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

There is no such thing as absolute motion.
    When we measure the velocity of an object, it is always with respect to some particular observer's “frame of reference.” For example, suppose I watch you drive by in a car and measure the car's velocity to be 80 kilometers per hour. This is the velocity of the car with respect to my frame of reference. However, you are sitting in the car, so the car is at rest, zero speed, in your frame of reference.
    The story of Galileo's conflict with the Catholic Church is widely known and also widely misunderstood. Many authors who agree with me that science and religion are incompatible have used the Galileo affair as a prime example. I expect some readers will expect me to take the same approach. However, I must bow to the more expert conclusions of most contemporary historians that the story is more complicated and that Galileo brought much of his trouble on himself.
    Not that Church authorities were blameless, but the facts are that Galileo's crime was not so much his teaching that Earth moved about the sun; his crime was more about disobedience. This was before free speech was accepted as a basic human right. In 1616, Galileo had been ordered to cease teaching the Copernican picture as a true representation of reality. He was instructed to instead teach it only as a convenient mathematical formalism. This was not unreasonable, because the strongest evidence in support of the Copernican model, such as the moons of Jupiter and the imperfection of the celestial bodies, had not yet been observed.
    In 1632, Galileo published Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems , in which he argued that the tides provide evidence, incorrectly as it turned out, that Earth moves. Worse, Galileo used a foolish character, foolishly named Simplicio, to express some arguments that had been advanced by Pope Urban VIII, a longtime friend and supporter of Galileo. The pope must have said, “We are not pleased.”
    Although the Inquisition had worked out what we today call a “plea agreement” that would have left Galileo with little more than a slap on the wrist, the Pope intervened in his case, and in 1633 Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, found guilty, and sentenced to house arrest. Although he was forbidden to write further, his Discourse on the Two New Sciences , which laid the foundation of mechanics that would be built upon by Newton, was published in Holland in 1638.
    The Catholic Church was, in fact, almost ready to adopt the Copernican model, as better observations began to show the model's superiority as a calculational tool—a fact that was not immediately evident in Copernicus's time. As we have seen, both Islam and Christianity relied on astronomy to determine important dates in their religious calendars, so the Church was happy to have a better method.
    However, with the Protestant Reformation, the Church backed off from its flexibility on cosmology, feeling pressure to maintain its traditional conservative doctrines. Dialogue was placed on the Church's prohibited list and not removed until 1822. In 1992, a commission appointed by Pope John Paul II acknowledged, “Church officials had erred in condemning Galileo.” 34
    Martin Luther (died 1546) opposed the Copernican model because it contradicted the Bible. The other great reformer, John Calvin (died 1564), is often quoted as saying, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” However, this quotation had not been found in any of Calvin's work, and it is not clear what Calvin's position was on the new astronomy. 35
    As the Reformation developed, Protestant countries, notably England, became more intellectually free than Catholic countries and provided the environment for Newton and others to proceed with a revolution in human thought. After all, the Reformation demonstrated that authority could be questioned, even the authority of the Roman Church, which was claimed to follow in an unbroken