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

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:25:30 UTC, "Society" <Society@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


"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)

Wow, I haven't even had time to rebut the utterly silly things you said
about his science the other day, and already you're opening the
personal-insult battle.

Tell you what, I'm not terribly good at that stuff, so I'll try to pass on
it.


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".)

Yes, I knew that. I also know what the Inquisition said when it condemned
Galileo on vehement suspicion of heresy.


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.

Just goes to show how much wrongness you can find in a communication if
you're determined to over-intepret it in the most unfavorable way.

(Perhaps that
wasn't your intention to suggest that, Dan Drake.)

Decent of you to concede that!


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.

Yes, yes. It would be a bad idea to assume that everyone knows that. But
in saying what I said, I had no need of that hypothesis.


So, officials of the Church asked some experts (philosophers)
if the heliocentrism Galileo advocated "was right" and the
philosophers "said no."

The meaning of my statement, of course, was the they simply asked some (of
their own favorite highly learned) philosophers, without anyone's being
expected to make a sober examination of all the facts as they were known,
let alone the facts of 32 years later when Galileo fully presented his
case. The result was a ban, and not a temporary ban, on -- well, as I
said, exactly what was banned is controversial.

Well, those philosophers were correct;
the heliocentrism propounded by Galileo (and Copernicus
before him) wasn't right.

No, this is both wrong and irrelevant. The irrelevance is what I was
talking about in the previous brief posting; the wrongness I'll address in
another one.

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.

By golly, I agree with the vary last bit: The teachings sure were contrary
to the understanding of the time. Good thing they ordered Galileo (or
didn't quite, depending on one's reading of the very complex case) never
to discuss the matter again. You never know what stuff might come up if
you allow that sort of thing.


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).

Right. We scholarly types who never oversimplify anything in a brief
posting always support our position by not giving citations.

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."

A person who was not totally unreasonable could well have reached such a
conclusion in 1616. What a person does with it is another matter. In any
case, nothing went on that bore any resemblance to what is now considered
an examination of the evidence.

A casual reader of what you're saying might easily miss that fact; hence,
my comments in the previous post and this one. You will note that the
comment I was repyling to was exactly about evidence and its possible
effect on the findings of the Church.


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.

Well, if you don't know about the events of 1616 and 1632-33, then you
really don't know anything at all about the case, do you?

This is not a rhetorical ploy to insult you. It is a fact. If you try to
talk about this without a pretty good knowledge of the events of 1616
(when Galileo met with the authorities on his own initiative, against
advice of probably wiser heads, and met with complete failure) and
1632-1633 (when he published and was ordered to stand trial in Rome), then
you can only pass on other people's versions of these very complicated
events. The result is likely to be badly oversimplified and in many ways
quite wrong; and in fact, it was.

There really is not space here to educate you. But I'll give you this,
free of charge:

"Whereas however we wanted to treat you with benignity at that time, it
was decided at the Holy Congregation held in the presence of His Holiness
on
25 Feb 1616 that the Most Eminent Lord Cardinal Bellarmine would order you

to abandon this false opinion completely; that if you refused to do this,
the Commissary of the Holy Office would give you an injunction to abandon
this doctrine, not to teach it to others, not to defend it, and not to
treat
of it; and that if you did not acquiesce in this injunction, you should be

imprisoned. To execute this decision, the following day at the palace of
and in the presence of the above-mentioned Most Eminent Lord Cardinal
Bellarmine, after beine informed and warned in a friendly way by the same
Lord Cardinal, you were given an injunction by the then Father Commissary
of
the Holy Office in the presence of a notary and witnesses to the effect
that
you must completely abandon the said false opinion, and that in the future

you could neither hold, nor defend, nor teach it in any way whatever,
either
orally or in writing; having promised to obey, you were dismissed."

That's from the formal condemnation in 1633. Note that he was (it says
here) not allowed to teach the idea in any way whatever. Way to do good
science!


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...
...
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. ;-)

Funny thing is, the older text that I cited actually had a reference, or
at least there was a time when it did.

...

--
Dan Drake
dd@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.dandrake.com/
porlockjr.blogspot.com
.