Episode 38 - Galileo's Legacy and the Church's Role in Enlightenment Thought

Embark on a journey through time as we unravel the pivotal transformation from the celestial contemplations of Aristotle and Ptolemy to the heliocentric breakthroughs of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. 

We'll navigate the entwined paths of ancient cosmology and Christian theology, revealing how a millennium-old synthesis of ideas was challenged and reshaped by the scientific revolution. Witness the tension between persistent beliefs and the burgeoning quest for empirical evidence, as we uncover the pivotal moments that redefined our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

Our conversation takes a compelling turn as we examine the nuanced interplay between religion, science, and the emergence of post-modernist thought. The Protestant Reformation, often misconstrued as an adversary to scientific progress, is revealed in a new light, underscoring its unexpected role in propelling rational inquiry. We'll discuss the impact of Christian scientists on the heliocentric model and the scientific method, dispelling myths of ecclesiastical antagonism toward reason. As notions of truth and certainty are increasingly questioned in today's society, we ponder Nietzsche's prescient insights on the post-Christian world, exploring the evolving landscape of rationality and identity. Join us for this thought-provoking examination of the shifting sands of belief, knowledge, and the very essence of truth.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Well, welcome to episode 38 of the Christ-Centered Cosmic Civilization. We're continuing to look at science and we're sort of right in the middle of looking at the whole revolution with Galileo and moving from the Potolomaiic system, cosmology developed by Aristotle, then by Potolomy, and then kind of largely integrated into the great Christian worldview that really existed for 1500 years in one form or another. Certainly we could say a thousand years. There was this integrated worldview that had many elements that were from this Aristotelian Potolomaiic universe, but it was also filled with genuinely biblical Christian material as well. So, with the Potolomaiic pagan view, with the crystalline spheres think of the entire universe as an enormous sphere and then inside that another slightly smaller sphere and then another slightly smaller sphere inside that, like hollowed spheres. So there's all these layers of crystalline spheres forming the universe and they are moving. If we really want to get into it, there's actually on the outer extreme, there's an outer sphere that's rotating in the opposite direction. Anyway, let's not get distracted by that, for now there's all the crystalline spheres and in those that's the stars and the planets and that sort of thing are in those, and then as we come in towards the Earth, which is at the center of this order you get to the point of the Moon and the Moon is in this close range and the universe really is what's above the Moon. What's above the Moon is that's the celestial crystalline spheres, and what's below the Moon, the sub-lunar world that belongs to Earth. So that's the Potolomaiic world. It's very, very ordered, structured, predictable and so on, and then that'll be. Yeah, I'm always tempted to get right into all the subtleties of it and why things move in the odd way that they do with that system, but it was a very successful system. So the Potolomy from Aristotle provides that general framework.

Speaker 1: 4:04

But then what the Christian civilization did particularly well, yeah, the Christian, what that particularly Western Christian civilization populated that Potolomaiic universe with Christian content. So then angels were put into it and the saints and the order of, like the highest heaven where Jesus sits enthroned at the side of the Father and the Spirit, and all that with the saints and hundreds of millions of angels and archangels, all the company of heaven, all of that sits supreme overall. And then all the spheres and things are ordered hierarchically, cascading down from that throne of heaven, so that they kind of produced a synthesis of Ptolemy, aristotle, with some biblical material and lots of kind of Christian imagination. So that was the worldview and it was very successful at predicting the movements of the stars and planets. It wasn't like when people think of it now they portray it as like an eludicrously ridiculous scheme that anyone could see was not the correct view of the universe. But that is a totally false way of viewing it. It was actually extremely sophisticated and mathematically could predict the movements of the stars and planets very, very accurately, far more accurately than you might imagine if you've never really studied it. But it didn't do it perfectly and that was why there was always this constant concern to improve that model and have a better model, and that's why, as we considered, bishops would come up with better models and so on and well, not only bishops, like all kinds of Christian thinkers and so on. But it was very powerful. It did enable the stars to be, predictions to be made about the movement of stars and planets and so on, and it covered things like what we would call comets and things like that wandering stars and they are moving independently off the spheres, and things like this. Anyway, what would be done is that little improvements would be made in that modelling, but we know, of course, from our perspective that they needed to have a completely different model and ditch that old kind of Aristotelian-Petolomaic system from that sort of pagan ancient view to replace it with something that was much, much more informed by the observation.

Speaker 1: 7:40

But not just observation. It needs to be said that one of the sticking point is what is the status of stars and planets and things like that. So from a Christian perspective it was considered like the entire universe, the heavens and the earth, is made of essentially the same stuff, because all of it is created on the first page of the Bible, all in this week of creation. That's there. So they're all of the same order, essentially the same stuff, whereas for the pagans the super-lunary world above the moon really was of a totally different order of being.

Speaker 1: 8:30

So it was difficult to study that super-lunary world and imagine that it was behaving in the same way that material things on earth would behave, because there was this deeper belief that the super-lunary world was just intrinsically of a different order, a different kind of being. So there was always a problem because Christians in the Bible don't think you should worship the stars and the Bible. From the most ancient parts of the Bible say oh no, don't worship the stars and things. The Lord. God just made them. He made the heavens and the earth. One of the most repeated phrases in the Bible is that the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and that's tremendously important in this scientific revolution, this idea that the heavens and the earth are creatures of the same order, and so you study them all in the same sort of way, anyway. So it was difficult to completely overturn the model, because there was some of those pagan assumptions about the super-lunary world were deeply embedded and it was hard to get rid of them. But this is what happened.

Speaker 1: 9:58

Yeah, we've thought a bit about how Galileo did that, so that the argument around Galileo, kepler, copernicus, all that stuff, is really about how to get rid of this very ancient and successful view of the universe that was from Ptolemy and replace it with something better. And it's a kind of argument then, between Aristotle's cosmology and a more biblical one. So that's a big first point we've been considering. Now a second big point is and this is really important and we've already kind of said it that the proponents of the heliocentric view, so those that were saying no, the earth isn't the centre of the universe, it is the Sun that's the centre of the universe and earth is rotating on its own axis and orbiting around the Sun. The proponents of that view were deeply Christian and they were not thinking to themselves oh dear, I think the Sun is at the centre and therefore I must reject the church and the Bible. That's how modern people think it was. That having the Sun at the centre was like a crisis of faith for them, because they would think oh dear, if I believe that I'm rejecting the Bible, I'm rejecting church and I can't be a Christian and believe in a heliocentric view. That is laughable laughable. Of course. That wasn't what it was. In fact.

Speaker 1: 11:50

Galileo wrote a work explaining how to understand the statements in the Bible that mention the movement of the Sun, and he explained that the biblical authors are describing what is seen from the simple perspective of the observer rather than a technical cosmological model. So Galileo is like he's saying listen, these statements in the Bible are not to be understood like. Many statements in the Bible are simply the way people speak, and they're speaking from the perspective of the observer and using the normal patterns of speech that ordinary people do. From the perspective of an observer, they're not propounding a kind of view of the universe seen from above the earth or from some other perspective like that. No, he's saying, the Bible is describing things just from the simple language, the simple perspective of the observer. And so we, today, today, people I mean only this last week someone said that they'd enjoyed the sunrise.

Speaker 1: 13:20

Now I could, I suppose, because I've been preparing all these scientific things I might have been a real stickler and said you did no such thing. Well, how on earth can you still be holding on to a Aristotelian-Petolomeic view of the universe now, in the beginning, in you know 2024, are we in, yeah, 2024, how can you still hold a Petolomeic view? But of course, everyone speaks about sunrise and sunset and the mornings, like they'll talk about stars rising in the horizon and the whole way in which we talk about the universe in ordinary speech. We talk about sunrise and all these things Just from the perspective of us as observers, and we're not getting into a detailed cosmological model. I guess we all realize that the apparent movement of the Sun is produced or at least the model that we're using at the moment is produced by the rotation of the earth. And there is more we could say about this that when I did some post-doctoral research on scientific method.

Speaker 1: 14:43

I remember going through the diaries or journals of Copernicus, is it? I think it was Copernicus, I'm just going from memory now, but it was fascinating how the it was considered. I think it was Copernicus, not Galileo, who was saying the reason it's better to have more Christian, to have the sun at the centre of the universe is not like the. One of the main reasons in his own journals was not so much what we were called the scientific reason, but he said it's intrinsically better because the sun is obviously a kind of either the location of the highest heaven because look at how bright it is, you know it's light, or at least it's it is. It represents the throne room of heaven, the sun, and that is a much better thing to have at the centre of the universe, having this sort of manifestation of the heavenly throne room, which is the sun that moves in, you know, in our sky, and rather than having earth at the centre like it's better to have the throne room of Jesus, or at least something that represents that at the centre of the universe. That that I found fascinating. If I can find the journal notes for that, it's probably 30 years since I read those, but if I can find them I'll see if I can attach them to the podcast in some way.

Speaker 1: 16:23

Now this heliocentric model, then sun-centred model, was, it seemed to be more readily accepted and developed in Protestant nations. Now that could be because the centralised authority of the Roman Catholic Church was not so powerful, and so some people have said that that there's this sense that there's, there isn't a sense of church authority that might make people nervous to explore these alternative theories. That could be true and there may be an element of that, but it's a more complex thing and we may. We will be going into this in much more detail when we do a series on atheism later in this podcast, if the Lord allows us to continue this for the long term, because in the long term we'll do one about atheism, but it's the at the Reformation.

Speaker 1: 17:31

It's a complex thing because there's a desire to rid, to get rid of many, many things that are perceived to be superstitious, and there's a lot of those things, and there's like a puritanical purge and so lots of elements of the medieval world and culture are expunged, and so therefore there's like a greater readiness to get rid of the Ptolemaic worldview. But it's a mixed blessing, because with that purge Protestant purge there also is a purging of the angels from the universe and loads of biblical elements. Lots of the biblical worldview is also kind of purged in this desire to have a very trimmed down, stripped down, rationalistic. We've thought about the problems of rationalism that emerge particularly in England, but then also to a degree in the Netherlands and Germany. This really strong, and Geneva has it too later. But that kind of desire to have a very rationalistic view of the universe, in that sort of a purge, many, many biblical elements are also burned away in the acids, the acids of rationalism. So it's a complex thing that, yes, the Protestant nations had a capacity to more freely explore and develop these alternative models of the universe. But that also came at a certain cost and it's not totally clear, looking from our perspective now, that Protestants were better at science than Catholics or things. But that takes us in a different direction. So we'll leave that for now.

Speaker 1: 19:43

But the point is, look, especially from the 20th century, the story of Galileo has taken on a mythological status, embodying the idea that church is opposed to science, reason and evidence. And I often talk to non-Christian people who just assume that's a well-established fact that church is hostile to science, reason and evidence. And I've even had people just say to me things like I'm going to get into a bit of science and evidence now if that doesn't offend you. I've had people literally say that to me if that doesn't offend you. And I'm like how could that possibly offend me? But that, literally, is where the cultural mythology has got to, because, as we've seen, the precise opposite is true. The scientific method was developed by Christian people. It emerges out of a biblical worldview. It was Christian scientists who argued for the heliocentric view of the universe over against the Ptolemaic view. The great founders of the modern scientific movement were mostly devout Christians. Right up to the modern day, many of the most brilliant scientists continue to be passionate Christians.

Speaker 1: 21:17

But I want to end this little section by thinking about. Here's a quotation from Johann Kepler about this, and he says those laws, the laws of the universe, those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image, so that we could share in his own thoughts. And, if piety allows us to say so, our understanding is, in this respect, of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life. So that is Kepler just reflecting on something that we've articulated, hopefully clearly, that our capacity to understand the rationality, reliability and reality of the universe is itself our capacity to do that. It's itself a gift of God, and Kepler locates that very specifically in us the fact, as the Bible says, we are made in the image of God and really were designed to be able to think God's thoughts after him, for like join in the thinking that God has as displayed in the universe.

Speaker 1: 22:53

Okay now, the threat, then, to science is not from church. Obviously, the possibility of science is church, but there is a threat to science that we face and it's not from church. It's from what we might call post-modernism, because if what we've seen is we've talked about the rise of rationalism late 17th century into the 18th century, the rise of rationalism so trying to operate reason and logic autonomously as if it's self-sustaining thing, but when it's a tool, it's a very reason, logic, evidence, all this stuff very powerful tools, but they need to be operated in the way that they were intended and when reason is disconnected from its proper setting in this kind of cosmic civilization, when it is not sustained and strengthened and liberated by Christ, the Logos, it can become turned on itself and attack the very foundations of reason and order. And that is what has happened in the past 100 years. So people speak about the post-modern age as if it was something that occurred only at the end of the 20th century.

Speaker 1: 24:46

But many earlier thinkers saw that the loss of God, the loss of Christ in the culture, would mean the end of rationality, morality and truth and order as it had been understood. So we're going to think about Nietzsche for a moment here, but before we do that, let's just appreciate where we've got to. I'm speaking in 2024. There's this huge cultural alarm because the boundaries of what is considered order and scientific evidence, order, truth are immensely weakened, because what is a man, what is a woman, identity, biology, like tons of things that are just like, were, until, say, 10, 20, 30 years ago, just considered to be obvious. Features of reality are no longer considered to be obvious, and that it's to pick at problems and to all these things. What has been done is to pull at loose threads and keep pulling on them until the whole thing unravels. That is what the post-modernist situation is, is to notice the loose ends and to keep pulling on them until everything unravels.

Speaker 1: 26:33

And so there's a sense in which younger people today do mentally inhabit a world that has no, none of that sense of structure and order and rationality. The universe is essentially irrational to them and the idea that you can be whatever you want that when I was young that was meant to inspire you, that you could be a scientist or a train driver or you could write a novel or something like that, that was considered to be a little inspirational motto to help you push on and go for things. But now that is taken in an absolute sense. And not that long ago I was in a charity shop no, it was my daughter was in charity shop and there was somebody in who believed that they could be it was either a mermaid or a unicorn, and it wasn't just that they wanted to role play, that they genuinely believed that they could be that and that that would be their actual identity. Now, what? What is the what?

Speaker 1: 27:53

I don't want to just pick on these extreme, these culture war extreme items. I only touch on those because there's complexity to those things about identity and who gets to define what is a man and a woman and all that. They're not totally simple things about identity and why we feel a struggle of identity and what it's. What about our biology and all things like that. There is not they're not utterly trivial things, but the loss of any anchor points in the conversation for many people that that is a massive threat to the scientific project, that there isn't really that belief in the rationality, reliability or even reality of the world as it was understood in these past 400 years that enabled the scientific project to happen.

Speaker 1: 28:51

So let's think a little bit about Nietzsche, this and this and this. No, I tell you what. We won't start on Nietzsche now with the it's too big of a thing, but we're going to think about the philosophy, nietzsche and how he had predicted this unraveling of rationality and really science. And he knew that you can't like that kind of rationality and morality that had been developed and created, this amazing civilization, christian civilization. Once you take away Christ from that, that civilization will collapse. It will collapse and that that needed. He wanted people to face that squirrely and realize that and and possibly embrace it.