My God! It’s full of stars… or journey to the true centre of the universe with John Waters (and Galileo) in the Irish Times…

Okay, this Monday we’re treated by John Waters to a remarkable overview of then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, and his intriguing relationship with Galileo (incidentally, credit where credit is due, Waters had a rather good piece on Wayne O’Donoghue a week or so back which was both sympathetic and rational albeit that his suggestion that O’Donoghue should just assume a ‘normal’ life was probably unfeasible). But talking about the rational… how’s this?

It was widely reported last week that Pope Benedict cancelled a visit to Rome’s oldest university, La Sapienza, after a number of academics and students accused him of despising science and defending the Inquisition’s condemnation of Galileo.

The Vatican said it was considered opportune to postpone the visit due to a lack of the “prerequisites for a dignified and tranquil welcome” following a sit-in by 50 students and a letter signed by 67 professors, including several allegedly eminent scientists.

The signatories said Benedict’s presence would be “incongruous” because of a speech he made at La Sapienza in 1990, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in which he quoted the judgment of an Austrian philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, that the church’s trial of Galileo was “reasonable and fair”. The letter declared: “These words offend and humiliate us.” This episode is emblematic of our latter-day blogosphere culture in embracing both ideological spite and indifference to truth, manifesting the classic symptoms of a whirlwind created on the internet by neurotics exchanging bites of information by way of stoking each other’s narcissistic obsession with expressing their democratic right to make fools of themselves.

Truth, as I’ve taken some time to demonstrate on these pages, is very much what our correspondent defines it.
As to the rest? Oh sugar, he’s talking about many of us! Well, that’s a tad rude John, play the ball, not the women and men. And, so what? . Such a profoundly mean-spirited statement as regards perhaps the broadest number of people (yet still pitifully small) in human history to engage is telling. Sure, some of it is frivolous, shallow, tedious and self-regarding. But much of it is fascinating, informative and generous.

Anyhow, ever onwards…

His title was The Crisis of Faith in Science, referring not to declining belief among scientists but a wider loss of confidence in the capacity of science to address the core questions of existence.

Far from attacking science, he was highlighting instances in which scientists have questioned the basis of secularism in the modern world. Among his points was that there are implications, other than cosmological ones, arising from Galileo’s discoveries.

Never! Implications other than cosmological? Well, I never. But, then again, that’s not entirely surprising. For example, one might point to how Galileo’s discoveries undercut a considerable portion of the authority of the Church to speak on such matters with any degree of credibility. But… that’s not necessarily what our correspondent means…

[Marxist philosopher Ernst ] Bloch held that Einstein’s revolution meant it was possible to perceive the Earth as fixed and the Sun as mobile. Ratzinger quoted Bloch’s surprising conclusion: “Once the relativity of movement is taken for granted, an ancient human and Christian system of reference has no right to interference in astronomic calculations and their heliocentric simplification; however, it has the right to remain faithful to its method of preserving the Earth in relation to human dignity, and to order the world with regard to what will happen and what has happened in the world.” In other words, once you accept Einstein’s theory, you could reasonably conclude that the Christian worldview should be kept out of astronomy, but Christianity is right to continue seeing the Earth as the moral centre of the cosmos, and placing human dignity at the centre of the creation equation.

Okay… now, I’m a tedious old rationalist and materialist. But what on earth is Bloch saying, and why on earth should Ratzinger quote it as if it actually means something? Or rather, sure it’s saying something, but it’s confusing two very different approaches.

“Once the relativity of movement is taken for granted, an ancient human and Christian system of reference has no right to interference in astronomic calculations and their heliocentric simplification; however, it has the right to remain faithful to its method of preserving the Earth in relation to human dignity, and to order the world with regard to what will happen and what has happened in the world.”

An interesting quote, but one which is entirely problematic. The linkage between relativity and a ‘right to remain faithful to its method of preserving the Earth in relation to human dignity’ is – on a rational level – meaningless. These are category errors, and no less so simply because one might put the prefix ‘Marxist’ in front of Bloch’s name. Bloch is making a broad rather diffuse point that is not uninteresting, but it’s not convincing. Yet again there is a blurring, deliberate perhaps, between cosmology in the scientific sense and a worldview generated from a religious perspective. Indeed whether Bloch’s words are as advertised is a different matter, but why does Waters see fit to take his view as of any significance on this matter one way or another? Well, the answer is that he does so because the then Cardinal Ratzinger quoted him.

It was here, somewhat agape, that Ratzinger cited Feyerabend, an agnostic and sceptical Austrian/American philosopher (1924-94).

Ratzinger said: “If both the spheres of conscience are once again clearly distinguished among themselves under their respective methodological profiles, recognising both their limits and their respective rights, then the synthetic judgment of the agnostic-skeptic philosopher P Feyerabend appears much more drastic. He writes: ‘The church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and revisionism can be legitimised solely for motives of political opportunism.'”

But again, why should we accept Feyerabend (agnostic and all) as being in any particular position to argue the faithfulness to ‘reason’ of the Church as against Galileo (indeed it’s interesting is it not how Waters reifies one sort of expertise or enquiry – that being the useful, but nebulous area of certain aspects of philosophy, over dull old scientific research or expertise as we’ve seen in his railing against those who use tedious statistics which undermine his argument)? Why not actually ask someone who understand the methodologies of reason – and in particular the scientific method, such as it was that Galileo was attempting to work within – such as.. such as… well, y’know, a scientist. Perhaps one who has attempted to deal directly with these issues. But to do that would be to move away from the rather fluffy terrain that the argument is constructed upon, one which tangentially engages with ‘reason’ but only in the limited terms that the argument is formulated and move on to dealing with it in the context of people who know precisely what they are trying to do.

Indeed if we examine what Waters writes we will see that at no point is there an engagement with ‘truth’ or ‘reason’ in any sense that allows us a clear definitions of these terms. Does he mean a process of deduction, the application of logic, empiricism? Any or all? We are left none the wiser. Or rather, we can be fairly clear that this is not at all what he means. Consider the following passage.

From here, Ratzinger moved to the failure of the church to deal correctly with the ethical implications of the Galilean perspective, which, in its wider interpretation, he noted, CF Von Weizsacker had identified as creating a “very direct path” to the atomic bomb. Ratzinger concluded: “It would be absurd, on the basis of these affirmations, to construct a hurried apologetics. The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation and from being inscribed in a still greater form of reason.”

I love the idea that the atomic bomb is the logical outcome of Galileo moreso say than being the logical outcome of the first sea dwelling ancestor of ours to flop a flipper onto the sand of some ancient shore and start the long slow crawl that took us to the Moon. It’s so brilliantly absolutist as if all modernity is summed up in that single device (and yes, Des Fennell, has argued something not disconnected from that idea, and no, I don’t buy it either). Why not penicillin? Gameboys? Cinema? The mapping of Mercury which is happening as we speak by a US probe? Could it be that these are insufficiently existential (although for my money the last is pretty existential if one wishes to see a useful purpose for humanity as the – so far – only fully self-aware and reflective aspect of the universe… a notion which as it happens fits right into a rational discourse and perhaps a religious one also). One too might raise an eyebrow at the idea of ‘hurried apologetics’. Just how long would it take? A millennium? Two, perhaps?

But how does that expression of the ‘absurdity’ of an hurried apology (367 years and counting as it was for poor old Galileo when Ratzinger made his speech in 1990) sit with those reprobates who ‘accused him of despising science and defending the Inquisition’s condemnation of Galileo’. Perhaps I’m being foolishly rational here. But at the very least he’s sailing close to the wind in terms of defending that condemnation. No, one could plausibly posit that he’s implicitly defending it.

One wonders though what Waters thinks about the actual Gallileo controversy? Does he know that this wasn’t some arcana with different cosmological (and the beauty of that term in the context of this article is that it diffuses meaning rather than pinpoints it) hypotheses in some sort of genteel dispute but that Galileo was able to prove empirically by observation that the Earth moved around the Sun. That he could point a telescope into the night sky and make these observations, and then make them again, and again, and again. And these observations were replicated by Jesuit astronomers. The Church – beyond the astronomers – was unable to dismiss or demonstrate that they were fundamentally incorrect. This wasn’t theory unsupported by evidence, but this was, in the context of the scientific method of the time, fact. Not belief, but ‘truth’. And that truth (or rather the potential truth based on observation) was directly in contravention of an entirely different sort of ‘truth’ based on a literal reading of the Bible. There’s no ifs and buts in this discussion. That’s it. It’s irrelevant if Galileo’s work did lead to the bomb. It’s entirely irrelevant what is said 367 years later in a lecture. Galileo, using a methodology based in science, imperfect and contradictory as science was at the time, produced evidence based theories which were proven correct and the other sort of ‘truth’ which isn’t truth at all, but simply assertion, wasn’t.

And all the handwaving that Ratzinger does by recourse to Weizsacker and Feyerabend doesn’t alter that one iota.

And here we have it, yet again. Shadow boxing as a substitute for argument. Consider again part of his opening piece…

His title was The Crisis of Faith in Science, referring not to declining belief among scientists but a wider loss of confidence in the capacity of science to address the core questions of existence.

Far from attacking science, he was highlighting instances in which scientists have questioned the basis of secularism in the modern world. Among his points was that there are implications, other than cosmological ones, arising from Galileo’s discoveries.

The problem with these arguments is that who is to say what the ‘core questions of existence’ are? I don’t know? Does anyone? Which means that we get a smorgasbord of complaints and worries and agonised fretting about some sort of ‘meaning’ which seems almost profound until it is examined at close range at which point it merely seems to be a sort of discontent that a religious interpretation of existence has been superseded by something arguably more honest if not approaching the rarified heights of ‘truth’ that our correspondent thinks we should all be herded (and I use that term deliberately) towards.

The universe is fascinating. Cosmology – the real stuff – is an area that any thinking human should consider deeply. There are implications that are profound, issues that are unresolvable, developments that some hardened materialist scientists suggest may point to interesting questions… even if they are unable to provide evidence of answers. It is an area that those of faith can find some comfort in as much as those without find intellectual satisfaction.

But… wouldn’t it be nice to hear something positive, something that doesn’t take the form of yet another attack on people both specific in terms of the scientists and students who quite reasonably find little in Ratzingers words but a sort of apologia for events that were profoundly anti-rational (and let’s not even begin to get into the socio-political reasons why the Inquisition acted the way it did which was for reasons rather more mundane than differing views of cosmology and considerably more rooted in preserving power elites) and general in terms of societies which find that religious interpretations are less and less useful as a means of judging and assessing the world and universe about us. One might find that depressing, or one might find it – as I do – an opportunity for religious thinking to move towards a more fully rigorous relationship with empiricism… as indeed those who have toiled long and hard for the Vatican in the area of astronomy have managed to do which brings me to the last line…

The theme of the pope’s planned address at La Sapienza, incidentally, was: “There is a danger in modern times that man may stop seeking the truth”.

Except let’s not look too closely at the Vatican Observatory, because, surprise, surprise a report in the Independent under the heading “Science bows to theology as the Pope dismantles the Vatican observatory” suggests that:

Science is to make way for diplomacy at the Pope’s summer residence, with the dismantling of the astronomical observatory that has been part of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, for more than 75 years. The Pope needs more room to receive diplomats so the telescopes have to go.

The whole observatory is being moved some 10 miles to a nearby disused convent. While: Father Jose G Funes, the present director of the observatory, known as the Specola Vaticana, insisted that there was no sinister significance in the move. “It is not a downgrading of science in the Vatican,” he said. “To remain within the palace would have had only a symbolic significance, whereas where we are going we will be even more comfortable… The Independent notes that… But symbolism is exactly what close watchers of Pope Benedict XVI see in the move: confirmation of the view that he is far less receptive to what scientists – including scientists in dog collars – want to tell him than his recent predecessors. He has, for example, spoken in favour of intelligent design, in flat contradiction of the views of the observatory’s former director.

Whereas: The theological conservatism of the Polish pope (John Paul II) cohabited oddly with an enthusiastic acceptance of the findings of science. In a speech in 1996, for instance, he came close to accepting the theory of evolution.

Father Coyne’s (the previous director) tenure did not long outlast the reign of John Paul. When Coyne retired in August 2006, it was rumoured that hostility to intelligent design had been his undoing. Benedict’s rejection of the Enlightenment, and the reign of scientific truth which it ushered in, is well established.

Symbols are powerful. There I would agree with John Waters. But to talk of truth and to act in this way, even for the best of intentions, suggests that there is a fundamental problem.

The continuing efforts, and they’re not restricted to our correspondent, to elide issues of emotion, belief and a sort of starry eyed transcendence with the power of the empirical, rational and scientific and ascribe the authority that those latter methodologies contain in order to support contentions that seem some distance from ‘truth’ are depressing. There is a word for that sort of construct. It’s called a ‘belief’. But while beliefs are not necessarily of any particular harm it really is long past time that this strange effort to gift them that authority was discontinued. Isn’t it?

Meanwhile Pete Baker on Slugger takes a more benign view of this in an interesting piece…