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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

#101

Post by EdHominem »

api wrote: post #58
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 singu…

> Science is essentially a learning process.

Science is a testing process which we engage in to learn. Minor, but critical difference.

> a single scientific method

"Hypothesize and test." That's it, there is only one.

Now, which strategy do you use to pick the best hypothesis, and to test faster, etc? That's the part you don't want to get dogmatic about. (eg gradient descent.)

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#104

Post by fmstephe »

elboru wrote: post #90
baldfat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth mentioning: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back in those times. Here is the article on Artistole's…

Any good book you recommend about these topics?, a lot of things are not clear in my mind, like why is Galileo known for "fighting" the Catholic Church about this, but not Copernicus? I have to admit I haven't gone further than some Wikipedia articles.

The best article I know if

http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

As mentioned by another user below. The story in that link is really a great read. However, I'm unable to tell you how accurate or complete that account is.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#105

Post by kelnos »

michaelmrose wrote: post #75
athenot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consi…

To be willing to accept evidence to the contrary is wonderful but to limit oneself to only what can be justified in terms of "misunderstanding" not contradicting is fundamentally limiting. The truth can have no sacred cows they are a disease of the mind stunting growth forever.

I feel like that's more of a "political" statement, something that seems to be common among religious leadership even today. Whenever science proves something to contradict a holy text with enough certainty that the religious org can't ignore or refute, they save face by claiming that the evidence in the holy text was merely misunderstood, misinterpreted, or mistranslated. It's understandable, if intellectually dishonest.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#106

Post by whybroke »

jnordwick wrote: post #88

What about the Orthodox? "The Church" is really an anachronism. You are speaking of the Roman church which is about only half of Christianity at the time: Western Europe. What about the other half of the Church? Eastern Europe, Russia, Asian, Norther Africa, the Middle East, Greece? How did they receive Galileo? I've always been fascinated by this total amnesia over the Orthodox Church as if it didn't exist or was on…

And the necessary next question: how fast did ideas travel at the time given technical, linguistic and cultural borders. I'd love to know the first mention of Galileo's (or Copernicus') ideas in Moscow, Terran, Mumbai, Mexico City, Beijing etc

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#107

Post by acqq »

baldfat wrote: post #64
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…

Also worth mentioning: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back in those times. Here is the article on Artistole's…

No. The church thinkers actually believed what was in the Bible: Augustine, Saint Basil, St. Thomas Aquinas.

And the scriptures were made by the people who understood very little about the world, compared to what the current science knows. Therefore the creation is described using the concepts that we today know for sure don't exist. Specifically, in the creation myth:

"And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so." (Genesis 1:7)

The firmament is what people believed separated the water that rains "from above" from what we see as "heaven."

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

The Latin translation, accepted by the Church, made in 4th century AD, uses word that is cognate with English "firm." The firmament was believed to be firm, like metals, and the gods "opened" it when it rained, and then closed it back.

They didn't even know that the rain is really in the clouds.

Their "world model" involved non-moving Earth. Aristotle came later.

It's true that Aristotle wrote what he wrote, but his teachings were never a part of the Bible.

Edit: kindly see my next answer down the tree if you don't want to read the Wikipedia yourself, the highest church thinkers really supported exactly the model with the firmament, the Earth in the middle, because Bible. Also see my top post here regarding the main article.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#108

Post by sofal »

PakG1 wrote: post #59
oldmanjay wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Scientists do not generally have faith in their hypotheses in the same way that religious believers have faith in the claims of their holy book or their religious leader. That would be an equivocation on the usage of the term 'faith', one usage being merely confidence or trust, which can be apportioned to the available evidence, and the other usage being a religious belief in doctrines regardless of available evidence.

If you start with the conclusion that the claims in your holy book are true and then work backwards from that by reinterpreting it when it seems to clash with the available scientific evidence, that would be exercising religious faith. If you hypothesize something and withhold a certain level of confidence in your hypothesis until it can be tested, you are not exercising faith in the religious sense of the term.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#109

Post by pippopascal »

Ultimately, the argument for the helio-centric model is aesthetic. It is more elegant than the geo-centric when describing the dance of the stars.

So, are both systems equally right and equally wrong?

- Ultimately we're talking about a change in reference frame, which is a vector subtraction. They're mathematically transformations of each other.

- Since the Sun doesn't have infinite mass it, in fact, also orbits the Earth

- Neither system is an inertial reference frame. If we assume the Earth is infinitesimal, at the very least the Sun orbits the Jupiter-Sun barycenter (which is almost outside the Sun proper). So if anything we should speak of a "J-S centric model"

- Both are useful. The geo-centric model is quite useful and still used in astronomy (Never-mind tracking satellites, try understand your coordinates in the heliocentric reference frame.)

- The "corrections" of the geo-centric model are higher order harmonics, and can fit any motion and it's an early application of harmonic analysis. In fact, they're not actually corrections to the model, they are motions that naturally arise when describing circular motion wrt a point outside its axis.

- What's wrong with non-inertial reference frames anyway? Consider them "fictitious" or consider them real, we can calculate and consider the non-inertial forces.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#110

Post by c3534l »

acqq wrote: post #107
baldfat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth mentioning: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back in those times. Here is the article on Artistole's…

No. The church thinkers actually believed what was in the Bible: Augustine, Saint Basil, St. Thomas Aquinas. And the scriptures were made by the people who understood very little about the world, compared to what the current science knows. Therefore the creation is described using the concepts that we today know for sure don't exist. Specifically, in the creation myth: "And God made the firmament, and divided the wat…

No one is saying that the bible has a physically accurate account of the world, only that the church at the time based their understanding of the physical universe primarily on Aristotle, and I don't think you'll find many historians arguing otherwise on account of us having writings from them arguing and justifying their positions.
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