition appears to have executed only around 2000 people, and that for all of the major executions put together doesn't seem more than around 10,000 people. In general, the Inquisition's goal was mainly getting heretics to convert, not executing them: only around 5% of guilty sentences produced executions in the first place.
Not on astronomical grounds, but on philosophical ones. His observations (mountains on the moon, phases of Venus, sun spots, moons of Jupiter) led Galileo to the conviction that the celestial bodies were made from the same materials as terrestial ones. Remember, aether wasn't just the stuff that filled the space between the celestial bodies, it's also what those bodies were supposedly made of, allowing them the rapid daily motion you have to posit if earth is not supposed to rotate. One of the arguments formerly brought forth against terrestial motion gets thereby neatly turned on its head.
The problem was that while personally I find this line of reasoning rather convincing, it's not a smoking gun, which led Galileo on his quest for more direct observational evidence, eg his (incorrect) theory of the tides.
One could make the argument that at the time it was normal to persecute someone because they insulted you and I don't want to get into that whole debate about moral relativism, but that's not the defence you've brought up.
I mean, ultimately they convicted him of heresy for his claims. It's not like they were "We condemn you to house arrest for being a dick!". They were like "We condemn you to house arrest for heresy since you claimed the Earth goes around the Sun!". And on top of that they go and repudiated his ideas. So not only did they say that the claim was false, they also said that it was such a terrible claim that it qualified for one of the highest kinds of crimes (heresy).
There's no need for anti-Catholicism here.
I did not mean to imply that there isn't another side. Only that the gulf between poor ideas (and invective) and persecution leading to conviction on grounds of heresy (and its attendant results) is so large that it is not meaningful to defend the actions of the Catholic Church on the basis that someone was impolite in their discourse with its leaders.
The strategy of casting oneself as a victim is a tried and tested method of gaining a politically useful yet illusory moral high ground with which to bludgeon your opponent, and the Church has no shortage of enemies.
So why exactly were, say, Giordano Bruno or Jacob Hutter burned? It might not have been as widespread as some people believe, but it clearly did happen.
https://aeon.co/ideas/opposition-to-galileo-was-scientific-n...
It does not refer to the actual incident of persecution from the Catholic Church.
THIS IS WRONG and a Myth that Galileo was persecuted by the church.
> After all, the Church rather infamously persecuted Galileo in the 17th century for suggesting that the Earth is not, in fact, at the center of the cosmos, and that, by extension, Church doctrine relating to God’s orderly plans for the world were inherently flawed.
Decent quick read on Galileo myth that the church was fighting science.
It had a lot more to do with competing scientific claims and more specifically the attack of Aristotle.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2016/04/17/galileo-a...
Regardless, the church has a long history of: appeals to authority, discouraging debate, irrational attachment to previous ideas, and overly complex hypotheses (e.g. God) - all of which counter the methods of science. While the role of the church in the evolution of 'science' has certainly been complex, it's not much of a stretch to say that the church has a history of fighting the essential components of the scientific method.
Of the 21st Century Scientific Method? Are you also going to look down at the Greek Philosophers? Their method was also wrong. You are judging history with a 21st Century mindset and that isn't fair to Newton or Copernicus (Who's myth is also bigger then Galileo). Heck medicine was still doing blood letting during the founding of United States.
> it's not much of a stretch to say that the church has a history of fighting the essential components of the scientific method.
That is such a wrong statement and has been debunked by the fact that science was propelled through and by the church. The VERY fact that this article list all the scientific / Astronomical features in Catholic Churches
Sorry I was in the process of getting a PhD in Historical Theology and not a Pro Catholic shill.
*
Francis Bacon was really the founder of the modern Scientific Method, correct? Did you read his other book?
Like his translation of 7 Psalms from the Bible or his many essays and books regarding Theology? Science and Theology didn't clash like people would like to say and I actually say the reverse we are ahead of the technology curve because of the Church, Mosques and Synagogues. This war we see from extremism is actually a very modern creation.
at the height of the Church’s calendar problem, in the second half of the 16th century, the eastern Church and the western Church were an incredible ten days out of sync with one another. This was only reconciled in 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII implemented what has become known as the Gregorian calendar reform.
This doesn't sound right at all. Why would the church calendars be out of sync at the time? In fact, it was the Gregorian reform that put them out of sync. They are still out of sync and the gap is growing.
Bonus history trivia question: What month did the Russian October Revolution happen?
There is the Eastern Orthodox Church (Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Bulgarian Orthodox, Georgian Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox, etc.) - This is all one Eastern church.
There is the Oriental Orthodox Church (Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox, Malankara Orthodox, etc.). This is all another Eastern Church.
There is also the Assyrian Church of the East, but ever since the war in Iraq and rise of ISIS, it's all but destroyed at this point.
Between those 3, those are the only "eastern" churches in existence apart from tiny schismatic groups. However, when someone refers to the Eastern Church, they are almost always referring to the first one, the Eastern Orthodox Church, since it's enormous and sat at the center of the Byzantine Empire.
In contrast, there is single Catholic Church, and just a century prior to Gregory's time it united all Christians in the Western Europe, apart from a few heretical / protestant movements here and there.
Galileo got off easy even after having violated the ban and insulting the pope.
If you have a few hours to spare, read "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" for an entertaining trip into that period.
http://tofspot.blogspot.ch/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smack...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_degli_Angeli_e_dei...
Sadly, I don't know if I'll ever have the chance to go back. =((
There are non-Christian sources mentioning the crucifixion of Jesus within few decades afterwards.
If they think that crucifixion was a common motif in religions of the time they would better provide some examples. Their /cr.htm just repeatedly states it as fact.
No, this "Orpheus crucifixion" stone doesn't count because it was probably created by Roman Christians who were known to combine Jesus with Orpheus in their art due to the obvious parallels. And the original Greek myth of Orpheus says nothing about crucifixion.
Film at 11.