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

chain from Peter, Christ's first Vicar of God. Surely it is no coincidence that Luther and Calvin were contemporaries of Copernicus.
    Galileo always insisted that his teachings did not conflict with those of the Church. He is often quoted as saying, “The Holy Spirit's intention is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go,” although it is generally assumed that he was in turn quoting Cardinal Cesare Baronius (died 1607). The new science opened the door to what is known as natural theology , in which God's majesty is revealed through the wonders of nature. It also led to deism, which reached full flower briefly in the eighteenth century during the brief period known as the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. In Enlightenment deism, an impersonal creator sets the universe in motion and interferes no further with it as it proceeds deterministically according to the laws of mechanics set down by the creator.
    The new cosmology removed humanity from the center of the universe and challenged the teachings of both Aristotle and the Church. Still, in the medieval view humans were special in that they had not only a material body but also an immaterial soul.
    As for the Galileo affair, historian Thomas Dixon says it was not a clash between science and religion, as it is usually remembered, but rather a dispute about who was authorized to produce and disseminate knowledge. Galileo's claim that a sole individual could arrive at knowledge by his own observations and reasoning was considered presumptuous and a direct threat to the authority of the Church. 36
    Moreover, Galileo promoted a philosophical view now defined as scientific realism , which has become the dominant perspective of most scientists ever since. According to this doctrine, scientific observations and inferences about the unobserved represent a true glimpse of ultimate reality. Galileo insisted that Earth really moved around the sun.
    The Church did not object to scientific models such as those of Copernicus and Kepler as being useful tools. But it insisted that science was just in the business of making predictions of observable phenomena and that one should leave questions of ultimate truth to be determined by scripture as interpreted through the revelations and traditions of the Church. 37
    The Catholic Church would have been perfectly happy if Galileo had, like earlier astronomers, just followed the lead of the Lutheran theologian, Andreas Osiander (died 1552), who oversaw the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ( On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres ) and added an unsigned preface that said:
It is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study. Then he must conceive and devise the causes of these motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as the past…. These hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that is enough. 38
     
    This is what we call instrumentalism . Today, scientific realism is the common belief among most scientists—not because they have thought about it but because they would rather not. Philosophers of science, however, have made a convincing case that our scientific models and their ingredients—while not arbitrary, culturally dependent narratives, as claimed by postmodernists—are formulated with a great deal of subjectivity and need not precisely describe “true reality.”
    NEWTON'S LAWS
     
    Galileo, and to some extent Descartes, laid the foundation of mechanics. Isaac Newton carried the program to its conclusion. Although many improvements to Newton's methods and observations have since been elaborated, these basically decorate the Newtonian edifice.
    Newton's greatest achievements