God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion by Victor J. Stenger Read Free Book Online

1650). His Cartesian coordinate system and analytic geometry became basic tools that are still used in physics. He was able to reconcile God with the new mechanistic science that was just starting to develop, with his help, by making a clear distinction between body and soul, or, as we would now put it, matter and mind.
    Prior to the seventeenth century, it was universally believed that the movements of bodies were the result of spiritual action, with God as the prime mover, as taught by Aristotle and Aquinas. Descartes replaced spiritual causality with mechanical causality, in which inanimate bodies and animals were machines moved around by natural forces. The one exception was the human being.
    Descartes proposed that humans possess a distinct immaterial, immortal mind, or soul, that controls their movements. This duality became a fundamental ingredient of Christianity, as well as fitting in well with just about every other religious belief in the world. And it is a major place where religion and modern science, as I will later argue in detail, irreconcilably disagree.
    Finally, let us discuss another thinker of the seventeenth century who has had some influence on modern thought, although he was largely disputed or ignored in his lifetime. This is the Jewish, Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (died 1677).
    Spinoza formulated the doctrine known as pantheism, mentioned above, that associates god with an impersonal cosmic order. When a rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God, the great physicist was able to escape disapproval by saying he believed in “Spinoza's god.” The rabbi may have been unaware that Spinoza had been excommunicated (a rare event in Judaism) from his synagogue in Amsterdam for his teachings. The Catholic Church banned all of Spinoza's books, and many were burned by Protestant reformers.
    Einstein and many other avowed atheistic physicists of our era, notablythe celebrated cosmologist Stephen Hawking, use the term “god” metaphorically in the Spinozan sense, to the enormous confusion of laypeople who have never heard of Spinoza or of pantheism and are thereby led to falsely think that Einstein was, and Hawking is, a believer. It would be better for all if nonbelieving scientists avoided using this metaphor. More recently, Hawking called heaven a “fairy story.” 33
    GALILEO
     
    Galileo is generally recognized as the first true scientist of the new science because he placed observation over authority except on purely theological matters. As we have seen, several Islamic scholars had done the same, so Galileo was not the first to emphasize the importance of observations. But he took the ball and ran with it.
    The Florentine scholar improved the previously invented telescope, increasing its magnification factor from three to twenty, and turned it on the heavens. He observed four satellites of Jupiter and inferred that they rotated around that planet rather than around Earth, providing support for Copernicus's heliocentric conjecture. He saw sunspots and mountains on the moon, rejecting the common belief that the celestial bodies, being part of heaven, were perfect spheres.
    By watching a swinging lamp in church, Galileo deduced the principle that the period of a simple pendulum depends only on its length. He noted that all heavy objects fall with the same acceleration, neglecting air resistance.
    He was the first to make a careful distinction between velocity, the rate of change of position, and acceleration—the rate of change of velocity. When asked the reasonable question, “If the Earth moves, why do we not notice it?” Galileo gave two responses. First, he insisted that his observations of celestial bodies provided evidence that Earth moves and thus our intuition that we can detect our motion must be wrong. Second, he explained that when we sense our motion we are observing our acceleration, not our velocity. This has become known as the principle of Galilean relativity: velocity is relative.