House of Eratosthenes

Happy Galileo Day
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

cult (n.)
1. a particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
2. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, esp. as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
3. the object of such devotion.
4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
5. Sociology. a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.

Today’s the 375th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s appearance before the Grand Inquisition, and the FARK kids are going nuts.

Agnosticism seems to me to have something to do with age. In other words, younger atheists tend to be gnostic atheists; they know there’s no God, because they’ve figured it out. There’s no evidence in either direction so the presumption should lean against God, and He should receive no benefit of doubt. They pulled this part out of their asses. They have faith. They achieve a fellowship through this faith, and in that sense achieve cultism of the purest kind.

I was impressed with how fair the linked article is. You look at events today, objectively, with a decent respect to both sides, and then you look at the details as reported by the article — it’s the same thing. You can make the connection either one of two ways: The inquisition represents our global-warming types and Galileo represents our skeptics, or vice-versa. Both sides are making the same mistakes. And that’s true of intelligent design versus evolution and any one of a number of our other hot topics.

There is no doubt the church was in the wrong. A commission formed by Pope John Paul II in the 1980s admitted as much. But was it fully responsible? There were, in fact, two other parties at fault.

One was Galileo himself. His vanity, sarcastic words, contempt for lesser minds and half-truths had earned him fierce enemies among the intellectuals of Europe–especially among the Jesuits. Galileo even fudged at least one experiment.

The second set of culprits were naturalists (the scientists of the day). Advocates of the pagan philsopher Aristotle resisted Galileo’s findings. The pope and cardinals would not have acted if dozens of these “scientists” had not said Galileo was wrong. Some hated Galileo, who had hurt their feelings. Others felt that Aristotle and the Bible should not be overturned without solid evidence. It did not matter that both Kepler and Galileo had shown that the Bible could be interpreted to agree with the new science. Their own eyes showed them that the sun, not the earth moves. Galileo could not provide hard evidence to the contrary. Solid proof for the earth’s movement around the sun was two hundred years away, when tiny shifts in star positions and subtle pendulum motions were finally measured.

Human fallibility, arrogance, and lazy group-think. On both sides.

There’s a lesson there.

There’s at least the hint of a God, too. For who else is there to laugh His ass off at us?

Thing I Know #207. Dismiss all anecdotes and parables containing these three things: A hero who can do nothing wrong, a villain who can do nothing right, and a setting in which all events are hearsay and can never be validated first- or second-hand. You’re being snookered. Count on it.

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Happy Galileo Day
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

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Happy Galileo DaySunday, June 22nd, 2008

Happy Galileo Day
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008