Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [21]
The celestial phenomena will be examined, strengthening the Copernican hypothesis until it might seem that this must triumph absolutely.
And later in the book he confessed,
Nor can I ever sufficiently admire [Copernicus and his followers]; they have through sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over what sensible experience plainly showed them …
The Church declared, in its indictment of Galileo,
The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both psychologically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.
Galileo replied,
The doctrine of the movements of the earth and the fixity of the sun is condemned on the ground that the Scriptures speak in many places of the sun moving and the earth standing still … It is piously spoken that the Scriptures cannot lie. But none will deny that they are frequently abstruse and their true meaning difficult to discover, and more than the bare words signify. I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.
But in his recantation (June 22, 1633) Galileo was made to say,
Having been admonished by the Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth was not the center of the same and that it moved … I have been … suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the center of the same, and that it does move … I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the same errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church.
It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo’s work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.
Pontifical disquiet with modern science has ebbed and flowed since the time of Galileo. The high-water mark in recent history is the 1864 Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX, the pope who also convened the Vatican Council at which the doctrine of papal infallibility was, at his insistence, first proclaimed. Here are a few excerpts:
Divine revelation is perfect and, therefore, it is not subject to continual and indefinite progress in order to correspond with the progress of human reason … No man is free to embrace and profess that religion which he believes to be true, guided by the light of reason … The Church has power to define dogmatically the religion of the Catholic Church to be the only true religion … It is necessary even in the present day that the Catholic religion shall be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship … The civil liberty of every mode of worship, and full power given to all of openly and publicly manifesting their opinions and their ideas conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people … The Roman Pontiff cannot and ought not to reconcile himself or agree with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.
To its credit, although belatedly and reluctantly, the Church in 1992 repudiated its denunciation of Galileo. It still cannot quite bring itself, though, to see the significance of its opposition. In a 1992 speech Pope John Paul II argued,
From the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment down to our own day, the Galileo case has been a sort of “myth” in which the image fabricated out of the events is quite far removed from reality. In this perspective, the Galileo case was a symbol of the Catholic Church’s supposed rejection of scientific progress, or of “dogmatic” obscurantism opposed to the free search for truth.
But surely the Holy Inquisition ushering the elderly and