Galileo’s modern compromise: Letting science work *with* religion

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In his open letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), Galileo offered a defense of science against the prevailing heavy hand of religious orthodoxy:

“But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.”

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The immediate context was the great debate over the geocentric and heliocentric models. The larger context was the tension between religious philosophy, which stressed faith in revelation and tradition, and Renaissance philosophy, which stressed observation and reason. How, for example, should we decide whether the earth or the sun is at the center of our cosmos? Should we trust the views handed down to us by the best theologians of the centuries, those views derived primarily from Scripture? Or should we trust the views presented to us by scientists, their theories based on observational data from telescopes and other instruments and mathematical calculations of that data?

The traditionalist position was that reliance on observation and reason — when that conflicts with Scripture and tradition — is heresy. Giordano Bruno was convicted and executed, in part, for such heresy. When reason conflicts with faith, reason must give way. Or else.

Galileo’s solution is to argue that God wrote Scripture, of course, so Scripture contains the truth — and that God also created nature, and so nature also contains truth. God also created us humans, giving us sense organs and intelligence. So we can study Scripture rationally and learn important truths, as theologians do. But we can and should study nature rationally and learn important truths, as scientists do. And since both Scripture and nature come from the same author — God wrote two books, so to speak — the best theology and the best science should be compatible.

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Consequently, the real heretics are those who place faith over reason and who use apparent theoretical conflicts as a pretext for persecuting or killing their intellectual opponents. The truly devout, by direct contrast, are those who use their best intelligence, as God intended when He gave it to us, to try to understand the universe and who, when intellectual conflicts arise along the way, use reasonable methods — discussion, debate, and further investigation — to resolve them.

I call this “the modern compromise” because versions of it are also found in Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and John Locke. In Galileo’s version, the intellectual turf is divided into two realms — the natural and the supernatural — and as long as scientists and theologians stick to their own turf, there should be no problems.

Locke uses the same dualist point to argue for the separation of church and state:

“The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original, end, business, and in everything perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other” (A Letter concerning Toleration [1689]).

So the early modern compromise is to use a strong metaphysical dualism to separate the natural and the supernatural, the realm of science and the realm of religion, the scope of the state’s power and the scope of the church’s, the physical and the spiritual, the factual and the moral. As long as everyone stays on their side of the line, we can avoid conflict.

I sometimes wonder to what extent the dualism was a genuine metaphysical claim by these founding modern thinkers — and to what extent it was a tactical claim to create a safety zone for naturalistic life and inquiry, given the often-dangerous religious orthodoxies of the time.

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Despite having lost much of Europe to the Protestants over the preceding century, the Catholic Church was far from toothless, especially in southern Europe, and in 1616 it issued a Codex with a formal response to Galileo’s argument and the threat of heliocentrism:

“Propositions to be forbidden: That the sun is immovable at the center of the heaven; that the earth is not at the center of the heaven, and is not immovable; but moves by a double motion.”

Thus the stage was set for continued tension on both sides and Galileo’s trial for heresy in 1633.

Related: In the Philosophers, Explained series, my close reading of Galileo’s classic argument reconciling science and religion:

11 thoughts on “Galileo’s modern compromise: Letting science work *with* religion”

  1. I’ve thought the same about dualism being a tactical ploy e.g. how sincere was Descartes’ angst over being unable to resolve his dualism? All Aquinas had to do was clearly paint a picture of reason and logic, set it side by side with faith, protect himself by asserting both had their just claims – and let subsequent thinkers draw the inevitable conclusions to the extent they could and survive. Those who were too brash, such as Bruno, paid the price.

    A thoroughly reprehensible but grimly worthwhile book is Wade Rowland’s fairly recent ‘Galileo’s Mistake’. A reviewer said he favors a sort of ‘Inquisition Lite’. On first looking at it I immediately checked the index for Kant. Sure enough he was there: referenced by Rowland to underscore Galileo’s hubris in asserting the veracity of his conclusions and that we could know something about reality with reasonable certainty.

    Rowland’s book does remove some of the more lurid aspects of the story, pointing out that Galileo and his family were close friends of members of the high clergy, that some were sympathetic to his discoveries but urged him to lay low as the Church was under pressure from the northern Protestant Reformation which accused it of being soft on heresy and succumbing to paganism.

    But all this does is make Galileo “guilty” of the same crime as Bruno: lack of political prudence in the face of monstrous institutional oppression – or simply the courage to speak the truth come what may.

  2. Interestingly, Galileo’s main concern in his later years was not for himself, but for Italy (and southern Europe in general by implication). He predicted that if the Catholic Church succeeded in suppressing his work, Italy would not take part in the scientific revolution he foresaw. Darned if he wasn’t precisely correct. The locus of the scientific, and perhaps more importantly the Industrial, revolution shifted north. And unless you count Marconi and Fermi three hundred years later, Italy dropped off the scientific map.

    As far as the great modern compromise, it lasted until scientists broke the agreement by claiming that the entire existence of the universe may be explained by reference to the material. At which point they began to distract themselves from science by attempting to define not just the things we can detect within the universe, but what things must not exist.

    Which, ironically, is precisely the role of the Inquisitor.

  3. Neil: I would be interested in precisely what you mean by “At which point they began to distract themselves from science by attempting to define not just the things we can detect within the universe, but what things must not exist.

    Which, ironically, is precisely the role of the Inquisitor.”

    Do you mean God?

    BTW there was much oppression in northern Europe as well, with the impending wars of the Reformation and the worst of the witch hunts in Germany, though soon the beginnings of the Enlightenment were to break through in England and France.

  4. Aquinas also expressed a similar concern to church authorities: that with the influx of Aristotelian ideas from the Muslim world the Catholic Church stood to discredit itself if it did not accommodate them. His attempt to synthesize Aristotelianism with church doctrine led to a sea change in the latter that helped mitigate the extreme anti-corporealism of Augustine and Plotinus who virtually wrote the blueprint for the Dark Ages (supernaturalism as an alibi for nihilism).

    Ironically many promoters of enlightenment in both the West and Middle East were religious functionaries: monks, clergy, jurists, even popes, since they were amongst the most, at times only literate classes of their societies. Ibn Rushd, whose commentaries on Aristotle bequeathed an invaluable legacy to Western medieval thinkers, was a respected scholar of the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence; Thomas Aquinas was the Catholic Church’s greatest theologian.

  5. Some readers might find this of interest: A few facts from my researches about the Muslim golden age and subsequent decline that echo the theme of the modern compromise in the Muslim world.

    “Rationalism was born in Spain in the mind of an Arabian philosopher [Ibn Rushd], as a conscious reaction against the theologism of the Arabian divines.”
    – Etienne Gilson, ‘Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages’

    Strictly speaking Gilson’s assertion is not true. But to medieval European scholars first encountering the intellectual life of the Muslim world it certainly seemed that way. Many of the lands subjugated by the Arabs from the seventh century on were permeated by the intellectual legacy of the Ancient Greeks: the Islamic empire was thoroughly steeped in the Hellenic tradition. What is called the Islamic golden age was in fact based on the Hellenic legacy, particularly Aristotelianism. Arab Caliphs such as al-Mansur and al-Ma’mun commissioned the translation of much of the Greek corpus into Arabic, greatly widening its impact on the intellectual life of the empire, and helping preserve it for posterity. Far from mere custodians and transmitters of this legacy Muslim thinkers, scientists and engineers added enormous contributions of their own e.g. transforming the primitive Greek astrolabe into a sophisticated measuring device used by mariners, surveyors and astronomers. Later during the Crusades a major sin attributed to Christians by the Arabs was their rejection of the Hellenic legacy.

    At a time most Westerners believed the world flat al-Biruni had calculated its radius to within several miles. The Islamic world led the West in every sphere of knowledge and endeavor. Wealthy Christians often sent their sick on long voyages to be treated by superior Arab doctors. Many of the greatest minds of its Golden Age e.g. al-Kindi, al-Hazen, Ibn Sina, Moses Maimonides, Ibn Rushd, were Aristotelians – thinkers not only of great import in the Middle East, but later in the West. The ‘Canon Medicinae’ of Persian philosopher, doctor, pharmacologist and herbalist Ibn Sina – known as Avicenna in the West – remained the leading European medical and pharmaceutical reference well into the 1700’s.

    It was the Hellenic heritage built on by Muslim thinkers European scholars imported from the Middle East during the medieval era. Scholars such Adelard of Bath, Roger Bacon, Michael Scotus, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas sought out, assimilated and introduced this legacy into Europe. European construction was literally straightened out by the importation of Euclid’s geometry, which also allowed for far more ambitious, elegant and symmetrical architecture, including Gothic, also aesthetically substantially influenced by Islamic. Aristotle’s ideas furnished scientists like Copernicus and Galileo with the methodological tools to challenge established scientific theories and models of the time – including Aristotle’s own. Inevitably they came to hold to the critical light of reason church doctrine itself.

    But Muslim thinkers and scientists had always depended on powerful patrons instead of broad based institutions – their treatises carefully couched in terms ingratiating to civil and religious authorities. In the centuries following Muhammad’s death the relative, precarious, yet fruitful liberalism that existed in the empire came to be viewed with increasing suspicion and disfavor. The Sunni-Shia split had been disturbing, and, fearing the sectarian splintering of the umma (Muslim community), a rigid orthodoxy increasingly came to be favored and enforced.

    For seeking to separate philosophy and rational inquiry from religious faith – which, later in the West earned him a reputation as a father of secularism – Ibn Rushd suffered persecution and exile.

    In ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’, theologian and Sufi mystic al-Ghazali (1058 – 1111), considered by many Muslims the greatest Muslim after Muhammad, leveled a bitter assault on philosophy – denouncing Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as unbelievers – that marked the beginning of its end as a vibrant independent intellectual force in Islamic society. (During a low point in Spain under the Almoravids even theology was considered a heretical corruption of the pure message of the Qur’an and cleric incited mobs burned al-Ghazali’s writings). Perhaps the greatest Islamic philosopher, the aforementioned Spanish Moorish doctor and jurist Ibn Rushd (1126 – 1198), known to Latin scholars as Averroes, penned a rebuttal to al-Ghazali titled ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, but it failed to stem the tide. The gates of independent thought were slowly closing to the Middle Eastern mind as the Hellenic heritage and torch of reason and learning passed to Europe to produce its High Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution and Modern Era.

    It is telling that much of Ibn Rushd’s corpus is known to us only in Latin translation: Medieval Christian scholars held him in greater esteem than his countrymen, who banished him. Perhaps the former were more receptive as their society had lived through more centuries of night. One of his teachers, the early Andalusi Moorish philosopher, logician, physician, psychologist, astronomer, physicist, botanist, musician and poet Ibn Bajjah, known to Latin scholars as Avempace (d. 1138) compared himself to a lonely weed – unwanted, isolated and unappreciated.

    So long as an approximate state of affairs existed in the Christian West power equilibrium was maintained between the two civilizations. But as the West, ironically aided by the legacy it received from the Middle East, slowly wrested free of the shackles of political and religious oppression, thereby unleashing its power, while an opposite tendency was stultifying the Islamic mind, that equilibrium was shattered and the Middle East ultimately fell prostrate before it.

    “If the people of this religion are asked about the proof for its soundness, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.”
    – Al-Razi (865-925), Persian physician, chemist, musician and philosopher

  6. Thanks! It really is fascinating when one begins to connect the dots, as I was prompted to by the events of September 11, 2001. Sometimes, looking at it all, I feel a bit like Star Trek’s Mr Spock: “fascinating…”

    A bit more if you like as I have it right before me…

    Scholars such as Albert Hourani in ‘Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939’ chronicled the confrontation of Middle Eastern intellectuals such as Egypt’s Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed with Western ideas as they grappled with, and increasingly came to appreciate the power of such Enlightenment concepts as individual rights, freedom of expression, limited government, secularism and economic liberalism. But in the latter decades of the 19th century and into the 20th a profound ideological shift was occurring in European universities.

    Middle Eastern scholars zealously adopted the latest trends of thought.

    From the early decades of the 20th century political and revolutionary parties based on Western collectivist ideologies – Fascist, Nazi, socialist and Marxist – proliferated and swept the Middle East, shaping the ideologies, strategies and rhetoric of the struggles of its peoples for liberation. Those with a more secular bent initially prevailed, likely a manifestation of the drive to equal Western power. But Islamist movements such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna (of which seminal Islamist theoretician Sayyed Qutb was a member) were also affected. Islamist thinkers like al-Banna, al-Afghani, Mohammad Iqbal and Ali Shariati were deeply influenced by the new Western ideologies and attempted to fuse them with movements of Islamic renewal. Nowhere amongst them was there to be found a Locke, Jefferson or Enlightenment party.

    The tragedy of the Middle East was that when it finally realized it needed to catch up to the West the Enlightenment ideas that had underpinned Western modernity were in decline as a philosophical movement. What it’s scholars found and assimilated instead, particularly in the European humanities, was the Kantian-Hegelian reaction to it that led to 20th century collectivism and totalitarianism.

    I think that more than any debacle of imperialism, colonialism or foreign policy this was the essential and critical failure, even betrayal of the Middle East by the West in the modern era. Far from being unreceptive to Western ideas, not understanding the profound schisms that lay in Western thought, the tragedy of the Middle East had been that it was too uncritically eager to assimilate them.

    Several of countless examples…

    Anton Saadeh, founder and “leader for life” of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), founded in 1932, was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler and deeply impacted by Nazi and Fascist thought. Despite his explicit disavowal in 1935 when accusations appeared in the press, indications are that he consciously modeled the SSNP after the Nazi party. A four pointed “red hurricane” on white circle against black background many have seen as echoing a reversed swastika was adopted as party symbol and its anthem was sung to ‘Deutschland Über Alles’. In ‘All Honorable Men: The Social Origins of War in Lebanon’, Michael Johnson notes that this influence went beyond these trappings, “…and included developing a cult of the leader, advocating totalitarian government, and glorifying an ancient pre-Christian past and the organic whole of the Syrian Volk or nation. Saadeh had a corporate view of the state, read fascist texts, and was allegedly in close touch with Italian fascists and the Nazis during the second world war.”

    In the 1930’s Egypt’s Young Egypt party was also consciously modeled on the German Nazi party including torchlight parades, mass rallies and adoption of Nazi slogans like “one people, one party, one leader.” Its “Green Shirts” engaged in violent confrontations with the rival Wafd party’s “Blue Shirts.” It also adopted Nazi anti-Semitism with attacks on Jews and Jewish businesses. One of its members was a teenage Gamal Abdel Nasser.

    The Third Reich expended considerable efforts to propagate the philosophy of National Socialism in the Arab world. To many Arabs, including Islamists the aura of a revitalized German nation suggested a model for their own society’s renewal, as well as a defiant alternative to their colonial masters. Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim brotherhood had close ties with the Nazis beginning in the 1930’s and during the war engaged in agitation, espionage and sabotage on their behalf against their British overlords.

    When Hitler became chancellor of Germany one of the first congratulatory telegrams he received was from Haj Amin Muhammad al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. A virulent anti-Semite, Husseini had instigated riots and later murderous pogroms against Jews in Palestine on various occasions since 1921. With the rise of the Nazis Husseini became a supporter of the Final Solution. Later, when his pro-Nazi sympathies became known to the British, he fled to Berlin where he was personally welcomed by Hitler. Lodged in a confiscated Hebrew school by the Nazis he was set up as prime minister in exile of a pro-Nazi/pan-Arab government. Himmler took Husseini on tours of Auschwitz and financed his Muslim academy in Dresden, set up as a training ground for a puppet Nazi/Muslim government. Later Husseini was active in recruiting Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia in efforts to ethnically cleanse it of Jews.

    In the 1920’s and 1930’s Sati’ al-Husri, Iraq’s minister of education and founding theoretician of pan-Arabist thought, undertook to shape Iraq’s future along nationalist collectivist lines influenced by a careful study of Fichte. “We can say” Husri said, “that the system to which we should direct our hopes and aspirations is a Fascist system.” Expelled by the British in 1941 he continued his work in Syria, exercising great influence on its educational curriculum. In ‘Republic of Fear’ Kanan Mikaya, an Iraqi exile, writes that “Husri polemicized against the idea that education should form self-sufficient individuals who judged their own behavior irrespective of someone else’s blueprint on their future.”

    After the WW II fascination with Nazism and Fascism quietly subsided (the region provided safe haven for a number of important war criminals) and, as Youssef M. Choueiri relates party members gravitated towards more palatable political organizations, which almost invariably meant socialist e.g. Marxist, Arab Nationalist – which was anti-Marxist, inclining towards a more “Arab socialism” – or socialist-reformist Islam.

    In Damascus in the 1940’s Michael Aflaq – educated in the Sorbonne in Paris – founded the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. On March 8, 1963 the Ba’ath came to power in Syria and have ruled since then. Its main rivals were the Saadeh’s SSNP and the pro-Soviet SCP (Syrian Communist Party). Syria became an authoritarian state under Hafez al-Assad, who secured power by means of a vast network of police spies and informants and encouraged a cult of personality, a policy continued by his heir and son Bashar. In 1963 Ba’athists seized control of Iraq, lost it in a coup nine months later, and seized it again in July 1968 holding on to it for more than three decades. Saddam Hussein emerged as party strongman in 1979. While doing much to modernize the country he precipitated the disastrous Iran-Iraq war and retained grip on power by a policy of ruthless perpetual terrorism against Iraq’s civilian population until deposed by the Coalition Provisional Authority in the 2003 Iraq War. While liquidating communists as rival gang members he owned a library devoted solely to his hero Josef Stalin. His policies were directly responsible for the deaths of over a million Muslims.

    Saudi Arabia was more insulated by America from the new trends, and its communist parties, always illegal, exercised less influence than in other Islamic states. Integral to the House of Saud since Muhammad bin Saud’s initial alliance with cleric Ibn Abdul-Wahhab in the 18th century was Wahhabism, a virulently reactionary strain of Sunni Islam that often saw and waged war on other Muslims as infidels e.g. in 1801 Wahhabi forces scaled the walls of Karbala, massacred most of its inhabitants, looted its valuables and destroyed its shrines. Ironically it was enabled by Christian powers: First by the British during WW I to lever them against the Ottomans, later by the Americans who consolidated the rule of the House of Saud to ensure a stable political climate for developing the nation’s vast oil reserves, facilitating its sudden spectacular wealth. This financed wholesale Wahhabi proselytizing or da’wah including the erection of hundreds of mosques and madrassahs (schools) throughout the Middle East. [To me akin handing hundred of billions of dollars to the Moonies]. One of its many fruits was the Taliban. When the inevitable disillusionment with socialism-Marxism arrived in the Islamic world an alternative would be ready and waiting.

    In ‘The Middle East: 2,000 Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day’, Bernard Lewis notes that for most of the 20th century the path to reform and modernization in the Middle East was “seen almost exclusively in socialist terms,” with some regimes inclined to Marxism, others to a more “Arab socialism,” seen as more humane and adapted to Arab needs. The results for both were dismal failure. Writes Lewis, “Only in one respect were the economic policies successful – in underpinning a series of ruthless and pervasive dictatorships in which both the decencies of the traditional Islamic order and the liberties of the new Western order were undermined and destroyed.”

    Instead of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson they got Karl Marx and Saddam Hussein. Instead of the Enlightenment ideas that had underpinned the liberty, prosperity and power of the West, their scholars had imbibed the most toxic ideological poison it had ever concocted. This dynamic was not confined to the Middle East but underpinned the failure of decolonization and modernization worldwide.

  7. Ed is wonderfully profuse (as always) but I don’t see what anti-Semitism has to do with Galileo. The idea of dualism has always been part of philosophy — Socrates attacked Olympus but not “God.” Even calling the issue “dualism” is denigrating, as is the use of “monism,” as they are Jesuitical in setting up pro and con, then giving one a dealer’s choice. The pendulum, with its Darwinian plumb-weight, definitely swings towards non-belief. In Galileo’s era, everyone believed in God, but the Christians had a Triune God and the Arabs despised them for it, calling it (rightfully, I think) idolatry. Their deepest sunken pillar is monotheism, and thank you Moses, Adam, Jesus, and the rest. Mohammed is a latter day saint. A prophet like the others, no, THE Prophet.

    Atheism is on the rise because of science’s embellishments and the vapidity of most modern religions, particularly your local church, with the recent arrest of its “pastor” for some sexual felony. One staunch Lutheran church sought to import a German divine named Emmanuel Pfuzze. The congregation was excited and one child asked the new preacher, who was addressing the ladies’ choir, and a lovely soloist in particular, “Are you Pastor Fuzz?” The good minister replied, “No, but I’m getting there!”

    Science has made the universe irresistible in beauty, complexity, and almost, charm. The Hubble telescope shows us why Captain Kirk liked to drive his warps thereabouts and the increasingly accessible literature (Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins) (I’d like to recommend the Feynman lectures on YouTube) makes one’s mouth water over black holes and time horizons and the Big Bang’s inherently anomalous core. This universe, this life, sprung from “an irregularity.” However, many scientists, rarely publicized by the Media, believe in a Creator, and that creation came from spirit to energy to mass. Life was breathed into organisms that could reproduce. Species that could replicate…ah…there’s the rub.

    Science insists — according to its media gurus at least — that evolution is a fact, but it is also a fact that genes mutate in a mysterious way, and that germs stay germs, and snakes stay snakes, no matter their various adapted forms. Science has never demonstrated where life comes from, nor consciousness. Nor reason. Somehow it got here, it happened. But thinkers like Einstein maintain nothing occurs from chance. Uncertainty principle not relevant. We’re told that life must exist on other planets…but since spontaneous generation was demolished, no one can say where life came from and from even fossil records, it is obvious that life forms BEGAN on the earth. Atheists are no better at science than Christians, Muslims or Jews, and the not uninteresting mathematician-scientist John Lenox maintains that the worship of God entails exploring (scientifically) His universe. (See his YouTube lectures with Dawkins and Hitchens)

    I think Galileo, who believed in “God” (perhaps more than he did in the Vatical), was trying to get that point across. The phenomenal virtuosity of Richard Dawkins in THE BLIND WATCHMAKER does not really disprove anything, it certainly does not “prove” evolution. It does explain how a species can quickly “evolve” a different pigmentation or beak shape. The genes are inherent (as in roses) or flexible and respond to certain environmental stimuli. The Dawkins mainline bandwagon banner proclaims DARWINIAN ATHEISM as the new “religion.” The moreso, in that Dawkins himself comes across like the local vicar.

  8. Saw a picture of a fragment of the heavens taken by the Hubble telescope of a field containing 10,000 galaxies, each of course containing millions to billions of stars, each with their own planetary systems. Looking back and considering the microscopic blue spec we call Earth floating in the immeasurable cosmos it becomes clear that God is a Presbyterian.

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