Review : Galileo's Daughter (II)

Welcome back to the concluding part of my review-summary of Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter. In part one I covered how Galileo was a prodigious polymath, something which often gets lost in the simplified "he was imprisoned for teaching that the Sun goes around the Earth" version of events. I also looked briefly at Galileo as a man, ending with how for him, the idea of a conflict between natural inquiry and holy doctrine barely made sense. 

In this second part, I'll begin with these now largely estranged viewpoints didn't pose a problem for Galileo's own philosophy, but then how this came into such prominent conflict with the Church. I'll end with a look at whether Sobel's own interpretation – that the problem was not one of a clash of world views – is really correct.

3) Galileo the Philosopher

Galileo, says Sobel, believed that God revealed truths through two books. One of these was Holy Scripture, which could never be wrong, but could be misinterpreted and wasn't intended to be taken literally. The second was nature itself, "this grand book the Universe". Observation was truth and could never be wrong. Where the two appeared in conflict, ultimately nature must prevail, and scripture recognised to be symbolic :

"Holy Scripture and Nature are both emanations from the divine word : the former dictated by the Holy Spirit, the latter the observant executrix of God's commands."

Key here is that while Galileo might be somewhat morally flexible, he really seems to have believed this. Nor was this an unusual or even unorthodox view. While Galileo himself popularised the famous quote that the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go... the original source was no less than a Cardinal ! Indeed, the book is replete with high-ranking Church officials endorsing Galileo's work with some enthusiasm, and until the moment of the publication of the famous Dialogue, it would be hard to see him as being anything other than on the best of terms with the Church fathers. 

Not everyone, it's true, was a fan, but the overwhelming nature of his detractors appears to have been one of envy. There might be a smattering of religious fanaticism here and there, but Galileo himself dismissed this as mere "pretended religion", a means to an end, not a sincere belief at all.

This view of nature as the work of God led to a total rejection of the idea of intelligent design. He offers an argument for accepting uncertainty and rejecting the exalted status of mankind which is at once both theological and scientific :

"When I am told that an immense space interposed between the planetary orbits and the starry sphere would be useless and vain, being idle and devoid of stars, and that any immensity going beyond our comprehension would be superfluous for holding the fixed stars, I say that it is brash for our feebleness to attempt to judge the reason for God's actions, and to call everything in the universe vain and superfluous which does not serve us."

In other words, we might not understand why or how God operates, but that damn well doesn't mean we can't observe the world he's made, or reject it because it disagrees with our ideas about how it should be. He continues :

"I believe that one of the greatest pieces of arrogance, or rather madness, that can be thought of is to say, 'Since I do not know how Jupiter or Saturn is of service to me, they are superfluous, and even do not exist*'. Because, o deluded man, neither do I know how my arteries are of service to me, nor my cartilages, spleen or gall; I should not even know that I had a gall, or a spleen, or kidneys, if they had not been shown to me in many dissected corpses."

* While the majority response seems to have been one of awe, a few people had indeed refused to even look through Galileo's telescope. 

Practically minded as he was, he was also thinking of the philosophical implications of what he was doing and his methodology. While he was clear that experiment and observation had the last word, he used thought experiments as guides. For example, when considering whether heavier objects fall faster, he imagined two objects merging in mid-fall to ask whether their speed would then spontaneously increase. Although the notion of gravity evaded him, he at least considered the basis of relative motion, imagining that if you dropped a ball when pulled along on a moving platform, the ball would still keep moving forwards as it fell. In understanding why 45 degrees was the optimum angle to maximise the range of a projectile, he wrote :

"To understand why this happens far outweighs the mere information obtained by the testimony of others or even by repeated experiment."

I like this argument very much. When you understand the reason for something, you can predict what will happen in new situations. You've gained a fundamental insight into how the world works, even, in sense, a measure of control over it. Pure data collection and observation are sometimes an underrated part of the scientific process (likened unflatteringly to stamp collecting), but ultimately this kind of understanding is the nugget of shining gold we're all searching for. This is the epitomy of the scientific endeavour, not to merely quantify the world, but to understand it at the deepest level the human mind allows.

Galileo even came up with an argument that would presage Wigner by several centuries, recognising that the Universe did indeed follow mathematical laws – in sharp contradiction to Aristotle's silly view that the world was just more complicated than that :

"Just as the accountant who wants his calculations to deal with sugar, silk and wool must discount the boxes, bales, and other packings, so the mathematical scientist, when he wants to recognise in the concrete the effects he has proved in the abstract, must deduct any material hinderances; and if he is able to do that, I assure you that things are in no less agreement than are arithmetical computations. The trouble lies, then, not in abstractness or concreteness, but with the accountant who does not know how to balance his books."

Here was a true, practical philosopher*. He saw no contradiction between science and religion and indeed saw his work as revealing the glory of god : "To imagine an infinite universe was merely to grant almighty God his proper due". There were, of course, those who disagreed. Some did so out of envy and jealously, some out of sheer stupidity. And one, in particular, seems to have done so, if we have to reduce it to a single cause, out of an insistence on authoritarian control. Belief in a deity itself was never the cause of the strife, but the need to assert power over others has an awful lot to answer for.

* What's especially fascinating to me is how some other philosophical arguments of this and earlier eras are incredibly sophisticated, yet the practical, natural philosophy remained stuck in an age of astonishing stupidity. This is quite the reverse of the common tendency to proclaim that our intellect gets ahead of our morality. Maybe this is true today, but for the longest time, our practical understanding was incredibly slight and completely outpaced by moral philosophy – if not by how we actually treated each other in reality.

4) Galileo the Criminal

Pope Urban VIII was a cunt. He wasn't the only cunt, and he didn't start out being such a cunt, and he certainly wasn't one of the stupid cunts like what we have nowadays, but nevertheless, he had a nasty, vindictive streak, was thin-skinned, and didn't like to back down in the face of a challenge. He was, I say again, a cunt.

Galileo had a tendency to sail close to the wind, to push the boundaries of what the Church would allow. He also had a healthy fear of being ostracised, and in the face of censure and censorship, he usually backed down. He consistently tried very hard, however, to pre-empt this, discussing his ideas with high-ranking members of the clergy before publishing them and always (until the very end) doing everything through the proper channels. He was personally friends with many high-ranking members of the Church, most of whom praised him for his wonderful discoveries of all kinds, and on good terms with the Pope himself. So how did it all go so suddenly and catastrophically wrong ?

The initial dispute in 1616 was relatively mild. Heliocentrism wasn't deemed heretical, but the Church required it to be discussed as a hypothesis, not fact. The Church, in the wake of the Reformation, was not feeling terribly secure, but Galileo was given personal assurances that his minor infraction hadn't damaged his high standing : he just had to be a bit more careful in the future, but everyone still thought he was the bee's knees.

More problematic was the business of interpreting the Bible. The problem with not taking Scripture as literal truth meant that both sides argued with each other as to whose interpretation was correct, and worse, who got to interpret the interpretations. The Church was moving in a direction of declaring itself the sole authority as to who was allowed to do this, which made Galileo's personal attempts at theology dangerous. Galileo, in contrast, was seeking to save the Church from itself, knowing that while the evidence for heliocentrism was not yet irrefutable – arguments were genuinely lacking, especially a theory of gravity for how it would all work – the time was coming when it would be proved with certainty, and to maintain denial would cause the Church to be ridiculed. People would, quite literally, lose faith.

But for the next 16 years or so, Galileo kept his work to himself and close colleagues. Only after much effort, seeking assurances from multiple clergy, and sending it through the Papal-approved publication censors and channels, did he submit a much more elaborate discussion. Initially, it was received with all the applause Galileo was accustomed to. Only when Pope Urban got wind of it did things go very quickly south.

What seems to have happened was a confluence of factors all making the Pope more of a cunt than usual. As well as the Reformation, he was feeling personally insecure due to accusations of not defending the faith with sufficient vigour. Galileo's detractors, recognising the early censure* of heliocentrism, sensed a chance to bring him low, and they seized upon it in full force. The Pope never read the 500 pages himself – all he heard was the filtered version from Galileo's enemies.

* With just two very small amendments and insertions required by the Church, the stronger term of "censorship" hardly seems appropriate. This was scarcely more than the actions of modern-day broadcast regulators, albeit applied to an arena which is out of bounds to the Inquisition's modern-day counterparts.

What the Pope heard was partly correct and partly an egregious distortion. It was true that Galileo was openly supporting heliocentrism as fact, not hypothesis. Technically he had fully complied with all the directives, but in practise, nobody reading it would ever come away with the impression the geocentrism remained a valid theory. At his trial, he bowed completely to the pressure – there was never any famous "and yet it moves !" defiance from a by now frail old man – and pretended that he actually fully believed in the Ptolemaic model, saying that maybe he'd once considered heliocentrism an interesting alternative but no more than that. He maintained that his work was not intended to promote the heliocentric model in any way. He presented a document that he believed gave him full license to consider it hypothetically, but none of this was enough to satisfy the more belligerent Inquisitors (although only 7/10 signed the final verdict) or the Pope himself... who was, of course, a cunt.

Why do I labour this point ? Because Urban never even read the document, yet doubled down on his wrath. He eventually had Galileo moved, not out of kindness so he could be closer to his daughter, but because his ostensible gaolkeeper was actually treating him as more of an honoured guest, receiving many visitors for scientific discussions. Far worse, Urban had all of his existing (and future) works banned from further printing : a wholly mean-spirited and petty thing to do, an action of pure spite given that half of Europe had already read them. 

The part that seemed to personally wind him up was that Galileo had used some of his favourite arguments to favour heliocentrism... or at least, this is how things are usually described, but really this is a bit too simple. The fuller version is more subtle.

In an earlier essay, Galileo had written an analogy that was pleasing to both scientist and theologian alike, a story of a man who goes around looking to understand the various ways in which animals produce sounds. He learns a great deal, but eventually finds one which doesn't fit any of theories, so realising that the omnipotence of God is greater than he can imagine. Man can learn much, the fictional investigator realises, but the full wonders of the Universe are beyond human comprehension. 

This argument "delighted Urban", and so Galileo used it in the dialogue (as he was instructed to do) for the debater who prefers geocentrism. At the end, he concedes that the magnificence of God is such that he might be wrong, and that God might indeed allow a heliocentric universe. Together with the others conceding that they cannot offer certain proof of heliocentrism, this was enough for the document to pass muster for publication. It all feels very delicate and respectable, and not at all the case of "Galileo made fun of the Pope" which even today is how it's written in some popular descriptions. Rather it seems thoroughly intellectual and nuanced.

What marks Urban as a complete cunt is that he swallowed the argument that Galileo was mocking him without ever bothering to check. He was willing to fine him and sentence him to life imprisonment – Galileo was even threatened with torture – all on the basis of what other people said, despite having been on such personally good terms with the man until almost that very moment. He would have undone all his life's works without ever even trying to check if he was being fed the correct interpretation of what Galileo had actually written. Why he did this is, sadly, the missing piece of the argument, but the result, of course is history.

Conclusions

The censorship of the Catholic Church was indefensible by modern standards, but its importance has been massively exaggerated by New Atheists. Neither Galileo nor Copernicus (who was never branded a heretic) were seeking any conflict with the Church or to undermine religion, but they did have a different approach to theological inquiry. For them, studying the natural world revealed the handiwork of God and was literally incapable of contradiction with holy writ, with the Scriptures subject to human error and therefore subservient to observation. 

For those like Pope Urban, it was not quite that the situation was reversed. It was more that he believed that God was not bound even by human imagination, that God could, if he wanted, commit something logically inconsistent like creating a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it. Whereas Galileo might see God as bound to create things which were ordered and harmonious, Urban imposed no such restrictions.

Galileo also offered an argument of cosmic economics. Whereas the Ptolemaic system offered Earth an exalted central status, but at the same time made it degenerate and changeable, Galileo said that its rarity in the heavens – not its immutability or position – made it valuable. Morality and cosmology were linked, and so Galileo made clever arguments to overturn the Ptolemaic framework on this front too. But the weight of history was perhaps here against him, and worse was the Church's increasing zeal to control information.

And this, I think, is the really interesting discrepancy between Galileo and his detractors. It's not at all about science versus religion in the highest, abstract sense : belief in deities is orthogonal to belief in what those deities happen to do or what they require of humans, and says nothing in itself about how they chose to order the world. It might be fairer to compare science to academia and religions to the Church, human institutions pitted against one another rather than their ideals. And at the heart of it seems a strongly illiberal desire amongst the Church – not the religion – to dictate what is true. 

I always remember hearing a well-known scientific contrarian declare, for no real reason at all, that "at some point you've got to make a decision", that is, to declare what the answer is so that everyone else can move forward. For the scientific consensus this is exactly what you mustn't ever do. Consensus is only successfully forged from independent findings, and only achieves its strength precisely because everyone has worked so hard to pull it down and failed. The idea that anyone gets to decide what's True, to tell everyone else what they have to believe, is anathema to the whole project. 

As scientists, we can only offer evidence and arguments; as humans, we can certainly try and persuade because we think that believing the truth as we see it will be of benefit to others. What we cannot ever do is to Declare Truth. Once we decide on truth by authority, we have lost the path of righteous truth-seeking and fallen into a need for power. The need to control others, for them to believe specific things even when the alternatives are completely harmless... that's what was at work with Urban. That's, I think, the "one trial of Galileo" that was really going on beneath the surface accusations.

It's what we see today among many fanatics, both of religious ilk but also the weirder segments of the political ideologues. To brand all the religious as being unthinking dolts as the New Atheists would have it is to catastrophically miss the point : what we should be fighting against is not spiritual beliefs, but the the illiberal ideas that we must impose our ideas on everyone else, to control rather than convince, to declare rather than discuss. In this age where one political side appears to be degenerating into ever more incoherent fascist farce, maintaining this liberal view is increasingly difficult. But if we can't accept that other people are perfectly entitled to hold stupid but harmless beliefs, then what are we even struggling for ?