Re: Wherez my flying car? MarkB, give it to me damn you!


"Jill" <perspicacious@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:sph1r35h63j1cqiaoml030dn5qdjgrj8r6@xxxxxxxxxx

Dan Drake wrote:

PolishKnight wrote:

[...E]ven if Galileo had gotten all his details right
that's no guarantee the Vatican would have changed
it's mind right away.

Actually, there's no way in the Inferno they would have.

Actually, Dan Drake, you're worng. ("Your theory is so bad
it is not even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli, apocryphal remark)

The Church had resolved the question of discrepancies
between a literalist interpretation of Scripture and facts
of the world that are contrary to such interpretation about
1000 years before Galileo. (A Christian school of Bible
interpretation that was literalist only came along in the 19th
century and then only among the then-new Protestant sects
that called themselves "fundamentalist".)

Scientific correctness was alightly alluded to in the
discussion *before* his first meeting with officialdom
in 1616. For that session, though, the Church simply asked
some philosophers whether this heliocentric thing was
right, and they said no ("false and contrary to philosophy"),
and teh Church officials added that it was contrary to the
Bible -- so they forbade him to write aobut it as if it were
true and not just a clever gimmick.

Actually, Dan Drake, your characterization of events is,
to put it charitably, flawed because it is so simplistic.

Saying "the Church _simply_ asked _some_ philosophers"
(emphasis added) suggests that the first philosophers who
were happened across were the ones asked. (Perhaps that
wasn't your intention to suggest that, Dan Drake.) Additionally,
the casual reader of your remark might fail to realize that
at that time the word "philosopher" named someone who
was highly educated and usually conducted original
research, making a philosopher an especially knowledgeable
individual. Few people today realize that at that time what
we now call science was simply a part of what was called
philosophy. Sometimes people of Galileo's day would
use the term natural philosophy if they wished to distinguish
the study of natural phenomena from the rest of philosophy
and sometimes they didn't.

So, officials of the Church asked some experts (philosophers)
if the heliocentrism Galileo advocated "was right" and the
philosophers "said no." Well, those philosophers were correct;
the heliocentrism propounded by Galileo (and Copernicus
before him) wasn't right. Galileo's arguments were sloppy
and Copernican heliocentrism was known to natural philosophers
who studied the heavens that the Copernican theory didn't fit
the data. "False" is a pretty servicable label for a theory that
is contrary to the best available data. As for the judgment by
the experts of the day that Galileo's teachings were "contrary
to philosophy", meaning contrary to the best accepted theories
of the day, the Ptolemaic geocentric system and Aristotelian
physics, the experts were right about that too.

When "Church officials added that it (heliocentrism) was
contrary to the Bible", they weren't being arbitrary or acting
on a whim. They relied on the best science of the day and
saw that it fit well with the then-best accepted interpretation
of a particular passage in the Bible (no it's not in Genesis;
I leave the identification of the passage to which I refer
to the student). Thus, the Church officials were reasonable
when they concluded that not only was Galileo teaching
what today we'd call junk science but that what he was
teaching was contrary "was contrary to the Bible."

Also, they ordered him not to discuss it *at all* -- unless
they didn't, which is controversial to this day.

Problem: this was 16 years *before* he made his
actual case! [...]

Your claims about what happened when and in which order
are unclear to me. So, I choose not to address them here.

The church just got around to admitting his
position was correct:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo
"On 31 October 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret
for how the Galileo affair was handled, and officially
conceded that the Earth was not stationary, as the result
of a study conducted by the Pontifical Council for Culture.
[77][78]"

NO! Does Wikipedia really say that? Wow, it's a worse
piece of *** than even I thought. Of course, Wikipedia says
whatever the last bozo happened to put in, so you never know
what it will assert as fact from one day to the next.

Agreed. I was aware of the problems with Wikipedia
as a source and even so, am equally guilty of using it
frequently. The problem with me is laziness.

Well, you're not alone on that score, Jill. The author(s)
of (at least that section of) the Wikipedia article were also
lazy. Their references are to secondary, not primary, sources
and their choices of secondary sources were especially poor.

Wikipedia usually pops right up in the first few items
of a search making it terribly convenient but as you
pointed out not always terribly reliable. I'm going to
take your advice in the future and Google further than the
first Wikipedia entry that pops up.

Yeah, IME Wikipedia articles often show poor scholarship
and about any controversial matter they are downright misleading.
As its Galileo article illustrates, Wikipedia contributors often
rely on their personal sense of "what everybody knows to be so."
The result is to render the relationship of Wikipedia to knowledge
akin to the relationship between folk knowledge and knowledge.
Wikipedia articles are a lot like Usenet articles that way. ;-)

That snippet of a Wikipedia article that PolishKnight cited
seemed suspect to me because the language in quotes was
very unlike any official Church document from a pope that
I've ever seen. So I looked at footnotes 77 and 78 and what
was quoted was somebody's _opinion_, likely secondhand,
of what Pope John Paul II had said. Gee, the author(s) of that
stuff are sure that everybody _they_ know knows this to be
so, in part because they and everybody _they_ know listens
to the BBC. Then to back up their assertion that this is so,
they cite the BBC.

Hmmm, that would make a fine schoolbook example
of circular reasoning. It's kind'a like, say, some early
Renaissance scholastic scholars asserting that everybody
we know has studied Aristotle and everybody who's anybody
knows that the heavens are immutable. And why do we all know
that the heavens are immutable? Because Aristotle said so!
We modern folk, including those holding the title of Ph.D.
(hey, what does that stand for?), like to laugh at the blunders
of earlier scholars; then off we go and make the exact same sort
of blunder!

--
Now actually, that is not the answer that I had in mind
because the book that I got this problem out of
wants you to do it in base eight. But don't panic.
Base eight is just like base ten really, if you're
missing two fingers.

Tom Lehrer, "New Math"


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