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Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

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Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#51

Post by oldmanjay »

PakG1 wrote: post #43
jmcdiesel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science and Religion aren't at odds with each other, they never have been. What has been at odds is religion and scientific discoveries that contradict or disprove the religious story. Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the problem. Bruno was burned alive for holding fast to the idea that there are more solar systems than just our own, and that the universe is basically infinite, both…

Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the problem. Rather, in the face of a specific interpretation of the Bible. There are other literal interpretations of the Bible that are much more in tune with scientific knowledge of astronomy and origins, but they are not well-understood among less educated religious folk that follow the Bible. Likewise, certain interpretations of the Koran lead t…

Belief virtually requires a closed mind, since an open mind would allow observation that contradicts the belief. It's not sad, it's a feature.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#52

Post by eugeneionesco »

imaginenore wrote: post #31

Let's not dilute the term "scientific". Scentific method is relatively recent, and consists of very specific sets of steps. So no, Galileo's opposition was not scientific.

Definitely not true. Please study the work of Johannes Kepler on planetary motion, he lived in the same period.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#53

Post by enraged_camel »

cpr wrote: post #45
criley2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Also worth mentioning: Galileo himself was "within the Catholic Church"." Also worth mentioning: not being in the Catholic Church during that era was called "excommunication" and was banishment from public society all together

No, excommunication simply means being outside the sacraments. It had nothing to do with public society. Galileo was under house arrest at some point, but that had no canonical relation to any excommunication.

Your technical definition is correct, but you need to consider the practical implications. When you got excommunicated from the Church, people basically stopped taking you seriously, and no one wanted to associate themselves with you. As a consequence, you had no choice but to move elsewhere, i.e. self-banishment.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#54

Post by eternalban »

bbctol wrote: post #27
daveguy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With Occam's razor you would prefer it. > - Ptolemaic model with its epicycles provided better predictions. These two statements are contradictory.

How so?

OP thinks the assumption of "epicycles" tips the balance of "least assumptions" to the contending theory. (He did not elaborate the full count of assumptions of either.)

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#55

Post by nkrisc »

klodolph wrote: post #46
nkrisc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was the sun is orbiting around a constantly (though subtly) shifting point because of the complex interactions of all the planets that orbit it. Each planet orbiting the sun alone would have a different barycenter. Put them all together and you get a much more complex picture. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It's not that the barycenter is moving, it's that the orbit of the sun is not even remotely circular. The barycenter only moves in response to forces outside the solar system (the galaxy). On the other hand, if you look at the barycenter of, say, Earth + Sun, then that barycenter will move around because there are a bunch of other planets involved. But the barycenter of the solar system is more stable, due to the con…

Thanks, that is a better explanation.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#56

Post by neaden »

hprotagonist wrote: post #38
jmcdiesel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science and Religion aren't at odds with each other, they never have been. What has been at odds is religion and scientific discoveries that contradict or disprove the religious story. Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the problem. Bruno was burned alive for holding fast to the idea that there are more solar systems than just our own, and that the universe is basically infinite, both…

Bruno was burned alive for being a complete prat, and pissing off all the wrong people, actually. Formally, he was condemned because: > In the spring of 1599, the trial was begun before a commission of the Roman Inquisition, and, after the accused had been granted several terms of respite in which to retract his errors, he was finally condemned (January, 1600), handed over to the secular power (8 February), and burne…

It amazes me that a literal wizard is held up as a martyr for science these days.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#57

Post by athenot »

edko wrote: post #6

There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable exceptions. José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo, so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools. Moreover, when Galileo fell in dis…

The opposition by the church was two-fold. It was on the grounds that Galileo had not sufficiently proven the Copernician system. Nevertheleless, it endured 9 popes before controvery was stirred up when the debate moved into the venacular and his theory started getting pitched against Scripture, instead of just continuing the debate among astronomers.

But even the authors of the judgement against Galileo didn't consider it final, as Cardial Bellarmine wrote:

    I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve
    round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very 
    carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which 
    appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood 
    these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated.
Also there was no prohibition to continue to discuss the theory in the context of Astronomy, just to stop making claims about validity of scripture (which is what got Galileo in trouble later in life).

It's worth noting there have been many scientific discoveries advanced by churchmen or churchwomen which on the surface appeared to contradict points of doctrine. However, the scope of the two are different and can coexist. This happened again with George Lemaître, who formulated early hypothesis about the Big Bang, concerning himself with the "how", not the "why" and resisting concordism arguments.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#58

Post by api »

santaragolabs wrote: post #2

This is basically the thesis of Paul Feyerabend who used it as his main argument against there being a scientific method. His book "Against Method" is one of the best works on Philosophy of Science I've read during my university education.

For quite a while I've suspected that you might be able to support Feyerabend's argument using modern learning theory. In particular I suspect that this is relevant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...

Science is essentially a learning process. Since every learning method has a performance envelope and fares better against some fitness landscapes than others, restricting science to a singular method effectively prohibits learning over fitness landscapes whose structures lie outside that method's envelope.

In layman's terms: a single scientific method will be unable to learn certain things, or at least unable to learn them in a reasonable amount of time.

This is also why I am eternally skeptical of all business and management "methodologies." If there were a closed-form methodology that always yielded successful businesses there would be no entrepreneurs. Large companies and investment funds would simply execute this closed-form method deterministically and reliably pump out successes while retaining 100% ownership. Entrepreneurs exist because creating successful companies is an "AI complete problem" that requires the full multi-approach multi-paradigm multi-methodology capabilities of a human intellect... and even then it's hard.

(E.g. I put down Lean Startup when I realized I was just reading a description of gradient descent in the business domain. Gradient descent only works over very regular fitness landscapes with clear peaks and well-connected paths to those peaks. In a rocky fitness landscape you will get stuck at a local maximum almost instantly and never go any further.)

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#59

Post by PakG1 »

oldmanjay wrote: post #51
PakG1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the problem. Rather, in the face of a specific interpretation of the Bible. There are other literal interpretations of the Bible that are much more in tune with scientific knowledge of astronomy and origins, but they are not well-understood among less educated religious folk that follow the Bible. Likewise, certain interpretations of the Koran lead t…

Belief virtually requires a closed mind, since an open mind would allow observation that contradicts the belief. It's not sad, it's a feature.

Let's say that blind belief requires a closed mind. Everyone at the end of the day relies on faith at some level or other. Even scientists believe in their hypotheses until their hypotheses are proven wrong. Then they change their beliefs. The fact of the matter is that everyone still believes in something at all times. I have yet to meet a scientist who precludes his everyday thoughts with, "well, then again, it's also possible that we're in the Matrix and this is all a computer simulation, or that I'm not real at all, even though I appear to have agency, etc, etc, but barring all of that, which requires a higher burden of proof, here's what I currently think and believe..."

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#60

Post by lmickh »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #34
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #24

To be fair, the Church's influence in what we would call science back then was incredibly powerful. I think its unrealistic to see 17th century science as this secular institution like we have today. Of course the 'scientists' of the age followed a church friendly narrative. It was in their interests to do so. I think we will never really understand the chill on speech and research the Church had during the medieval…

That's really a lot of nonsense, though I'll grant you that "progress-stifling, working-against-science church" is a long-entrenched meme[+]. [+] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progr...

Would also add that much of the Dark Age myth originated from the renaissance humanists.

I've always found it funny that so much of the movement was examining original sources instead of what someone wrote about them, yet so many people read the renaissance works and don't look back to the original sources just before them.

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