The Galileo Affair, 1633-1893

GALILEO'S DIALOGUE:  WOULD ARISTOTLE HAVE BEEN PERSUADED BY GALILEO'S EVIDENCE FOR THE COPERNICAN SYSTEM?

From 1616 to 1624, Galileo obeyed the "Special Injunction" that he had received from Cardinal Bellarmine in 1616--that Galileo would "abandon completely" the Copernican view of the Universe and "henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever, either orally or in writing."  But then in 1624, he began to write the book that would be published early in 1632 under the title Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican.  That book provoked the Inquisition in 1633 into proceedings against Galileo that would force him to sign a document of abjuration and to be imprisoned (under house arrest in his villa outside Florence) for the rest of life, until his death in 1642.

In 1623, the old pope died, and Cardinal Maffeo Barberini was elected Pope Urban VIII.  Urban was a well-educated Florentine, who admired Galileo, and who had helped to keep the Inquisition from publicly condemning Galileo and Copernicanism in 1616.  Urban's position had been, and continued to be, that as long as the Copernican system was treated as a mere "hypothesis" that could not be absolutely demonstrated to be true, then it should not be considered a heretical denial of the Bible.  He insisted that if Copernicanism were affirmed to be a truth about nature, that would deny God's omnipotence by denying God's arbitrary power to design the cosmos in any way He wished.

In the spring of 1624, Galileo went to Rome and stayed there for six weeks to pay his respects to the new pope.  He met weekly with Urban, and the two had friendly conversations that led Galileo to think that the Pope might be his supporter.  But when Urban read the Dialogue in July of 1632, he felt betrayed because he saw in the book, beneath the shallow pretense of treating the Copernican system as a mere hypothesis, a clear defense of that system as a probable truth based on the best evidence and demonstrative arguments.

Galileo had written his book as an imagined dialogue with three interlocutors.  Salviati defended the Pythagorean and Copernican system.  Simplicio spoke for the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic system.  Sagredo acted as an educated gentleman who commented on the debate.  Like a Platonic dialogue, Galileo did not speak in his own name, but the reader could see that Salviati was his spokesman; and the reader could also see that Salviati was allowed to make the stronger arguments.  It was also a good joke that Simplicio's name suggested he was a "simpleton."

It should be noted that while these three characters in the Dialogue discuss the cosmological, astronomical, physical, and philosophical aspects of Copernicanism, they say nothing about the biblical issues.

It is also noteworthy that Galileo has Salviati argue that he, not Simplicio, is the true Aristotelian philosopher, because Aristotle would have accepted the modern scientific evidence for the Copernican system.  Consider this passage:

"SALV.  Whenever you wish to reconcile what your senses show you with the soundest teachings of Aristotle, you will have no trouble at all.  Does not Aristotle say that because of the great distance, celestial matters cannot be treated very definitely?"

"SIMP.  He does say so, quite clearly."

"SALV.  Does he not also declare that what sensible experience shows ought to be preferred over any argument, even one that seems to be extremely well founded?  And does he not say this positively and without a bit of hesitation?"

"SIMP.  He does."

"SALV.  Then of the two propositions, both of them Aristotelian doctrines, the second--which says it is necessary to prefer the senses over arguments--is a more solid and definite doctrine than the other, which holds the heavens to be unalterable.  Therefore, it is better Aristotelian philosophy to say, 'Heaven is alterable because my senses tell me so,' than to say, 'Heaven is unalterable because Aristotle was so persuaded by reasoning,'  Add to this that we possess a better basis for reasoning about celestial things than Aristotle did.  He admitted such perceptions to be very difficult for him by reason of the distance from his senses, and conceded that one whose senses could better represent them would be able to philosophize about them with more certainty.  Now we, thanks to the telescope, have brought the heavens thirty or forty times closer to us than they were for Aristotle, so that we can discern many things in them that he could not see, among other things these sunspots, which were absolutely invisible to him.  Therefore, we can treat of the heavens and the sun more confidently than Aristotle could" (Galileo 2001, 63-64).

One could see this as Galileo agreeing with my argument that Aristotle doubted the truth of his cosmology, because he saw that the fundamental premises of his reasoning about cosmology were not based on observational evidence, since in studying astronomical phenomena, "there is so little evidence available to our sense experience," and therefore his cosmological astronomy was based on ancestral myths about the divinity of the heavens that were believed only by faith.  Consequently, Aristotle would have been open to the observational evidence provided by Galileo's telescope that supported modern astronomy.

I have written about Hobbes's suggestion that the "vain philosophy" of the Aristotelian Scholastic theologians was based on what Aristotle knew to be "false Philosophy," which Aristotle professed to believe only because of his "fearing the fate of Socrates."  This suggests the possibility that Aristotle's secret teaching in his natural science supports Galileo's modern science in challenging the medieval model of the cosmos.

This also suggests that Leo Strauss was wrong in claiming that Aristotelian natural right requires an Aristotelian cosmic teleology that has been refuted by modern science.  Aristotle saw that natural right could be rooted in the immanent teleology of his biological science that was better grounded in sense experience than his cosmology.  And, as I have argued, Aristotle's biological teleology was confirmed by Charles Darwin's evolutionary biology.

Moreover, Galileo suggested that Aristotle would have accepted the empirical evidence for modern biology--for example, the anatomical evidence for the primacy of the brain (rather than the heart) in the human nervous system as the natural biological ground for the human mind (Galileo 2001, 124-26).

Galileo observed that people like Simplicio who identify their Aristotelian philosophy with repeating what is said in Aristotle's texts without considering the new empirical evidence for modern science are not really philosophers, because they are actually "historians or memory experts" rather than philosophers (Galileo 2001, 130-31).

THE INQUISITION PROCEEDINGS AGAINST GALILEO IN 1633

In the summer of 1632, the Pope ordered a ban on the recently published
Dialogue, and he commissioned a special committee of three people to study the Dialogue and send him a report with their assessment of it.  In September, their report concluded that Galileo had violated the orders of the Inquisition and the Pope, because "many times in the work there is a lack of and deviation from hypothesis, either by asserting absolutely the earth's motion and the sun's immobility, or by characterizing the supporting arguments as demonstrative and necessary, or by treating the negative side as impossible" (Finocchiaro 1989, 221).  The Pope then submitted the case to the Inquisition in Rome, and Galileo was summoned to Rome to stand trial.

In April and May of 1633, Galileo sat for four depositions before the Inquisition, in which he answered questions.  In his first deposition, he said that he had understood that Cardinal Bellarmine's special injunction in 1616 meant that he could hold Copernicus's opinion only "suppositionally" (ex suppositione) or "hypothetically" (ex hypothesi), because to hold it "absolutely" true would be repugnant to the Bible; and he claimed that in the Dialogue, he had done that because he had never advocated Copernicanism in absolute terms.

But then the Inquisition received commissioned reports from people who had read the Dialogue and offered their assessments of what Galileo had done in that book.  The report from Melchior Inchofer was meticulous in quoting many passages in the book where Galileo "teaches, defends, and holds the opinion of the earth's motion" (Finocchiaro 1989, 262-70).

In his second deposition, Galileo said that he had reread his book to see if "against my purest intention, through my oversight," he had conveyed the impression to his readers that he was defending Copernicanism as simply true.  He explained:

". . . Now, I freely confess that it appeared to me in several places to be written in such a way that a reader, not aware of my intention, would have reason to form the opinion that the arguments for the false side, which I intended to confute, were so stated as to be capable of convincing because of their strength, rather than being easy to answer. . . . I resorted to that of the natural gratification everyone feels for his own subtleties and for showing himself to be cleverer than the average man, by finding ingenious and apparent considerations of probability even in favor of false propositions. . . . My error then was, and I confess it, one of vain ambition, pure ignorance, and inadvertance. . . ." (Finocchiaro 1989, 277-78).

Galileo lied.  And the members of the Inquisition knew that he had lied to them.  Any attentive reader of the Dialogue would know that Galileo was lying here because nothing in that book suggested that Galileo "intended to confute" the "arguments for the false side"--for the Ptolemaic system.  The sentence of the Inquisition against Galileo in June included the remark that "we did not think you had said the whole truth about your intention" (Finocchiaro 1989, 290).  Galileo felt compelled to lie to avoid the severest punishment.  

In the sentence of punishment, Galileo was declared to be "vehemently suspected of heresy."  This was a technical term because it was one of three religious crimes, in descending order of seriousness: formal heresy, vehement suspicion of heresy, and slight suspicion of heresy.

The punishment had four parts.  Galileo was ordered in front of the Inquisition to "abjure, curse, and detest" his errors and heresies.  It was also ordered that his book Dialogue would be prohibited and placed on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books.  He was condemned to "formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure."  And he was ordered to recite the seven penitential Psalms (Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143) once a week for the next three years (Finocchiaro 1989, 291).

Galileo presented his abjuration on June 22:

". . . I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and motionless and the earth is not the center and moves."

"Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of Your Eminence and every faithful Christian this vehement suspicion, rightly conceived against me, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the above-mentioned errors and heresies, and in general each and every other error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Church; and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, orally or in writing, anything which might cause a similar suspicion about me; on the contrary, if I should come to know any heretic or anyone suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I happen to be."

"Furthermore, I swear and promise to comply with and observe completely all the penances which have been or will be imposed upon me by this Holy Office; and should I fail to keep any of these promises and oaths, which God forbid, I submit myself to all the penalties and punishments imposed and promulgated by the sacred canons and other particular and general laws against similar delinquents.  So help me God and these Holy Gospels of His, which I touch with my hands" (Finocchiaro 1989, 292).

Galileo was seventy years old.  He would live another nine years, dying in 1642.  During those nine years, he saw the beginning of what came to be called the "Galileo Affair"--the debate over the Inquisition's punishment of Galileo that has lasted for over 350 years.  Ultimately, this has been a debate about the character of modern natural science and philosophy in its denial of the medieval theological model of the cosmos, and about whether a liberal social order can safely allow philosophic freedom of thought in the public discussion of such questions.

THE GALILEO AFFAIR, 1633-1893

Acting under the express orders of Pope Urban VIII, in the summer of 1633, the Roman Inquisition sent copies of the sentence against Galileo and his abjuration to all papal nuncios (the Pope's ecclesiastical diplomats) in Europe and all local inquisitors in Italy, with orders to publicize them.  This was the first and only time that the Inquisition has so widely publicized an inquisitorial trial.  This was the Pope's warning to Catholics not to question the authority of the Church and his presentation of himself as a defender of the faith in the Counter-Reformation's attack on Protestant heretics and on all those who thought they could interpret the Bible for themselves rather than following the interpretation forced upon them by the Church.

Since the Inquisition publicized only the sentence against Galileo and his abjuration without releasing the entire proceedings, there was not enough information to determine clearly exactly what punishment Galileo had suffered.  The sentence says: "we deemed it necessary to proceed against you by a rigorous examination."  Many people assumed that the Inquisition's "rigorous examination" included torture.  Later, when the trial proceedings were released in 1867, people saw in Galileo's fourth deposition that "he was told to tell the truth, otherwise one would have recourse to torture."  But now historians generally agree that while Galileo was threatened with torture, he was not actually tortured (Finocchiaro 2009).  The official manuals for the Inquisition included procedures for torture.  But there is no evidence that Galileo was made to suffer any kind of physical torture.

The sentence against Galileo declares: "We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure."  This refers to the jail at the Inquisition palace in Rome.  But when the correspondence surrounding Galileo's trial and punishment was published in 1774, it became clear that Galileo was probably never confined in a jail.  While Galileo was in Rome for his trial, the Inquisition permitted him to lodge either in the Tuscan embassy or in the prosecutor's six-room apartment.  After he was sentenced, Galileo was permitted to travel to Siena and live under house arrest at the residence of the archbishop, a friend of Galileo's.  In December of 1633, Galileo was allowed to go to his own villa in Arcetri, near Florence, where he remained under house arrest until his death.

So, the old story that Galileo was tortured and imprisoned is mistaken (Finocchino 2009).  But still being under house arrest for nine years was a serious punishment.  And that his Dialogue remained on the Index of Prohibited Books was also an important part of his punishment, although the book was published in parts of Europe that were free from the Inquisition.

And what about the order that Galileo recite the seven penitential Psalms once a week for three years?  There's no clear evidence that he performed this act of penance.  In October of 1633, Galileo's daughter--who had become the cloistered nun Maria Celeste--wrote to him and said that she would take upon herself the obligation to recite the seven psalms one time each week "to relieve you of this care" (Sobel 2011, 312-15).  This is strange because it was not legally or theologically possible to substitute one person's penance for that of another.

Far from showing penance for what he had done, Galileo often insisted in his correspondence after 1633 that he had been "unjustly condemned" (Finocchiaro 2005, 59-60).  He complained of this injustice to the many prominent people from around Europe who visited him in Arcetri.  These visitors included people like Thomas Hobbes and John Milton.  This provoked a debate that has lasted for over 350 years as to whether Galileo should be seen as a persecuted martyr of philosophy and science, and how this might illustrate the conflict between science and religion or reason and revelation.  Many people have compared Galileo's trial and punishment to that of Socrates.

Milton might have been the first person to present Galileo's case as showing the need for protecting philosophic freedom of thought and expression against the coercive enforcement of religious and intellectual orthodoxy.  Milton had visited Galileo in 1639.  Then, in 1644, he published his Areopagitica, in which he argued against a censorship law enacted by the English Parliament in 1643, which prohibited books from being published without legal licensing by governmental censors.  

Milton's primary argument for "the liberty of unlicensed printing" is that licensing manifests the tyrannical evil of the Catholic Inquisition--"this project of licencing crept out of the Inquisition" (Milton 1999, 8).  He observes:

". . . I could recount what I have seen and heard in other Countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their lerned men, for that honor I had, and bin counted happy to be born in such a place of Philosophic freedom, as they suppos'd England was, while themselvs did nothing but bemoan the servil condition into which lerning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had dampt the glory of Idalian wits; that nothing had bin there writt'n now these many years but flattery and fustian.  There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought. . . ." (Milton 1999, 31-32).

One can see what's at issue here by contrasting Milton's scorn for the Inquisition as denying "philosophic freedom" and Robert Bellarmine's advocacy of the Inquisition as showing the spiritual authority of the Pope to enforce Christian orthodoxy and punish heretics.  As I have already indicated, Bellarmine was one of the most influential theologians of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church and a member of the Inquisition both when it attacked Copernicanism in 1616 and when it sentenced Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake in 1600 for theological and scientific heresies.

While many Catholic theologians had said that the pope had the "fullness of power" (plenitudo potestatis) in temporal matters, Bellarmine claimed that the pope had only "indirect power" (potestas indirecta) in temporal matters.  Political rulers have their own autonomous power grounded in natural and divine law that is separated from the spiritual authority of the pope.  But still, Bellarmine explained, there is a point where the temporal and spiritual realms merge.  The pope must advance humanity's ultimate end, which is the eternal salvation of souls in Heaven.  To achieve this end, the pope can order political sovereigns to punish heretics and pagans--even to the point of torturing and killing them--when they deny those orthodox Christian doctrines necessary for eternal salvation (Bellarmine 2012, 87-120)  

Against those Christians who asserted that political governments should secure religious and intellectual liberty as a way to promote peace among Catholics and Protestants, Bellarmine insisted that the pope must promote the punishment and even killing of Protestants who deny the authority of the Catholic Church to interpret the Bible for them.  Against the argument that the New Testament Christians did not use secular political power to persecute heretics, Bellarmine claimed that when Constantine gained control of the western part of the Roman Empire in 312 and converted to Christianity, this fulfilled the prophecy of Psalm 2:10-11--"Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth.  Serve the Lord with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling" (Bellarmine 2012, 119-20).  But one can easily see that Psalm 2 celebrates the coronation of a new king in ancient Israel as a theocratic ruler, which differs from the teaching in the New Testament.  Bellarmine cannot show that the New Testament supports his defense of theocracy.

As I have argued previously, libertarian Protestants like Milton, Roger Williams, John Locke, and C. S. Lewis have noted that in contrast to the Mosaic theocracy of the Old Testament, the New Testament churches were voluntary organizations that did not use violent coercion to compel belief in an established orthodoxy.  In that way, the New Testament supports the classical liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration.

Over the past three hundred years, the popes and the Catholic Church have gradually moved towards these liberal principles as the only grounds for resolving the Galileo Affair by avoiding the apparent conflict between the Bible and science.  

As we have seen, the "vehement suspicion of heresy" for which Galileo was condemned was based on two ideas.  The first was Galileo's scientific claim that the Earth revolves daily on its own axis and revolves yearly around the Sun.  The second was his hermeneutical claim that the Bible was not an authority for natural science but an authority only on questions of faith and morals.

The Church began to accept the scientific claim in 1757 when the Congregation of the Index withdrew the decree that prohibited all books teaching the Earth's motion, although Galileo's Dialogue and a few other books remained on the list of prohibited books.  Then, in 1822, the Congregation of the Holy Office (the Inquisition) allowed the Catholic astronomer Joseph Settele could teach the motion of the Earth as an established fact.  Finally, in 1835, the new edition of the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books for the first time omitted the Dialogue.  Oddly, however, there was no public statement from the Church about this.

Then, in 1893, the Church began to accept Galileo's hermeneutical claim about biblical interpretation in the light of science.  In Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Providentissimus Deus, without ever naming Galileo, Leo adopted Galileo's view for how to interpret the Bible so that it is always harmonious with natural science; and Leo employed the same reasoning that Galileo had advanced in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina.

The correct interpretation of God's revelation through the Bible must be guided by the Holy Spirit.  But we must see that Augustine was correct in teaching that the Holy Spirit did not intend to teach human beings scientific truths about the visible universe that were not necessary for salvation.  The Bible's accounts of the natural world use figurative language that would have been familiar to people in biblical times, figurative language that should not be taken literally as a statement of scientific fact.  Quoting the same passages from Augustine quoted by Galileo, Leo argued that when scientists demonstrate some truth about the natural world, Christians must interpret the Bible as compatible with that scientific truth.  As Augustine said, "whatever they can really demonstrate . . . . we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scripture."

Leo also employed Galileo's metaphor of the "two books":  God speaks through the Book of the Bible and through the Book of Nature, and these two truths cannot contradict; so that whatever scientists discover about the Book of Nature must determine our reading of the Bible so that it harmonizes with this natural truth.

In my next post, I will show how Pope John Paul II followed in the path taken by Pope Leo to finally resolve the Galileo Affair--and also the Darwin Affair--and showed how the Church could allow for the Reason/Revelation debate to be conducted in a Lockean liberal social order.

REFERENCES

Bellarmine, Robert. 2012. On Temporal and Spiritual Authority.  Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Finocchiaro, Maurice. 1989. The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Finocchiaro, Maurice. 2005.  Retrying Galileo, 1633-1992. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Finocchiaro, Maurice. 2009. "Myth 8. That Galileo Was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism." In Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail, and Other Myths About Science and Religion, 68-78.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Galilei, Galileo. 2001. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems. Trans. Stillman Drake. New York: The Modern Library.

Milton, John. Areopagitica, and Other Political Writings of John Milton. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Sobel, Dava. 2011. Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love. New York: Bloomsbury.

Galileo on the Harmony Between Biblical Faith and Scientific Reason: Separating "How One Goes to Heaven" From "How Heaven Goes"?

Recently, an article in the New York Times noted that 30 asteroids have been officially named after Jesuit astronomers.  Last month, three new ones were named after three Jesuit priests:  565184 Janusz for the Rev. Robert Janusz, a polish priest and physicist, 551878 Stoeger for the Rev. William R. Stoeger (1943-2014), an American priest, and 562971 Johannhagen named for the Rev. Johann Georg Hagen (1847-1930), an Austrian American, who is said in the naming citation to have "devised several ingenious experiments at the Vatican to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth, directly confirming the theories of Copernicus and Galileo."  All three of these men have worked in the Specola Vaticana (the Vatican Observatory), just off the papal gardens at Castel Gandolfo, close to Rome.  The Vatican Observatory was first established by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 to support advances in the science of astronomy.

This must surprise many of us who have been taught the story about how the Catholic Church's Inquisition in 1633 punished Galileo Galilei with imprisonment for teaching that the Earth rotates and moves around the Sun and thus committed the heresy of denying the Bible, which seems to teach that the Earth is unmoved at the center of the cosmos, with the Moon, the Sun, and the planets moving around the Earth.

Actually, Galileo showed how there need be no conflict between Biblical faith and scientific reason, as long as one sees that the Bible teaches us "how one goes to Heaven" but not "how heaven goes."  Remarkably, the Catholic Church--particularly under the leadership of Pope John Paul II in 1992--has accepted this teaching of Galileo and admitted that the punishment of Galileo by the Catholic Inquisition was wrong.  The Church has also adopted this teaching as supporting the liberal principles of religious liberty and scientific liberty.  This has allowed the Church to accept the scientific truth not only of Galilean astronomy but also of Darwinian evolution as consistent with the transcendent salvational truth of the Bible.  The official Catholic acceptance of Darwinian evolution came in 1996 with a statement by Pope John Paul II.  Protestants (like Francis Collins and Deborah Haarsma) have followed the lead of the Catholic Church in accepting "theistic evolution" or "evolutionary creation" as compatible with both Biblical truth and scientific truth.  What we see here is that even if the teaching of Galileo does not completely resolve the tension between Reason and Revelation, it does at least leave it open to free debate in a free society.

THE COPERNICAN SYSTEM

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published his book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in which he updated the ancient Greek idea (of Pythagoras and others) that the Earth moves by rotating on its axis daily and by revolving around the Sun once a year.  This was rejected by the proponents of the Ptolemaic geocentric system with a stationary Earth at the center of the cosmos and the Sun and the planets revolving around the Earth.  The argument of Copernicus was mostly hypothetical:  if the Earth were in motion around the Sun, then the observed phenomena in the sky would result.  But Copernicus could not present enough empirical evidence to make his idea persuasive.

There were four kinds of objections to the Copernican system (see Finocchiaro 1989, 16-25).  The first was that it was epistemologically absurd because it denied our direct sensory experience of the world.  Throughout our lives, all of us perceive that the Earth is at rest, while the rest of the cosmos moves around the Earth.  Every day we see that the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west.  Of course, we know that our senses are sometimes deceived: a straight stick half immersed in water appears bent.  But we easily correct such perceptual illusions.  By contrast, it's hard to see how we could correct our perception of the Earth being at rest.  That would be such a radical deception of our senses that we would lose all confidence in our senses as a guide to truth.

The second objection was that the Copernican system was empirically false because it predicted some astronomical consequences that were not observed.  For example, if Copernicus was right, then the Earth must be a planet, the third planet circling the Sun, with physical properties like the other planets.  But according to the medieval model of the cosmos, the Earth differed in its elemental properties from the heavenly bodies.  The heavenly bodies were made of the element ether, which was weightless, luminous, and changeless, while the Earth was made of rocks, water, and air, which were (positively or negatively) weighted, dark, and changeable.  Also, if Copernicus was right, then the planet Venus should show phases similar to the Moon, and the planet Mars should show differing apparent brightness and size since Mars and the Earth revolve around the Sun at different rates.  Before the telescope, this kind of objection seemed to be empirically supported.

The third objection to the Copernican system was that it was physically impossible because it violated some of the fundamental principles of physics as it was known at the time.  That the Earth could rotate on its axis or revolve around the Sun seemed physically impossible because the natural motion of earthly bodies (rocks and water) was to move in a straight line to the center of the Earth.  There were three types of natural motion (as opposed to forced or violent motion): ether (the element of the heavenly bodies) moved eternally in a circular motion around the center of the cosmos; the elements air and fire moved in a straight motion away from the center of the cosmos; and the elements earth and water moved in straight motion to the center of the cosmos.  Every simple element could have one and only one natural motion.  Answering this objection required developing a new science of physics with new laws of motion, such as the law of inertia, the law of gravitational force, and the law of conservation of momentum.

The fourth objection to the Copernican system was that it was theologically heretical because it contradicted the literal meaning of the Bible and the unanimous biblical interpretations of the early Church Fathers.  For example, in Joshua 10: 12-13, the Bible tells us: "Then spoke Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, 'Sun stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.' And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies."  Protestants agreed with this biblical objection because of their literal interpretation of the Bible.  Catholics agreed with this biblical literalism, but they also agreed with the appeal to the Church Fathers because Catholics saw God's revelation through the work of the Holy Spirit in guiding both the authors of the Bible and the traditional theology of the Church.

Galileo tried to answer all four objections, but the biblical objection was the hardest to overcome, and that led to his condemnation by the Catholic Church's Inquisition.

GALILEO'S FIRST TRIAL: 1616

In the fall of 1609, Galileo built the first astronomically useful telescope, and he used it to study the night sky.  In 1610, in his book The Starry Messenger, he published some of his discoveries: that the Moon, like the Earth, has a rough, rocky, and nonluminous surface, and that the planet Jupiter has at least four moons, and thus constitutes its own miniature planetary system.  Later he published other discoveries: that the planet Venus shows phases similar to the Moon; that the planet Mars shows large changes in brightness and apparent size; and that there are dark spots on the Sun that move in such a way as to suggest that the Sun rotates on its axis once a month.  In his published writings, Galileo did not explicitly indicate how this was evidence for the Copernican heliocentric system; but in his private correspondence, he was open about this.

In response to Galileo's new evidence for the Copernican system, the conservative supporters of the Ptolemaic system began to rely on biblical arguments based on biblical passages that apparently teach that the Sun revolves around the Earth, as in Joshua 10:12-13.  In December of 1613, Galileo responded to these biblical arguments in a letter to his friend Benedetto Castelli.  Although it was not published, this letter was widely copied and circulated.

Employing the traditional theological metaphor of God's "two books"--that God reveals His truth both in the books of the Holy Scripture as dictated by the Holy Spirit and in the book of Nature as governed by the laws of nature given by God that can be known by human reason--Galileo claimed that these two truths of the Bible and nature can never contradict each other (Galileo 1989a).  Whatever the Holy Spirit teaches in the Bible must be consistent with whatever scientists discover to be true about nature by sensory experience and necessary demonstration.  

But sometimes the literal meaning of the words of the Bible can contradict the findings of natural science.  And then one must see that the literal interpretation of the Bible is an error.  As guided by the Holy Spirit, the authors of the Bible often had to adapt what they said to the understanding of common people.  And so, for example, there are many biblical passages that "attribute to God feet, hands, and eyes, as well as bodily and human feelings like anger, regret, hate, and sometimes even forgetfulness of things past and ignorance of future ones," because common people tend to have such anthropomorphic conceptions of God; but surely to take this as a literally true account of God would be blasphemous (Galileo 1989a, 50). Similarly, the Bible might speak of the Sun revolving around the Earth, because common people would be unable to comprehend the truth of the Earth's moving and the Sun standing still.  The intention of the Holy Spirit was not to teach natural science but to teach what was required for salvation; and so that salvific teaching was true, while much of what might be said about the natural world could be false if interpreted literally.

This Letter to Castelli provoked attacks on Galileo from some traditionalist Christians, and particularly some Dominican friars in Florence.  In December of 1614, Tommasco Caccini preached a Sunday sermon in a church in Florence arguing that Galileo was a heretic in contradicting the Bible.  In February of 1615, another Dominican--Niccolo Lorini--filed a written complaint against Galileo with the Inquisition in Rome, and he enclosed a copy of Galileo's letter to Castelli as evidence of heresy.  In March of 1615, Caccini appeared before the Roman Inquisition for a deposition, in which he claimed that Galileo's Copernican teaching denied the literal sense of the Bible as supported by the unanimous interpretation of the Church Fathers.

In response to these charges, Galileo wrote a series of essays in 1615, of which the most important was his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina which elaborated the arguments from his letter to Castelli.  Today, these arguments from the Letter to Christina have been adopted by many Catholic and Protestant scientists as supporting their belief that biblical faith and natural science must be in harmony (see, for example, Block and Freeman 2019).

In the Letter to Christina, Galileo (1989b) continued to employ the "two books" metaphor and to argue that the harmony between those two books depends on seeing that the true meaning of the Bible is not the pure literal meaning.  He continued to use the Bible's anthropomorphic descriptions of God (as having hands, feet, eyes, and bodily sensations and feelings) as illustrating how the biblical authors accommodated their writing to the mistaken understanding of common people.  And he continued to argue that the primary purpose of the Bible is teaching the way to salvation, which does not require any true scientific teaching about the natural world.  (I have written previously about how Charles Darwin also employed the "two books" metaphor to support the compatibility of biblical faith and evolutionary science.)

Galileo captured the gist of his reasoning in a clever aphorism that has been one of Galileo's most often quoted remarks: "the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes" (Galileo 1989b, 96).

This plays off of the ambiguity in the word "heaven."  The Italian word cielo, the Latin word caelum, and the English word "heaven" all have a double meaning.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary meaning of "heaven" is "the expanse in which the sun, moon, and stars are seen, (esp. in earlier use) regarded as having the appearance of a vast vault arched over the earth; the sky, the firmament."  The secondary meaning is "the abode of God and of the angels and persons who enjoy God's presence, traditionally regarded as being beyond the sky; the final abode of the redeemed after their life on earth; a state or condition of being or living with God after death; everlasting life.  Opposed to hell."

One interpretation of Galileo's Copernican Revolution as conveyed in his separation of "how one goes to heaven" from "how heaven goes" is to say that he separated heaven (as God's abode and the abode of the redeemed in the afterlife of immortality that can be known only by faith) from the sky (as the expanse of astronomical bodies and space that can known by natural science); and while these two realms of two kinds of truth must be separated, they are not contradictory; and the biblical believer can see them as two different expressions of one truth--God.

In making this argument for the harmony of biblical truth and scientific truth in the Letter to Christina, Galileo appealed to the authority of St. Augustine, which countered the charge that he was denying the teachings of the Church Fathers.  He quoted from Augustine's On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis as saying that "whenever the experts of this world can truly demonstrate something about natural phenomena, we should show it not to be contrary to our Scripture" (Augustine 1999, 1.21).  The Bible must be interpreted in such a way as to be consistent with human knowledge of the natural world, including the movements of the sun, the moon, and the planets.  After all, "it frequently happens that even non-Christians will have knowledge of this sort in a way that they can substantiate with scientific arguments or experiments" (1.19).  The authors of the Bible "knew about the shape of the sky whatever may be the truth of the matter.  But the Holy Spirit who was speaking through them did not wish to teach people about such things which would contribute nothing to their salvation" (II.20).  (Notice how this remark by Augustine is echoed in Galileo's quip about separating "how one goes to heaven" from "how heaven goes.")  The intention of the Holy Spirit was to teach people through the Bible not about the natural truth of the natural world but about the supernatural truth of salvation through the doctrines of "the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of Heaven" (Augustine 1999, 1.19; Galileo 1989b, 112).

There are, however, at least three problems in Galileo's reasoning in his Letter to Christina--in his assumption that the divine reality of Heaven does not depend on any particular scientific conception of the cosmos, in his dismissal of the anthropomorphic depictions of God in the Bible, and in his claim that the Holy Spirit has clearly conveyed the way to salvation in Heaven through the revelation of the Bible in a manner that does not deny the truth of natural science.

The first problem is that since the medieval cosmic model (such as Dante depicted in The Divine Comedy) located Heaven in the Empyrean realm and Hell below the surface of the Earth, Galileo's scientific denial of that model denied the reality of Heaven and Hell.  Remarkably, Galileo's first public lecture as a young man was about the mathematical geography of Hell in Dante's Inferno, as if Hell were a real subterranean place deep in the Earth (Heilbron 2010, 28-33).  But then in the Letter to Christiana, he suggested that the way to the afterlife taught in the Bible belongs to the supernatural world known by religious faith as opposed to the natural world known by scientific reason (Galileo 1989b, 101). 

Must faith and science therefore be totally separated?  Or is it possible, as I have suggested in various posts, for science to study the natural history, the cultural history, and the individual psychology of religious beliefs in Heaven, immortality, the afterlife, and the existence of God?

The second problem in Galileo's Letter to Christina is his assumption that the anthropomorphic image of God in the Bible as having a body is so absurdly blasphemous that this proves that the literal meaning of the Bible is often a mistaken interpretation.  This is dubious for two reasons.  While the Bible is full of passages describing God's body, nowhere does the Bible say that the literal meaning of these passages must not be taken seriously.  After all, from the beginning of the Bible, God is said to have created man in His own image and likeness, which is to say that God was in the image and likeness of man.  And in the New Testament, it is clearly taught that Jesus, the Son of God, has a perfect human body--that He is God incarnate ("in the flesh").

Recently, Francesca Stavrakopoulou has written a wonderful book--God: An Anatomy--in which she goes through the Bible to find accounts of God's body, from his head to his hands, feet, and genitals.  She points out, however, that when the ancient Jewish and Christian theologians came under the influence of Platonic Greek philosophy, they began to identify the God of the Bible with Platonic abstractions about the Divine as timeless, changeless, and immaterial.  God became a transcendent, invisible, and incorporeal being that was a distorted refraction of the original biblical image of God as an embodied being made in our own image.

The third problem in Galileo's Letter to Christina is his dubious assumption that the Holy Spirit will guide us to the correct interpretation of biblical revelation, and that this correctly interpreted teaching about the truths of faith will not conflict with the truths of science.  Previously, I have argued that the Holy Spirit has failed to convey that correct interpretation of biblical revelation that would resolve the creation/evolution debate among Christian believers.  Similarly, it seems that the Holy Spirit failed to persuade the Roman Inquisition that Galileo was correct in interpreting the Bible as compatible with Copernican astronomy.

Throughout 1615, the Roman Inquisition commissioned reports and took depositions pertaining to the charge that the Copernican system was heretical, and that Galileo was a heretic for teaching this.  In December of 1615, Galileo left his home in Florence to travel to Rome to try to clear his name and prevent the Inquisition from condemning Copernicanism.  He lodged at the Tuscan embassy in Rome for six months.  Since 1610, Galileo had been the philosopher and chief mathematician of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

The Inquisition asked a group of theologians to prepare a report on Copernicanism.  On February 24, 1616, they submitted a report that concluded that the Copernican teaching was "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology" (Finocchiaro 1989, 146).

On the following day, the Inquisition asked Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (a Jesuit priest and probably the most influential Catholic churchman of his time) to meet with Galileo and demand that he agree to abandon his Copernican opinions, and that if he did not acquiesce, he would be imprisoned.

The next day, Bellarmine met with Galileo and gave him a "special injunction . . . to abandon completely . . . the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing; otherwise the Holy Office [the Inquisition] would start proceedings against him.  The same Galileo acquiesced in this injunction and promised to obey" (Finocchiaro 1989, 147-48).

A few days later, Bellarmine reported to the Inquisition that the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books would decree that Copernicus's book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres would be suspended until it could be corrected.  Only a few lines of the book were changed.  Copernicus's book had been permitted for over 70 years.  But now it became the first book devoted entirely to science to be condemned, even if only temporarily until it was slightly revised, by the Congregation of the Index.  Anyone but Galileo could discuss the corrected book, as long as they called it only a hypothesis.

On March 12, Galileo reported to the Tuscan Secretary of State that he had met with Pope Paul V for three-quarters of an hour, and that the Pope had received him warmly and even told him that he should feel safe as long as the Pope lived.

Galileo began to receive letters from friends in Pisa and Venice reporting rumors that Galileo had been personally put on trial and condemned by the Inquisition.  To silence these rumors, Galileo asked Cardinal Bellarmine to write a statement certifying that he had not been formally condemned by the Inquisition.  Bellarmine wrote:

". . . we say that the above-mentioned Galileo has not abjured in our hands, or in the hands of others here in Rome, or anywhere else that we know, any opinion or doctrine of his; nor has he received any penances, salutary or otherwise.  On the contrary, he has only been notified of the declaration made by the Holy Father and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, whose content is that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus (that the earth moves around the sun and the sun stands at the center of the world without moving from east to west) is contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended or held" (Finocchiaro 1989, 153).

We see here that Galileo both won and lost his battle.  He won by escaping personal public condemnation by the Church.  But he lost the intellectual and theological debate over whether Copernican science was compatible with biblical faith.

In 1633, however, he would lose the whole battle when the Inquisition condemned him to abjuration, penance, and imprisonment for teaching the truth of Copernican science.  And yet, eventually, by 1992, he would be vindicated by the Church.

In my next post, I will look at the intellectual history of the "Galileo Affair," and I will suggest that its resolution--among both Catholic and Protestant Christians--followed a similar pattern for the "Darwin Affair" (the debate over whether Darwinian evolution is compatible with the Bible), so that in both cases Reason triumphed over Revelation among Christians, because they agreed that they needed to look to scientific reason to correct the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the Bible, so that they could see how Copernican astronomy and Darwinian biology do not deny their religious belief in the transcendent destiny of their souls; and therefore they could accept freedom of thought for scientists and philosophers in a Lockean liberal social order as posing no threat to their Christian pilgrimage in the world.

REFERENCES

Augustine, Saint. 1999. The Literal Meaning of Genesis.  In Augustine, On Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill, 159-581. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press.

Block, David, and Kenneth Freeman. 2019. God and Galileo: What a 400-Year-Old Letter Teaches Us About Faith and Science. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Finocchiaro, Maurice, ed. 1989. The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Galileo Galilei. 1989a. Letter to Castelli. In Maurice Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, 49-54. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Galileo Galilei. 1989b.  Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina.  In Maurice Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, 87-118.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Heilbron, J. L.  2010. Galileo. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. 2022. God: An Anatomy. New York: Knopf.

How Pope John Paul II Resolved the Galileo Affair

In three speeches addressed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (in 1979, 1992, and 1996), Pope John Paul II restated Galileo's reasoning about science and biblical religion, while acknowledging explicitly that this showed that Galileo was right, and the Church wrong, in 1633.  In these speeches, the Pope made three claims about the character of the Reason/Revelation debate in a modern Lockean liberal social order.

The first claim is that the Church must allow this Reason/Revelation debate to be conducted on the basis of freedom--religious freedom and scientific freedom--so that neither side in the debate can coercively suppress or punish the other.

The second claim is that the Church must concede to Reason that the Revelation of the Bible must be interpreted as compatible with natural science, so that the Bible is seen not as a textbook about the natural world but a book about how to achieve the supernatural salvation of the human soul in Heaven, which surpasses the natural human understanding expressed in natural science.

The third claim is that to support this supernatural teaching of the soul's eternal salvation, the Church must teach that the Darwinian science of the soul's emergent evolution in the brain fails to account for the reality of the spiritual soul that can only be explained as the product of God's miraculous creation, so on this point Revelation must prevail over Reason.  

In 1979, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences met to commemorate the centennial of Albert Einstein's birth.  Pope John Paul delivered a speech with the title "Deep Harmony Which Unites the Truths of Science with the Truths of Faith."

He explained that science and religion are harmonious as long as both are free.  "Just as religion demands religious freedom, so science rightly claims freedom of research" (sec. 5).  To support this liberal idea of religious liberty and scientific liberty as authoritative for the Catholic Church, the Pope cited the statement Gaudium et spes from the Second Vatican Council in 1965, which recognized "the legitimate autonomy of culture and especially of the sciences" (sec. 59).  In a remark that echoed the title of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the Pope immediately applied this principle of freedom to the case of Galileo: "The Church, filled with admiration for the genius of the great scientist in whom the imprint of the creative spirit is veiled, without intervening in any way with a judgment which it does not fall upon her to pass on the doctrine concerning the great systems of the universe, proposes the latter, however, to the reflection of theologians to discover the harmony existing between scientific truth and revealed truth" (sec. 5).

The Pope recognized that both Galileo and Einstein characterize the modern scientific era.  But unlike Einstein, Galileo "had to suffer a great deal--we cannot conceal the fact--at the hands of men and organisms of the Church."  The Pope again cited Gaudium et spes:  "we cannot but deplore certain habits of mind, which are sometimes found too among Christians, which do not sufficiently attend to the rightful independence of science and which, from the arguments and controversies they spark, lead many minds to conclude that faith and science are mutually opposed" (sec. 36).  Although Galileo's name is not mentioned in this passage, the Pope suggested that the reference to Galileo was clear in the note to this sentence, which cited Pio Paschini's book on the life and works of Galileo, which had been published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (sec. 6).

The Pope was silent about the controversy within the Church over Paschini's book (Finocchiaro 2005, 318-37).  To mark the tricentennial of Galileo's death in 1942, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences had commissioned Paschini (a priest who taught Church history) in 1941 to write a book on Galileo's life and work.  But when Paschini submitted his book in 1945 to Church authorities for approval, they refused to permit its publication because they thought the book was too favorable to Galileo.  The book was finally published in 1964, after Paschini's death, only after the book had been edited to remove some of the more favorable comments about Galileo and the criticisms of the Church's condemnation of Galileo.

At the Second Vatican Council in 1964, some of the delegates wanted the Council to formally rehabilitate Galileo and acknowledge the Church's error in condemning him.  But some of the delegates resisted this.  In one of the early versions of Gaudium et spes, there was language stating that the condemnation of Galileo was an error that should never be repeated.  But some of the delegates objected to this language.  They finally reached a compromise as suggested in some of the abbreviated notes on the discussion: "Galilei.--Inopportune to speak of this in the document.--Let us not force the Church to say: I made a mistake.  The matter should be judged in the context of the time.  In Paschini's work everything is said in the true light" (Finocchiaro 2005, 329).  As approved on December 7, 1965, Gaudium et spes showed the compromise.  There was a passage about the legitimate "regret" that some Christians did not respect "the rightful autonomy of science," but Galileo's name was not mentioned in the text.  There was, however, a cryptic footnote to the passage that said:  "Cf. Msgr. Pio Paschini, Vita e opere di Galileo Galilei, 2 volumes, Vatican Press (1964)."  A careful reader who knew something about the controversy around Paschini's book could see this as a veiled confession that the Church had erred in Galileo's case.

Expressing his desire "to go beyond this stand taken by the Council," the Pope said that he hoped that theologians, scholars, and historians would "study the Galileo case more deeply" and dispel the mistrust that impedes the "fruitful concord between science and faith."  He then quoted remarks by Galileo in three of his writings that showed this harmony of science and faith.  In his Letter to Castelli, Galileo spoke of the "two books"--Holy Scripture and nature--that both manifest the divine Word.  In his Starry Messenger, he said that in his discoveries made through his telescope, he had been "enlightened by divine grace," which the Pope saw as "Galileo's confession of divine illumination."  And in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo explained that to reconcile the Bible and science, we must go beyond the literal meaning of the Bible, which can contradict the truths of science, to see that the real meaning of the Bible must be interpreted in whatever way renders it compatible with what science discovers about the natural world.  

Here we see the Pope agreeing with Galileo that biblical revelation must be interpreted to conform to whatever scientific reason correctly teaches about nature.  And in that sense, reason takes priority over revelation.  But at the same time, the Pope says that in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, "believing and non-believing scientists collaborate, concurring in the search for scientific truth and in respect of the beliefs of others," which suggests that scientific truth can neither confirm nor deny religious truth.

To satisfy his hope that people would reexamine the Galileo case, Pope John Paul II announced in 1981 the appointment of a Vatican commission to study the Galileo affair (Finocchiaro 2005, 343-53).  This commission was subdivided into four subcommittees to study the exegetical, cultural, scientific-epistemological, and historical-juridical issues arising from Galileo's trial and punishment.  They sponsored a series of scholarly conferences and the publication of some books.

In 1992, at a plenary session of the Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul heard and accepted the Vatican Commission's final report on the Galileo affair.  At this session of the Academy, there was a second topic for discussion--the nature of complexity as studied in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology.  In his speech--"Faith Can Never Conflict with Reason"--the Pope said that the Inquisition's trial and punishment of Galileo was a mistake, and this was widely publicized around the world, including a front-page story in the New York Times, as an apology from the Church for what it had done to Galileo 350 years earlier.

In the middle of this speech, the Pope repeated his arguments from 1979 for agreeing with Galileo's biblical hermeneutics--rejecting the literal interpretation of the Bible when this would contradict what natural science had discovered about the natural world--and for seeing how this supported the harmony of science and faith.

In the beginning and end of his speech, he observed that "from the Galileo affair we can learn a lesson which remains valid in relation to similar situations which occur today and which may occur in the future."  He suggested that those "similar situations" were likely to arise not from astronomy, physics, or mathematics, but from "relatively new disciplines such as biology and biogenetics," particularly related to the theme of "the emergence of complexity."  "Let us think, for example, of the working out of new theories at the scientific level in order to take account of the emergence of living beings.  In a correct method, one could not interpret them immediately and in the exclusive framework of science.  In particular, when it is a question of the living being which is man, and of his brain, it cannot be said that these theories of themselves constitute an affirmation or a denial of the spiritual soul, or that they provide a proof of the doctrine of creation, or that, on the contrary, they render it useless."

Here, I think, the Pope was pointing ahead to the problem that he would take up a few years later, in 1996, which I call the Darwin Affair, and which turns on the question of whether Darwinian biology can explain the natural emergent evolution of the human soul in the brain, or whether the human soul arises from a supernatural transcendence of nature that can be known only by religious faith, and whether this belief in the supernatural spirituality of the soul is essential to the Bible's teaching about "how one goes to Heaven."

That's the topic for my next post.

Darwinism and the Catholic Church

In 1633, the Catholic Inquisition condemned Galileo as a heretic for endorsing the Copernican heliocentric theory of the Earth as moving around the Sun, because this seemed to deny those Biblical passages that spoke of the fixity of the Earth. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, and his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was put on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books.

By contrast, Darwin's theory of evolution has never been officially condemned by the Vatican, and his books were never been put on the Index, although a book by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was put on the Index.

The Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo has often been cited by those who argue that there must be perpetual warfare between Biblical religion and modern science. But the Church's handling of the debate over Darwinian evolution shows that the Church's hierarchy learned a lesson from the Galileo affair--that it was a big mistake to interpret the Bible as contradicting modern science.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Pope Pius XII praised Galileo as an intellectual hero and declared in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis that there was no necessary conflict between Biblical faith and the theory of evolution. Pope John Paul II apologized for the condemnation of Galileo, and in 1996 he declared that the Church did not oppose Darwin's theory. A few years ago, I wrote a short essay on John Paul's statement.

We now have more information about the history of the Vatican's deliberations about evolution. In 1998, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) authorized the opening of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican. This congregation was originally called the Holy Roman Inquisition, which goes back to the beginnings of the Inquisition in 1231. This Archive includes the records of the Vatican's handling of the evolution debate at the end of the nineteenth century.

This archival material has become the basis for a book--Mariano Artigas, Thomas Glick, and Rafael Martinez, Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877-1902 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). The book studies the cases of six Catholic authors who argued for the compatibility of evolution and Christianity. Of these, the most fascinating case, I think, is that of John Zahm, an American priest at the University of Notre Dame who provoked controversy with his book Evolution and Dogma (1896), which defended theistic evolutionism. The case of Zahm was complicated by the fact that he was identified as a proponent of "Americanism"--a movement among American Catholics to celebrate the moral and political principles of American life (such as the separation of Church and State) as a guide for Catholics.

Zahm defends the theory of evolution as superior to the theory of special creation. God did not have to miraculously create each form of life, because He could employ the "secondary causes" of evolution to carry out His creative purposes. Against the view of many Catholic theologians that God had to miraculously create the body of the first man, Zahm suggests that the human body could have originally evolved naturally from primate ancestors. But then the human soul had to be created immediately by God. To defend his position, Zahm had to argue that the Bible should not be read literally as a text of science, and that the distinction between God as Primal cause and nature's secondary causes allowed natural evolution as a creative process.

The newly available archival material shows that while Zahm's book was condemned by Church authorities, this condemnation was not published or officially sanctioned by the Holy See, and his book was not listed in the Index.

What one sees in this and the other cases is that the Vatican was cautious in not wanting to publicly condemn evolution for fear of falling into something like the Galileo affair.

Pope John Paul II's statement in 1996 shows how far the Church has moved towards accepting Darwinian evolution. In effect, as I argue in my essay on the Pope's message, he adopted St. George Jackson Mivart's position that while the human body and all other forms of life might be products of Darwinian mechanisms, the human soul must have been created directly by a miraculous intervention of God into nature.

As I indicate in my essay, the next good step for the Vatican would be to recognize that even the human soul could have arisen by a natural process of emergent evolution in which differences in degree become differences in kind after passing over a critical threshold in the size and complexity of the primate brain.

As indicated in a recent article in Scientific American, comparisons of the genomes of humans and chimpanzees suggests that the uniqueness of human beings could have arisen from some uniquely human DNA sequences that regulate the development of the human cerebral cortex and neural mechanisms that control the human capacity for speech.

If our being created in God's image is manifested in our uniquely human capacities for reason and speech, the emergent evolution of the brain to support those capacities could explain the natural basis for that creative activity.

The Failure of Biblical Revelation in the Creation/Evolution Debate

Last week, I spent two days touring the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky.  These are two Christian creationist theme parks designed and managed by Answers in Genesis (AiG), which promotes the young-earth creationism of Ken Ham, who argues that Genesis 1-11 clearly teaches that the universe was created in 4004 BC over six twenty-four-hour days, and that there was a Global Flood in 2348 BC that is responsible for most of the geological record that we see today.

This denies the modern evolutionary teaching that the universe is billions of years old.  This also denies three other Christian views of creation.  The old-earth creationists interpret Genesis as allowing for the universe to be billions of years old, so that God's creative miracles occurred over a long period of time.  The evolutionary creationists interpret Genesis as allowing for God having originally created the laws of nature billions of years ago, so that God's creative plan could then unfold from the beginning through the natural process of evolution as understood by evolutionary science.  Finally, the Christian proponents of intelligent-design theory argue that a purely natural science can prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer without any appeal to the Biblical story of creation, although identifying this Intelligent Designer as the God of the Bible is a matter of personal faith rather than scientific demonstration.

That the Bible provides no clear teaching about the history of creation on which Christians can agree suggests to me the failure of Biblical Revelation to resolve this disagreement among Christians in the creation/evolution debate.  So, when I visited the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, I studied the exhibits to see if they could change my mind by revealing the Bible's clear teaching of young-earth creationism.  I had already studied the four AiG books that present most of the exhibits:  Journey Through the Creation Museum (2018), Creation Museum Signs (2021), Journey Through the Ark Encounter (2017), and Ark Signs That Teach a Flood of Answers (2017).

Ham's rhetorical arguments conveyed through these exhibits--and also through his writings--did not persuade me that he has found the Bible's clear teaching of creation history.  This confirmed my original thought that the disagreement about creation and evolution among Christians shows the failure of Biblical Revelation to resolve this issue.

I know of two serious efforts of Christian creationists to find a Biblical settlement of their disagreements.  I will begin by showing how they failed.  Then, I will show how Ham also has failed to do this in these two creationist theme parks.

If I am right about this, then one explanation for it would be that the Bible is not a Divine Revelation of God's truth at all.  But another explanation would be that the purpose of Biblical Revelation is to reveal the truths necessary for salvation, about which most Christians can agree, and that deciding whether Genesis 1-11 is literal history or figurative storytelling is unnecessary for salvation, and therefore Christians can disagree about that while agreeing about their salvation.

There is another problem with the Revelation of what is required for salvation, however.  The Hebrew Bible is accepted as God's Revelation by at least five major religions:  Judaism, Islam, Catholic Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Protestant Christianity.  Obviously, they don't agree about what this Revelation teaches about salvation, which again suggests the failure of Revelation.  

FOUR EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTS SEARCHING FOR CHRISTIAN UNITY

Six years ago, I wrote a post on a book edited by J. B. Stump--Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Zondervan, 2017).  Four positions in the creation/evolution debate were represented by four leading proponents: Young Earth Creationism (Ken Ham), Old Earth Creationism (Hugh Ross), Evolutionary Creation (Deborah Haarsma), and Intelligent Design (Stephen Meyer).  This was the first time that these four people had engaged one another directly.  Each of the four wrote a chapter, followed by responses from the other three, and then a rejoinder by the chapter's author.

In John 17, in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his arrest, Jesus prayed to God that all believers would be as one, that they would come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."  It seems that Christians give witness to the truth of Revelation by showing their agreement about that Revelation.  In Stump's Introduction to Four Views, he said that a primary purpose of this book was to pursue unity in what Revelation teaches about origins (16).  But in his Conclusion to the book, he lamented that this had not been achieved: "I doubt that readers will come away from this book with the feeling that we are any closer to the goal of Christian unity on the topic of origins" (232).

There are three possible explanations for this.  Either there has been no Revelation (through the Bible or through nature) of God's teaching about origins. Or there has been such a Revelation, but it's so obscure that it conveys no clear message. Or the Revelation does convey a clear message, but human beings have a stubborn bias that blinds them to that clear message.  Hugh Ross says that "since most humans will choose autonomy over submission to God," most humans will refuse to see the clear evidence of God's creative activity in nature (166).  But this atheistic bias cannot explain why faithful Christians--like the four authors in this book--would refuse to recognize the clear teaching of Revelation.  

So, we are left with the first two explanations for why these Christians cannot come to agreement about origins: either there has been no Revelation about origins, or the Revelation is not clear enough to be understood.  All four of the authors believe that God has sent the Holy Spirit "to guide us persistently to truth" (71, 76, 107), but here the Holy Spirit has failed to guide them to agreement about the revealed teaching concerning origins.   

Notice also that these four people are all evangelical Protestants, which is a minority of Christians.  Around the world, the majority of Christians are Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.  And the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches deny the Protestant doctrine of the perspicuity of the Bible--that the Bible is so clear and easily understood by anyone who reads it that each Christian should be his or her own priest, with no need for an ecclesiastical priesthood to teach them what the Bible really means.  The Catholics and Eastern Orthodox believe that the Bible is a divine Revelation, but they also believe that the Bible is so obscure that they need the divine Revelation of the Bible's correct interpretation through the Holy Spirit working through the Church's tradition of priestly interpretation.

For example, as I have indicated in some past posts, the Catholic Church originally condemned Galileo's heliocentrism as contrary to the Bible's geocentrism; but later the Church apologized for its mistake and endorsed Galileo's biblical hermeneutics--rejecting the literal interpretation of the Bible when this contradicts what natural science has discovered about the natural world.  By this same principle, Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis have endorsed theistic evolution--that God exercises His creative design through the natural process of evolution--but with the understanding that the creation of the human immortal soul requires an "ontological leap"--God's miraculous intervention into nature to create the spiritual soul in His image.  

In response to this, I have argued that no miracle is required here if we see the emergence of the human soul in the human brain that is unique in having 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex, which includes 1.3 billion neurons in the prefrontal cortex.  This gives human brains the capacity for symbolic thinking about imagined realities such as the supernatural creation of human beings in God's image.

CHRISTIAN FRIENDS OR MORTAL ENEMIES?  TODD WOOD AND DARREL FALK

The debate over whether evolutionary science is compatible with Biblical creation is one of many "culture war" conflicts that divide Christians and sometimes even drive their churches and schools into angry disputes between "us" and "them."  The Colossian Forum is an evangelical Christian organization designed to teach Christians how to think about and resolve these disagreements in a way that heals their divisions and brings them together into a loving Christian community.  The Colossian Forum directs its attention mostly to four kinds of disruptive disputes among Christians: "Faith and Politics," "Sexuality," "Origins," and "Women and Men."  The Biblical verse that captures the thought behind the organization is Colossians 1:17--"all things hold together in Christ."  According to the Colossian Forum, if Christians honestly discuss their disagreements, look to the Bible for instruction, and pray for Christ's help, Christ will bring them together in Christian unity through the guidance of the Holy Spirit in revealing the Bible's teachings.

To show how this could happen in the creation/evolution debate over origins, the Colossian Forum invited Todd Wood (an evolutionary biochemist who is a young-earth creationist) and Darrel Falk (a geneticist who is an evolutionary creationist who believes God created life on earth through an evolutionary process as understood by evolutionary science) to come together for a series of meetings over a few years.  Their discussions were then published in a book--The Fool and the Heretic: How Two Scientists Moved Beyond Labels to a Christian Dialogue About Creation and Evolution (2019).

I have written some posts about Wood, who is best known as a "baraminologist" who studies the "baramins" ("created kinds") that were created by God in the six days of creation, from which all species have evolved by natural selection.  Falk is a founder of BioLogos, an organization that promotes Christian evolutionism.  I have written some posts on BioLogos and its evolutionary creationism (or theistic evolution).

Wood and Falk actually agree about a lot.  They are both devout Christians.  And they agree that there is plenty of evidence supporting the theory of evolution, including the evidence for the evolution of humans from animals over millions of years.  

As opposed to Falk, however, Wood denies that all of this evidence makes evolution true, because Wood's Christian faith includes a belief in the creation story in Genesis 1-11 as literal history that began 6,000 years ago, which means that the evolutionary story of how all life evolved "from molecules to man" over billions of years must be false, despite the fact that there is so much evidence supporting it.  But since the Bible gives us few details about how the natural world has developed, Wood admits, we must use science to understand those details.  And that is what Wood tries to do in developing a creation science that should work better than evolutionary science.  Wood concedes that young earth creationists are mistaken in denying the evidence for evolution, and that much of what creation scientists have done so far is not real science.  But Wood has devoted his life to trying to develop a creation science based on testable hypotheses that will be true science (The Fool and the Heretic [FH], 29, 62-63, 105-106, 112-13, 151-56).

Wood's disagreement with Falk is not so much about evolutionary science as it is about the Bible.  They agree that the science of evolution is well-supported by the evidence.  But they disagree about what this means for our interpretation of the Bible's creation story in Genesis.  For Falk, this means that we must read Genesis 1-11 as a poetic story that conveys a theological teaching rather than as a literal history of the natural world, because this will accommodate the truth of evolutionary science as compatible with the Bible.  But for Wood, his faith in the Bible as literal truth means that he must read Genesis as literal history, and therefore if evolutionary science contradicts this literal history, there must be something wrong with the science, and it should be possible to develop a creation science that confirms the natural history of the Bible.

Another way to explain this is that while Falk accepts Galileo's hermeneutics for interpreting the Bible, Wood rejects it (see Wood, The Quest: Exploring Creation's Hardest Problems [2018], 45-52).  As I have indicated previously, Galileo suggested that apparent conflicts between Biblical religion and natural science could be resolved by understanding that if the clear findings of natural science contradict the literal meaning of the Bible, then we must assume that the literal interpretation of the Bible is mistaken, because what the Bible says about the natural world has often been accommodated to the understanding of the audience.  So, for example, if the Bible speaks of the Sun moving around the Earth, that's because in ordinary human experience, we easily speak of the Sun rising and setting, as if it is moving around the Earth, but that is not literally true.  If the Bible had attempted to explain Copernican heliocentric astronomy, that would have been incomprehensible to the Bible's original audience.  After all, the Bible is not a science textbook but a divinely inspired theological teaching about salvation.  In Galileo's clever aphorism, "the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes."

Wood agrees that when the Bible speaks of the Sun moving around the Earth, this should not be interpreted as literally true, because we don't want to see the Bible as denying the scientific truth of Copernican heliocentric astronomy.  But Wood denies the Galilean principle that we should always read the Bible so that it accommodates whatever natural science seems to teach.  Particularly, when it comes to the creation story in Genesis, we must believe it to be literal history; and if this Biblical history contradicts the teaching of natural science, then the science must be mistaken, and we must look for a creation science that conforms to the Biblical teaching.

Galileo and Wood are attempting to resolve the debate between Reason and Revelation by synthesizing the two.  As with any such attempt at synthesis, they both fail because they cannot give equal authority to Reason and Revelation.  Galileo gives higher authority to Reason.  Wood gives higher authority to Revelation.

Falk accepts the Galilean principle in saying that we must not interpret Genesis literally if that literal meaning conflicts with modern evolutionary science.  We can see that the Genesis creation story is very similar to other creation myths in the ancient near east, and therefore the Genesis story was accommodated to the understanding of ancient people.  Like Galileo, Falk subordinates Revelation to Reason.  (I have written previously about Darwin's place in the Reason/Revelation debate.)

For Wood, this is a dangerous teaching that harms the church (FH, 30, 32, 35, 106, 174).  If Christians are taught that Genesis 1-11 is not literally true but only a poetic story similar to other creation myths, then won't they wonder whether other stories in the Bible--like the story of Jesus being resurrected from the dead--are only poetic stories?  If they can't believe the miracles in Genesis are true, then how can they believe the miracles in the New Testament are true?  Won't this tempt Christians to abandon their faith in the truth of the Bible?

And yet Falk thinks it is Wood who is harming the church.  To claim that Genesis is literal history--that everything was created in six days 6,000 years ago and that the Global Flood created the geological record of today--makes the Bible sound ridiculously contrary to all modern science.  And won't that drive people away from the church because of the perceived absurdity of the Bible?

Rob Barrett of the Colossian Forum has admitted that the attempt to resolve the dispute between Wood and Falk and bring them to Christian unity failed:

"We are stuck in a messy place.  I once asked our two scientists if they saw each other as friends or enemies.  I was confident, after all of our time together, that they would agree that they were friends.  Todd disappointed me when he answered, 'Not just enemies.  Mortal enemies.'  I looked pleadingly to gentle Darrel for the correction Todd needed.  He failed me too: 'Yes, Todd's right.'" (FH, 163-64)

Barrett reported:

"In one meeting, Todd expressed his frustration at the deadlock.  He had come to know that Darrel is a Christian, but then he said that this 'makes it a thousand times more awkward, because I wonder why the God who convicts me for my position isn't convicting him.  I don't know how to answer that question.  So it leaves me uneasy.'  Darrel answered, 'Like you, I puzzle a little bit: Why doesn't God sort things out for you and reveal truth to you in the way it seems he reveals it to me?'" (FH, 189-90)

Well, yes, that's the point, I would say:  The Holy Spirit has failed to convey the teaching of Biblical Revelation to Christians like Wood and Falk, even though they have made the most faithful effort to open themselves to that Revelation.

Or should we consider the possibility that while people like Wood and Falk have failed to accept the clear meaning of Biblical Revelation about origins in Genesis, Ken Ham has succeeded in uncovering the true meaning of Genesis?

Remarkably, even though Ham and Wood both identify themselves as young-earth creationists, Ham has criticized Wood for teaching "young-earth evolution," because Wood has conceded too much to evolutionary science by saying: "There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it."

Whether Ham presents the correct reading of the Biblical Revelation about origins at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter will be the question for my next post. 

Looking at the Evolutionary History of the Cosmos Through the James Webb Space Telescope: What Will This Tell Us About the Meaning of Our History in the Cosmos?

The Launch of the James Webb Space Telescope into Space

First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope 

 

         At the Center of this Hourglass Structure, A Star Is Being Born in Nebula L1527

                                  A Three Quarter View of the James Webb Space Telescope

                           The Bottom of the Telescope, the Side Facing the Sun and the Earth

Ever since the emergence of human self-conscious awareness, human beings have wondered about how the world came to be, how humans came to be, and how the human place in the world illuminates the meaning of human life.  To answer their questions, human beings have told themselves myths about cosmic history, and generally these myths have appealed to religious beliefs about the powers of supernatural beings. 

Now, modern natural science is attempting to explain the evolutionary history of the cosmos from the Big Bang (about 13.8 billion years ago) to the present and into the future through natural laws that do not depend on supernatural beings.  We must wonder whether that can be done--whether this modern scientific story can fully explain cosmic history, and whether that story can replace those religious myths in a way that explains the meaning of human life.  Or must that scientific story always be limited by the unknown and unknowable depths of the cosmos?  And if so, will those limits to scientific knowledge show the need for religious myths (true myths?) to fully explain the cosmos and the meaning of human life within the cosmos?  Or is it reasonable to choose scientific reason over religious revelation even as we recognize the inevitable limits of natural reason in explaining everything?

The James Webb Space Telescope will help us to think about those questions. 

LOOKING THROUGH A TELESCOPE TO SEE THE HISTORY AND MEANING OF THE COSMOS

For thousands of years, in the Western World, astronomy was understood through a religious conception of the universe as a divinely created order that constituted a moral cosmology supporting a divine law to guide human life.  It was a geocentric cosmos.  The Earth was at the center.   Circling around the Earth were the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond that were the fixed stars, and then finally the crystalline sphere of the Primum Mobile and the Paradise of Heaven.  Beneath the Earth were Purgatory and Hell.  

Even Plato and Aristotle endorsed pagan versions of this religious astronomy.  But Aristotle noted that this cosmic model was based mostly on traditional myths that could be known by faith or trust (pistis) but not by scientific study, because the planets and stars were so far away from the Earth that they could not be known very well by sense experience.  Aristotle thought that biology was a more empirically grounded science than astronomy because plants and animals could be directly observed by human beings.

This changed with the invention of the telescope in 1608.  The word telescope was coined from two Greek words for "far-seeing."  In 1609, Galileo built his own telescope and turned it toward the night sky.  He could see the mountains and craters of the Moon, the planets, and a ribbon of light stretched across the sky that would later be identified as the Milky Way galaxy.  He could also see that Copernicus was right about the heliocentric Solar system, with the Earth revolving around the Sun.  The telescope had extended the range and clarity of the human visual system deep into the night sky.

In 1633, the Catholic Inquisition condemned Galileo as a heretic for endorsing the Copernican heliocentric theory of the Earth as moving around the Sun, because this seemed to deny those Biblical passages that spoke of the fixity of the Earth. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, and his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was put on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Pope Pius XII praised Galileo as an intellectual hero and declared in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis that there was no necessary conflict between Biblical faith and the theory of evolution. Pope John Paul II apologized for the condemnation of Galileo, and in 1996 he declared that the Church did not oppose Darwin's theory. A few years ago, I wrote a short essay on John Paul's statement.

After Galileo first turned his telescope to the sky, for the next three and a half centuries, telescopes became larger and more complex in ways that improved the depth and accuracy of astronomical observations.  But all of these telescopes were limited by their location on the Earth because of the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere.  By the middle of the 20th century, astronomers began to think about the possibility of sending telescopes into space beyond the atmosphere of the Earth.  This dream was fulfilled in 1990 when five astronauts onboard the space shuttle Discovery released the Hubble Space Telescope into an orbit around the Earth about 340 miles above the surface.  

Hubble did indeed produce stunning images of the cosmos that allowed for the study of cosmic history over billions of years.  But in the 1990s scientists began to think about new space telescopes that could detect objects up to 100 times fainter than Hubble can, and objects much earlier in the history of the universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to employ infrared astronomy to detect high-redshift objects that are very early in the history of the universe and very distant.  Infrared light also passes more easily through dust clouds than visible light.  As light travels through space, it is stretched by the expansion of the universe.  Consequently, many of the most distant objects shine in infrared light, which is longer in wavelength than visible light.  Unaided by optical instruments, the human visual system can see only a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The Hubble telescope captures a slightly broader portion of the spectrum, including the near ultraviolet and the near infrared.  The James Webb telescope captures a much broader spectrum, including the near and midinfrared spectrum.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day one year ago.  It was placed in a halo orbit, circling around a point in space known as the Sun-Earth Lagrange point, approximately 930,000 miles beyond the Earth's orbit around the Sun.  The combined gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun allow the James Webb spacecraft to orbit the Sun in the same time that it takes the Earth.

James Webb has four key goals: to search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe after the Big Bang, to study galaxy formation and evolution, to study star formation and planet formation, and to study planetary systems and the origins of life.

One example of the stunning images produced by James Webb is the image of the star Earendel.

                                                           James Webb Views Earendel

Earendel is the most distant individual star ever seen.  It was first detected by the Hubble Telescope early in 2022, but then a better image of it was captured by the James Webb Telescope.  Its light took 12.9 billion years to reach the Earth.  This means that this is what this star looked like shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, only 900 million years from the Big Bang.

The many ways in which the James Webb Telescope might contribute to our understanding of the cosmos is surveyed in a recent article in the New York Times and in a series of articles in the latest issue of Scientific American (December, 2022). The broadest coverage of the work with James Webb can be found at the NASA website.

This coverage of the James Webb research fails, however, to probe the deep philosophic and theological questions that should arise from this research--questions about the limits of natural scientific knowledge, the mystery of First Cause, the mystery of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life, and the cosmic teleology of human purposefulness.

THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SCIENCE

The fundamental assumption of modern natural science is that to understand nature we must engage in both thinking and looking.  In thinking about nature, we speculate about what nature might be like, and we formulate theories or hypotheses about the order of nature.  But thinking is not enough.  We must also look at nature:  we must engage in observations or experiments that will test our theories or hypotheses and either verify or falsify them.  Many scientists agree with Karl Popper that conjectures about nature that cannot be falsified by empirical observations or experiments do not count as scientific knowledge.

But as I have noted previously, some critics of this Popperian philosophy of science have argued that it ignores the fact that the human experience of the world cannot extend into the fundamental depths of nature, and therefore we can only speculate about that deepest reality of nature, without being able to empirically test our speculations.  The fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

So, for example, while the James Webb Telescope can expand our vision ever deeper into the cosmos, there will always be a cosmic horizon beyond which we cannot look.  And although we might push that cosmic horizon ever closer to the Big Bang, we will never be able to look beyond the Big Bang to see what there was before the beginning of time.  Consequently, we might speculate that we are living in only one of many (infinite?) possible universes, but we can never test that multiverse speculation because we cannot in principle ever look beyond our universe.

THE MYSTERY OF FIRST CAUSE

The limits of natural science are manifested in those fundamental mysteries of nature that might never be resolved--such as the mystery of First Cause as conveyed by the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?  I have written about this previously.

I have written about the debate between William Lane Craig and Sean Carroll over this question.  Craig presents a syllogism for the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God as supported by modern natural science.

1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

Craig claims that (1) is "obviously true," because no one believes that things just "pop into existence" without a cause, and if the whole universe came into existence at some point in time, the cause must have been transcendent--namely, a divine First Cause.

The controversial premise, he says, is (2).  Previously, traditional proponents of the Cosmological Argument have made logical arguments for why the universe could not be eternal and so must have an absolute beginning in time.  But now, beginning in the 20th century, we have scientific empirical evidence from astrophysical cosmology supporting the theory of the Big Bang--most importantly, evidence for the expansion of the universe and evidence from the second law of thermodynamics that the universe has moved from an original state of low entropy to high entropy.

Craig says that the scientific support for premise (2) coming from Big Bang cosmology is "religiously neutral," but when the empirical truth of premise (2) is combined with the metaphysical truth of premise (1), the logical conclusion supports the existence of a transcendent cause of the universe that must be God.

There are, however, good reasons to doubt those two premises as scientific statements rather than affirmations of religious faith.

Premise (1) is not "obviously true," because while we all have experience of how natural causes work within the universe to bring things into existence, we do not have experience with how transcendent causes work outside the universe to bring the universe itself into existence. 

Carroll makes this argument, and Craig refuses to answer it.  Craig just repeats how silly it sounds to say that things "just pop into existence" without a cause.  But as Carroll observes, the language of "popping" implies a context within which cause and effect relationships make sense.  So we can sensibly ask why the chicken crossed the road, because we have a contextual understanding of what roads are, what might be on the other side of a road, what might motivate chickens to cross a road, etc.  We have a context here of things interacting within a universe governed by natural laws.

But if we try to ask why the universe exists, we have no context outside the universe that would make it possible for us to seek a causal explanation.  Indeed, to even talk about transcendent causes implies that our natural experience of causality inside the universe has no application here.  Thus, Craig is employing the sophistical technique of equivocation: if it's silly within our natural experience of the universe to say that things can just "pop into existence," then it is also silly standing outside our natural universe to say that our universe could have come into existence without a cause.  This is a fallacious inference, because our ordinary experience of causality within the context of the universe does not necessarily apply outside that context.

THE MYSTERY OF FINE-TUNING FOR HUMAN LIFE

Part of the mission of the James Webb Space Telescope is to locate and study the exoplanets (the planets beyond the Solar System) that have the conditions favorable to life, or even to intelligent life.  Although intelligent life might be rare in the universe, and although it might even turn out to be uniquely found only on the Earth, it is remarkable that some of the physical and chemical constants of the universe appear to be finely tuned for the emergence of life and intelligent life.

Some astrophysicists, such as Owen Gingerich, believe that this evidence of fine-tuning or the anthropic principle becomes comprehensible only if one believes that this fine-tuning is the purposeful work of a Creator.  There are many parameters of physics and cosmology that are set at precise values, such that if there were even a slight deviation from these values, the universe would not be hospitable to any form of life or to intelligent life.  There can be as many as 34 of these finely tuned parameters.  For example, if the expansion rate of the universe had been slightly larger, no stars and planets could have formed; and if it had been slightly smaller, the universe would have collapsed before any stars and planets could have been formed.  The nuclear energy level ratio of carbon to oxygen is set precisely, so that if it had been larger, the universe would contain insufficient oxygen for life, and if it had been smaller, the universe would contain insufficient carbon for life.  If the earth were closer to the Sun, it would be too hot to sustain life.  If it were farther away from the Sun, it would be too cold to sustain life.  Just as Goldilocks found the bowl of porridge that was neither too hot or too cold but just right, it seems that the universe is just right for the emergence of intelligent life. 

Gingerich sees only two possible ways to explain why the universe is so precisely fine-tuned for the evolution of intelligent life on Earth.  We either say that this all happened through an astonishing sequence of accidents.  Or we say that it was intentionally planned by the Creator.  Gingerich thinks the latter is much more plausible, because it is easier to believe that the Creator intentionally set the finely-tuned parameters of the universe to make it inevitable that not just life, but intelligent human life would emerge on a planet just like the Earth.  He endorses the statement of Paul Davies "that the laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind.  To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way" (God's Universe, 38).  It's as though nature has been designed so as to be hospitable to minds that can contemplate nature.

It is easier to believe that the universe's being finely tuned for intelligent life is purely accidental if one believes in the multiverse theory accepted by some scientists today.  If our universe is only one of many universes, and if each of those universes has a different set of natural laws and natural physical and cosmological parameters, then we might imagine that through a random evolution of universes, at least one universe could have arisen like ours hospitable to intelligent life.  The problem with this, however, as Gingerich and other scientists have observed, is that this is a purely imaginary conception, for which we have no observational evidence, because we have no way of stepping outside our own universe.  For this reason, many scientists think the theory of multiverse is not a scientific theory at all, because it is not empirically testable.

Even if from the standpoint of the present moment, we as intelligent beings can look back on 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and see ourselves as the purposeful peak of that fine-tuned evolutionary history, which is what Gingerich does, we might wonder about the remote future of the cosmos.  Is the cosmos so fine-tuned for life and intelligent life that such life will continue forever?  Gingerich never asks that question or considers what scientific cosmology would suggest about the distant future of the cosmos.

Although Gingerich quotes from Paul Davies as saying that the universe seems rigged to favor the emergence of not just life but intelligent life, he does not quote Davies' remarks about what the universe will look like in the very remote future.  He imagines "an inconceivably dilute soup of photons, neutrinos, and a dwindling number of electrons and positrons, all slowly moving farther and farther apart.  As far as we know, no further basic physical processes would ever happen.  No significant event would occur to interrupt the bleak sterility of a universe that has run its course yet still faces eternal life--perhaps eternal death would be a better description."

If we look at the entire history of the cosmos, we see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life; and then after a few billion years of life, the universe became eternally dead again.  So now life, including intelligent life, seems to be only a momentary event in cosmic history.  Now, it seems that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death.

A NATURAL TELEOLOGY OF HUMAN MEANING?

Gingerich looks to the fine-tuning of the universe as evidence for a cosmic teleology--for a cosmos that has been created purposefully to bring about the emergence of human beings, which thus gives cosmic meaning to the place of human beings in the universe.

But rather than looking for some cosmic teleology of the universe, we should be satisfied if we can see the immanent teleology of living species, including the human species.  Cosmic teleology is the conception of all of nature as a whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or creator.  By contrast, immanent teleology is manifest in the internal purposiveness of organisms in their generation, their structure, and their activities.  Darwinian biology rejects any cosmic teleology by which the universe as a whole would be seen as ordered to some end or purpose.  Evolution by variation and natural selection explains the purposiveness of species without reference to any forces guiding nature to secure some cosmic scale of perfection.  And yet, although the evolutionary process does not serve goals, the organisms emerging from that process do.  Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care of the young--these and many other activities of organisms are goal directed.  Biologists cannot explain such processes unless they ask about ends or purposes immanent in each species. 

Human beings show such immanent teleology in that the evolved human nature of Homo sapiens includes natural desires and inclinations that are directed to goals or ends, and we can judge the happiness of a human life by how well those goals or ends are satisfied.  I have argued that there are at least 20 natural human desires, and that we judge societies as better or worse depending on how well or how poorly those societies provide the conditions for the harmonious satisfaction of those desires.  This is not a cosmic standard of the good, because this standard of the good is relative to the human species.  Nor is this an eternal standard of the good, because the human good exists only as long as the human species exists.  And modern scientific cosmology teaches us that human beings will exist for only a brief moment in cosmic history.  But for as long as that human species exists, even if it seems fleeting in the huge expanse of cosmic history, the human good is a natural reality.

The evidence of cosmological fine-tuning does not clearly show a fine-tuning for human life.  If we look at the entire history of the cosmos, we see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life, during the first 13 billion years, there was no human-like intelligent life, and in the remote future, as the Sun and the other stars burn out, the universe will become dark, cold, and dead.  We could conclude that the universe has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death, and so from the point of view of the universe, we are utterly insignificant.

But it does not follow from this, however, that if the universe does not care about or for us, our lives have no meaning.  Even if our lives have no cosmic meaning, they still have human meaning for us.  The universe doesn't care.  But we care about ourselves and others.

Even if the universe does not care about or for us, and even if we can never fully understand that universe, we still want to probe as far as we can into the awesome depths of that universe, and the James Webb Space Telescope will help us do that.