Imagine the pope being a man of science a couple of hundred years back... How much better the world could be.
The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale. There are always exceptions like Galileo, but it took science a long time to start answering (and contradicting) some of the key questions about our world and where we come from that religion addresses.
Current scale? What current friction do you have in mind. I honestly cannot think of anything with the Catholic church. Lots of friction with evangelical Biblical literalists, of course, but the Catholic Church is not literalist.
> There are always exceptions like Galileo
The Galileo case is more about personalities and politics. it is a very good example of why religious authority should be in the same hands as secular power, but it is not really about his beliefs - no one else (including Copernicus) faced opposition for the same ideas.
Did you forget a "not"?
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
Well, considering that Galileo basically called Pope a fool, and the punishment he received was home arrest, this affair is not really the best evidence of Church prejudice, backwardness and cruelty.
And if we agree with Feyerabend, Galileo of today would probably has as much difficulty as the original one, for the initial evidence he provided wasn't strong enough to discard knowledge of that time.
Even the epitome of the science-church conflict, the Galileo story, started from a scientific disagreement before the religious one[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_Mersenne
[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
Every honest description of Catholic Church, as any institution of this size and history, needs to be very nuanced. One of such nuances is a fact that it was one of the main, and sometimes strictly main, supporters and drivers of education and scientific progress. Other such nuance is that it very often punished and persecuted attempts to bring education and scientific progress.
Both views of the Church are true. That's what nuance is.
More advancements... No being opposed to actual enlightenment, because it doesn't sit well with the institution of power...
I am talking about a real man of science here of course, not some egoistic, smart person that needs to be constantly prove they are the smartest or else their frail ego will collapse... Which there are plenty of in academia and science.
Moral virtue has nothing to do with being a man of science, and many men of science lacked it completely.
And started(?) Jews being killed in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres
I'd prefer Satanism for sure, but I don't really care.
Often? Very rarely, and the motive was never to stop progress - it was side effect of something else.
The Pope encouraged Galileo to write a book about the issue and cover both sides in neutrality. Galileo did write a book, but was rather on the Asperger's side of social behavior, and decided to frame the geocentric position (which aligned with the Pope) as idiotic, defended by an idiot - named Simplicio no less, and presented weak and easily dismantled arguments. The Pope took it as a personal insult, which it was, and the rest is history.
And notably Galileo's theory was, in general, weak. Amongst many other issues he continued to assume perfectly circular orbits which threw everything else off and required endless epicycles and the like. So his theory was still very much in the domain of philosophy rather than observable/provable science or even a clear improvement, so he was just generally acting like an antagonistic ass to a person who had supported him endlessly. And as it turns out even the Pope is quite human.
The geocentric position is silly and wrong. There are no two sides here.
Neutral writing only means that it is not overtly prejudiced, and the weight of the evidence speaks for itself. That's definitely not what Galileo wrote. He was eventually widely considered to be right, but that didn't help him any.
The Tychonic model was probably the one best supported by evidence.
its worth bearing in mind that the Copernican model is also badly wrong - the sun is not the centre of the universe, just the solar system.
Geocentric models may look silly with the benefit of hindsight, but Galileo’s claim that the Copernican model was proven was entirely unwarranted at the time. The evidence did not exist until much later.
So what made Galileo decide otherwise was not any particular flaw with geocentricism, but rather he thought that he'd discovered that the tides of the ocean were caused by the Sun. That is incorrect and also led to false predictions (like places only having one high tide), so the basis for his theory was incorrect, as were many assumptions made around it. But it was still interesting and worth debating. Had he treated 'the other side' with dignity and respect, it's entirely possible that we would have adopted a heliocentric view far faster than we ultimately did.
It has always been known that the tides are caused by the Moon. The hard part is to predict the tides in detail, as they depend on the geography as well. Some of the first computers were invented to predict the tides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system
Was already a thing, though.
[1] - https://galileo.library.rice.edu/sci/observations/tides.html
Both positions were build on top of aether, quintesence and Celestial Spheres. The result was silly and wrong no matter which one you picked.
Back then Galileo’s theory wasn’t exactly provable and while he did get the core idea right he was still wrong on quite a few important things.
e.g. Tycho‘s model solved quite a few questions that Galileo couldn’t at the time.
e.g. Stellar parallax was a big issue that was conclusively solved until the 1800s
Galileo's affair wasn't about noble scientist going against stupid masses and oppressive institution designed to keep people in dark, while providing strong evidence for revolutionary theory, and being punished for his great genius.
But it is often presented like this.
The real story here is one that has played out endlessly in history in various contexts. And is a great example of why The Golden Rule is something valuable to abide, even if you're completely self centered. It also emphasizes that all people, even the Pope, are human - and subject to the same insecurities, pettiness, and other weaknesses as every other human. And more. It's a tale of humanity that has and will continue to repeat indefinitely.
But when you turn it into a story of good vs evil, you lose all of this and instead get a pointless attack on one institution, which is largely incidental to what happened. For instance you can see the Galileo story clearly in the tale of Billy Mitchell [1] who went from suggesting that air forces would dominate the future of warfare (back in 1919!) to getting court martialed and 'retired' for his way of trying to argue for such. His views would go on to be shown to be 100% correct in 1937, the first time a plane downed a capital naval ship. However, he died in 1936.
But people have so completely internalized the idea that truth must bow to power that they think the fact that the Church condemned Galileo's ideas because he was rude somehow exonerates it as an institution.
>The first use of firearms as primary offensive weapons came in the 1421 Battle of Kutná Hora.
"I Aim at the Stars" was the name of a real biographical movie made about him in the 60s. It feels like that exact title had to have been chosen, at least partly, tongue in cheek.
It turns out that scientific brilliance has basically zero overlap with ethical wisdom. Science is great, but it’s not a replacement for philosophy.