William Reville
Professor William Reville rejects two historical arguments that science and the Church necessarily contradict
each other
The function of science is to discover the natural mechanisms that explain the natural physical world of matter and energy, and it carries out this function remarkably well. However, science has nothing to say about values, ethics, aesthetics or the supernatural.
The function of religion is to teach us how to live good lives. Religion has no competence to explain the natural physical world, a matter fully accepted by mainstream Christianity, although the Church was somewhat confused on this point at times in the historical past. Science has no competence to teach us how to live good lives, although it provides data that, along with other considerations, can help us to decide on ethical matters.
A charge often laid against the Church to show it in opposition to science, is the teaching that it was heretical to say that the Earth went around the sun, because this contradicts certain passages in Scripture, and that it tried and convicted Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) on this charge.
This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Opinion
The Church was not alone in its opinion about the configuration of our solar system. A significant number of astronomers in Galileo’s time, perhaps the majority, did not accept the sun-centred model of the solar system championed by Galileo and originally proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) in 1543.
The most famous astronomer of Galileo’s time, Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), did not fully accept the Copernican heliocentric system.
Galileo had some evidence that the Earth moved around the sun, but he did not have proof. The Church asked him to publicly discuss the Copernican system as a hypothesis only until such time as proof became available, but Galileo persisted in arguing that the heliocentric model was factually correct.
One powerful objection to the Copernican model at the time was the failure to detect any parallax in the position of stars when viewed from Earth at different times of the year. If the heliocentric model was correct then the position of stars should change (parallax) in the sky when viewed from Earth at different times of the year because the angles of observation of the stars would be different from different points on the circle of Earth’s rotation around the sun.
We now know that no parallax was detected then because the stars are so far away that the amount of parallax is very small, too small to be detected by the crude telescopes available in Galileo’s time.
Star parallax was not demonstrated until 1838 by the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel (1784-1846).
The Church was wrong to pronounce on the configuration of the solar system because religion has no competence to explain the natural world.
This was understood by some wiser cardinals at the time – Cardinal Caesar Baronius (1538-1607), quoted by Galileo, remarked that “the Bible was written to teach us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go”.
The Church was wrong to interfere, but it did reflect the average scientific opinion of the time.
Another example often cited is the Church burning the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) at the stake, which is seen simply as an ignorant impulse to suppress advanced scientific ideas.
But it seems that the Church’s disagreement with Bruno was mostly on theological grounds.
Bruno was a highly unorthodox priest. He questioned the divinity of Christ and he practised magic. Bruno enthusiastically supported the Copernican heliocentric model.
This was not considered to be heretical by the Church in Bruno’s time. Bruno further claimed that the universe is of infinite size, the stars are each suns like our own, circled by earth-like planets that teem with life.
The idea that the stars are suns is a key astronomical idea that was then way ahead of its time and was a considerable feat of intuition on Bruno’s part. However, Bruno was no scientist and he arrived at this conclusion, without data, through philosophical reasoning as a corollary to his theological belief that God and souls fill the entire universe.
Bruno was eventually tried by the Inquisition on eight charges of heresy, including denying the divinity of Christ, denying the virgin birth, denying transubstantiation, practising magic, claiming that animals and objects have souls and claiming a plurality of worlds.
He was convicted of heresy, turned over to the secular authorities and burned at the stake in 1600. It seems clear from the list of charges that Bruno would have been convicted of heresy even if he had never made scientific pronouncements.
The Church was wrong to prosecute Bruno for saying that life exists elsewhere in the universe. But again, the belief that life was confined to Earth was the general conventional thinking at the time, not just in the Church.
And to send Bruno to his death for his views was appalling. The Church represents Jesus Christ who taught us to love and to forgive our enemies, not to burn them alive.
Judgments
However, society was very different in the 17th Century to what it is today and it is inappropriate to adjudicate on ideas and judgments made then using 21st Century standards. We must see things in context.
Back then, religion explained everything to people, scientific as well as spiritual, and heresy was viewed with dread as a threat not only to one’s spiritual welfare and the fate of one’s everlasting soul, but also to the secular order of the world. This was also a very cruel world by modern standards – the penalty for damaging a shrub in a London public garden was death.
Yes, historically the Church made mistakes in its attitude to science. But, viewed in context these mistakes were not nearly so great as they are usually painted and the Church has learned from them.
There was never a second Galileo affair. Galileo is regularly quoted to demonstrate an intrinsic contradiction between science and religion but the truth is that there is no contradiction.
We should no more mistrust mainstream Christianity’s attitude to science because of Galileo and Bruno than we should mistrust chemistry because it arose out of the pseudoscience of alchemy.
William Reville is an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at UCC. http://understandingscience.ucc.ie
