The Church and Galileo (Studies in Science & the Humanities from the Reilly Centre for Science, Technology & Values) [Hardcover]

All in all, this book seems to take a rather harsh view of the Church and its condemnation of Galileo. Most of the authors in this volume are of the opinion that the Church had drifted towards a hyperliteral interpretation of Scripture as a result of the controversies surrounding the Reformation of the previous century. Interestingly enough, however, the Copernican view had been widely known for several decades before it was condemned in the form of Galileo's teachings. Galileo's arrogance in pressing his views is recognized as one factor, but not the only factor, in the Church's approach towards Galileo's views. The authors of this book seem to fail to remember that the Church was and is a conservative institution in that part of its mission is to protect humananity from potentially-malevolent new teachings and movements. If it sometimes errs in condemning new views that later turn out to be correct or beneficial, then it should not be overly criticized for having done so.

The Galileo affair inevitably recounts the issue of how Scripture is to be understood. Perhaps the most interesting content of this book is the analysis of Augustine and his interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Augustine is often portrayed as someone who took a figurative approach to the Creation account. In actuality, as elaborated by article-author McMullin (pp. 90-93), there were extrinsic reasons that motivated Augustine to depart from a straightforward reading of Genesis. Augustine had been a Manichaean, and, even after his return to Christianity, had been intimidated by the Manichaean's characterization of the Creation account as "primitive and incoherent". It was then that Augustine began to vacillate, back and forth, between a literal acceptance of the Creation account and various figurative interpretations. Augustine was quoted as thinking that a literal interpretation was "nearly impossible", and so his tendentiousness towards nonliteral interpretations of Genesis are readily understandable.

McMullin's self-righteous vigilantism

The Vatican launched the Galileo Commission in 1981 to achieve "a frank recognition of wrongs" in the ancient Galileo affair, and it concluded in 1992 that Galileo's condemnation was due to "tragic mutual incomprehension".

In his "Introduction" to this book the Reverend Ernan McMullin, Philosophy Department Chairman for Notre Dame University, portrays the Commission's 1992 conclusion as a failure to abide by its mandate and calls the conclusion a "grave disappointment."

No one expects that the Vatican will ever again dictate to science, as it had to Galileo. And contrary to McMullin's hype the recent opening of the Vatican archives has revealed nothing new of consequence about Galileo. Furthermore no objective historian or professional philosopher would be "disappointed" in the Vatican, as McMullin says he is. McMullin's interest in the Galileo affair nearly four hundred years after the event is not disinterested scholarship.

As a graduate philosophy student at Notre Dame University I personally experienced McMullin's compulsivly self-righteous reformism. And I found self-righteous reformism characteristic of their philosophy school's oppressive faculty and obsequious graduates. McMullin's campaign to reform the Vatican is perfectly consistent with his personality and his school's culture.

McMullin has an agenda: he has donned the mantle of the reforming vigilante editor, who has rounded up his posse of contributors, and is in hot pursuit of the Vatican's public humiliation. Not satisfied with forcing reform on his philosophy students, he leveled his sights at the Vatican for big-game hunting, seeking the Vatican's confessional atonement.

As the Vatican's Galileo Commission reported in 1992, "mutual incomprehension" is a historical fact. This conclusion is both supported and explained by the contemporary pragmatist philosophy of language, which reveals how the nearly unbreakably tenacious grip of the then-conventional geocentric semantics bound the Vatican and scholars of the time to the geocentric cosmology.

In his Against Method (Fourth Edition) the contemporary pragmatist philosopher Paul Feyerabend explained how a new observational semantics had to be forged by Galileo. In the absence of any perceived terrestrial motion, the geocentric cosmology supplied Galileo's contemporaries with the semantics for an empirically convincing observation language for describing celestial movements quite apart from the authority of Biblical interpretation.

Feyerabend proposed an interpretative practice that he called "counterinduction", whereby a pioneering scientist such as Galileo reinterprets convincingly falsifying observations using the semantics defined by his new theory. And he specifically described Galileo's use of this counterinduction practice to create a new observation language based on the semantics of the heliocentric theory. Galileo was not unique in this practice. In his Physics and Beyond, Encounters and Conversations Heisenberg described his use of this same practice to develop his uncertainty relations for quantum theory. The counterinduction thesis offers a much more insightful new understanding of Galileo than any documents newly released from the Vatican archives.

McMullin seems never to have forgiven the Vatican for insufficient groveling about the Galileo incident. As a succession of Pontiffs has disregarded McMullin's demand that the Vatican assume the role of the confessing public sinner, McMullin's frustration has become increasingly shrill. Nowhere is his frustration more manifest than in his "Quoting Feyerabend on Galileo" in the Irish Theological Quarterly (2008). In this paper McMullin attacked Benedict XVI for having earlier referenced Feyerabend in connection with the Galileo affair. In 2009 I wrote a rejoinder to McMullin's article titled "Understanding Feyerabend on Galileo" in the same academic journal, and exposed McMullin's irresponsibly dismissive attitude toward Feyerabend's insights.

From the perspective of contemporary philosophy of language McMullin's Galileo and the Church is shallow. For a better resource I refer readers to Paul Cardinal Poupard's Galileo Galilei: Toward a Resolution of 350 Years of Debate, 1633-1983 (Institute for World Concerns Series). The Galileo affair was cultural phenomenon, and Poupard was president of the Pontifical Council for Culture. He was also responsible for coordinating the Galileo Commission's conclusion, and in 1992 presented the Commission's final report to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Another superior resource is Dudley Shapere's Galileo: A Philosophical Study. This book was written before Feyerabend published his counterinduction thesis in 1975. But Shapere is a leading Galileo scholar in the U.S., and his book is an interesting examination of Galileo from the viewpoint of earlier philosophers. Unlike McMullin's books, Shapere offers philosophical substance. And Shapere also identifies and corrects an egregious blunder in an earlier book on Galileo by McMullin, who failed to understand Galileo's writing.

For more on Feyerabend's analysis of Galileo's writings I invite readers to google my on-line book History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science (BOOK VI) at my dot-com web site, philsci, which offers free on-screen reading of the entire book and free printable downloads by chapter.

Thomas J. Hickey

For the student of Galileo, I can't think of a better collection of superb papers, most of them inspired by the recent opening of the Archives of the Holy Office. Essays include a review of how Copernicus' work was viewed by the Church prior to Galileo's work, as well as excellent pieces on the documents related to Galileo's trial. Contributors include all the leading Galileo scholars, including William Shea, the late Mariano Artigas and McMullin himself. While the authors are rightly critical of the Church's role in the affair, they point out, given the documentation and testimony, that Galileo's own actions ---over the course of the initial general injunction against Copernicus (1616) to the time of his own abjuration (1633) --set himself up to at least the credible perception of having dealt deviously with the Holy Office even if he did not.