My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
Ah, no, Galileo would seem to have written the letter that famous quote comes from to Johannes Kepler, a letter of 1610, Galileo's trial was in 1633. You can tell who he is talking about refusing to look from the quote, "what can you say of the learned here" by which he certainly would have meant people with the mathematical and astronomical knowledge to have understood what they were looking at. There were certainly some priests who would have had that ability, after all, it was Copernicus who inspired Galileo to look and Copernicus was a priest, as some of his greatest supporters were bishops and cardinals and at least one or two Popes. Galileo knew that, he said so in one of his most famous letters.* But in this case, he was talking about the scientific establishment of his days, the the university based teachers of the Ptolemaic system.
It would have been hard for him to write a letter to Kepler complaining about his treatment in his trial at the the Vatican as Kepler had died in 1630. You know, BEFORE THE TRIAL. The reason he was tried, his book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, wasn't published until about two years after Kepler died.
I hadn't known it before but fact checking my recollection, I note that the Brit pantomime villain of the bio-pic version of it (and I believe the guy the famous, lying, Brit anti-Catholic painting depicts) Cardinal Bellarmine doesn't seem to have made his first inquiry into Galileo's work until 1611 when he asked some Jesuits with math chops to check G.G.'s math which they confirmed was correct. So that old story that he was talking about red-robed cardinals refusing to look through his telescope seems to be just another common received lie of the kind that Brit style atheists stole from old line Brit Catholic-haters. By the way, Bellarmine died in 1621, so he'd have had a hard time being at the trial a dozen years after that.
For people who claim to uphold the highest standards of science, it's remarkable that you don't seem to have learned how to use calendars. Or, maybe like my most persistent atheist-troll, you're kind of vague on how time works, you know, before and after. Maybe if you knew as much as what Fr. Copernicus knew about those. . . .
Next time you whine about something like that, do a word search of my blog, you'll probably find out I've already answered it, atheists aren't very original in their snark. Or very big on fact checking.
* In order to facilitate their designs, they seek so far as possible (at least among the common people) to make this opinion seem new and to belong to me alone. They pretend not to know that its author, or rather its restorer and confirmer, was Nicholas Copernicus; and that he was not only a Catholic, but a priest and a canon. He was in fact so esteemed by the church that when the Lateran Council under Leo X took up the correction of the church calendar, Copernicus was called to Rome from the most remote parts of Germany to undertake its reform. At that time the calendar was defective because the true measures of the year and the lunar month were not exactly known. The Bishop of Culm, then superintendent of this matter, assigned Copernicus to seek more light and greater certainty concerning the celestial motions by means of constant study and labor. With Herculean toil he set his admirable mind to this task, and he made such great progress in this science and brought our knowledge of the heavenly motions to such precision that he became celebrated as an astronomer. Since that time not only has the calendar been regulated by his teachings, but tables of all the motions of the planets have been calculated as well.
Having reduced his system into six books, he published these at the instance of the Cardinal of Capua and the Bishop of Culm. And since he had assumed his laborious enterprise by order of the supreme pontiff, he dedicated this book On the celestial revolutions to Pope Paul III. When printed, the book was accepted by the holy Church, and it has been read and studied by everyone without the faintest hint of any objection ever being conceived against its doctrines. Yet now that manifest experiences and necessary proofs have shown them to be well grounded, persons exist who would strip the author of his reward without so much as looking at his book, and add the shame of having him pronounced a heretic. All this they would do merely to satisfy their personal displeasure conceived without any cause against another man, who has no interest in Copernicus beyond approving his teachings.
Galileo Galilei: Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615
I understand Galileo was a bit of a dick, and in a sense put himself under house arrest by being a dick. Sort of equivalent to criminal contempt, where you have to piss the judge off so badly you get sent to jail (see, recently, Arpaio).
ReplyDeleteAnd he was never clapped in irons and buried in a dungeon and fed moldy bread and maggots, or some such horror. Honestly, people, learn some history beyond what you get in comic books and animated cartoons.
He had been friendly with Urban VIII before he was a pope and he'd been allowed to teach the Copernican system if he said that it was a hypothesis. He really was pretty stupid to have tweeked the Pope's nose by making him the simpleton in the book - what got him in really hot water. Post-reformation Popes, especially ones who were Barberinis, didn't take lip.
DeleteI've never understood people who lie about history on behalf of "truth" which, I guess, some sciency guys figure is as irrelevant in science as it can be made to be in politics, that is if you don't care about democracy.
It is remarkable how much of the atheist mythology is derived directly from old line Brit anti-Catholic mythology. The funniest one I saw was when some online atheist kid whined about how Darwin had been oppressed by the Vatican. They don't tend to have minds as well ordered as Swiss watches, these atheist guys. Even when they teach at major universities. I mean, can you imagine writing a book slamming theology while knowing literally nothing but a bunch of old atheist bromides? Even if I were an atheist I'd at least want to know what I was talking about knowing someone like Terry Eagleton was bound to know what I didn't.
History is complicated. The cartoon version is always preferable. I remember the vogue in the 80's and 90's to decry "revisionist" history (coming from the likes of Limbaugh) because it meant the history they preferred (white men, supportive women, noble or ignoble savages, Europe saving the world from darkness) wasn't history as it actually happened. History is our narrative, it is who we are, but it's factual (supposedly), so the simpler and clearer it is, the better.
DeleteHistory that is complicated makes a muddle of simple arguments and narratives, so better to keep history simple so it will prove the point we want to make. Thus people in the "Bronze Age" were stupid (save for Plato and Aristotle and Socrates) and the period between the fall of Rome (where civilization was upheld by military power and despotism, but hey, it was "civilized!") and the Renaissance was the "Dark Ages" out of which nothing good came because we all know that, right?
And so on and so on.
And the ignorance of the subject as proof of a superior knowledge of it gets me everytime. And ignoramus who denies the validity of science or math because of ignorance is a benighted fool; an ignoramus who denies the concepts of theology or scriptural studies (or anthropology, for that matter) because they have no knowledge of the subjects whatsoever, is a truth-telling genius!
Nice work if you can get it.