Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [35]
Scientists know a remarkable amount about the universe, but we also know that much more remains to be understood. A great deal remains beyond the reach of current experiments—or even any experiment we can dream of. Yet despite our limitations, each new discovery lets us advance another rung in our ascent toward truth. Sometimes a single step can have a revolutionary impact on the way we see the world. While acknowledging that our ambitious aspirations are not always satisfied, scientists steadfastly seek access to a richer understanding as advancements in technology make more of the world’s ingredients accessible to our gaze. We then search for more comprehensive theories that can accommodate any newly acquired information.
The key question then: who has the capacity—or the right—to look for answers? Do people investigate on their own or trust higher authorities? Before entering the world of physics, this part of the book concludes by contrasting the scientific and religious perspectives.
WHO’S IN CHARGE?
We’ve seen that in the seventeenth century, the ascent of scientific thinking splintered the Christian attitude to knowledge—leading to conflicts between different conceptual frameworks that continue to this day. But a second source of division between science and religion was about authority. In the eyes of the church, Galileo’s claim to be able to think for himself and presume the capacity to independently understand the universe deviated too far from Christian religious belief.
When Galileo pioneered the scientific method, he rejected a blind allegiance to authority in favor of making and interpreting observations on his own. He would change his views in accordance with observations. In doing so, Galileo unleashed a whole new way of approaching knowledge about the world—one that would lead to much greater understanding of and influence over nature. Yet despite (or more accurately because of) the publication of his major advances, Galileo was imprisoned. His openness in his conclusion about the solar system saying that the Earth is not the center was too threatening to the religious powers of the time and their strict interpretation of scripture. With Galileo and other independent thinkers who precipitated the scientific revolution, any literal biblical interpretation of the nature, origin, and behavior of the universe had become subject to refutation.
Galileo’s timing was especially poor since his radical claims coincided with the heyday of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church’s response to its Protestant offshoots. Catholicism felt itself seriously threatened then by Martin Luther’s advocacy of independent thought and interpreting scripture by looking directly to the text, rather than through an unquestioning acceptance of the church’s interpretation. Galileo supported Luther’s views and went even a step further. He rejected authority and furthermore explicitly contradicted the Catholic interpretation of religious texts.22 His modern scientific methods were based on direct observations of nature that he then tried to interpret with the most economical hypotheses that could account for the results. Despite Galileo’s devotion to the Catholic Church, his inquisitive ideas and methods were too similar to Protestant thinking in the clergy’s eyes. Galileo had inadvertently entered into a religious turf war.
Ironically, the Counter-Reformation might nonetheless have inadvertently precipitated Copernicus’s espousal of a heliocentric universe. The Catholic Church had wanted to ensure that its calendar was reliable so that celebrations would occur at the right time of year and its rituals would