The final chapter of the powerful, uproarious & polemical The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (2009) by Dr David Berlinski *
In December 1613, a full sixty years after the death of Nicolaus Copernicus, the earth still stood at the center of the universe. It had not moved, and it had not been moved. Occupying distinguished positions in all the great universities of Europe, sophisticated astronomers saw no reason to dilute their faith in the ancient Ptolemaic system. It had stood the test of time, and it was accurate. The view that the earth was in motion around the sun they rejected because it seemed an offence to intuition and common sense. And so it was. To the obvious question why the earth's motion was not readily discernible, Copernican astronomy could offer no credible response.
Five years later, the Church placed Copernicus's treatise, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), on the index of banned books. In 1633, the Roman Inquisition placed Galileo Galilei on trial. He stood trapped, clever sniping Jesuits badgering him to renounce his view that the earth but not the sun was in motion. His tormentors capered and danced. In the end, Galileo did renounce his heretical doctrines, but he remained inwardly defiant. Eppur si muove, he was heard to mutter to himself when the proceedings concluded.
Yet it moves.
At least, this is the story that has been handed down to us. It is a tale that had engendered a long-standing myth of clerical ignorance and religious intolerance.
The facts are rather different, as the facts so often are.
Intoxicated by the new astronomical theories advanced by Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, and often helping himself to their ideas without bothering overmuch to credit their influence, Galileo had in 1613 committed his thoughts about science, religion, and astronomy to paper in a letter to his friend the Benedictine Benedetto Castelli. His letter is a great soulful cry, a plea for tolerance and freedom of inquiry. It is as well one of the governing documents of the modern scientific era, a kind of legal charter.
Galileo begins by assenting to a proposition that he proposes almost at once to deny: "The Holy Scripture can never lie or err, and... its declarations are absolutely and inviolably true." This is on its face an odd claim, even if in the context of early-seventeenth-century intellectual life it was a matter of orthodoxy, for it seems to conflate three quite different ideas. The first, that certain texts can never lie; the second, that they can never err; and the third, that they are not only true but absolutely true. But texts—written words, after all—can neither lie nor err, although they can certainly convey a lie or communicate an error. Lying and erring are things that men and women do. Texts can, on the other hand, be true or false, but Galileo is concerned to repeat the common view that biblical texts are not only true, but true absolutely and inviolably. And this suggests that such texts express propositions that not only are true, but could not be false.
Now, Galileo's scientific career was, if nothing else, a matter of demonstrating that in certain fundamental respects, the ancient and subtle Ptolemaic system, according to which the heavens revolved around the earth in a series of celestial spheres, was mistaken. But the Ptolemaic account was the biblical account. It was, in fact, the account common in the ancient Near East, where only the Greeks were daring enough to speculate that the earth might be in motion around the sun, and even the Greeks were unable to reconcile this thesis with the plain evidence of their senses. They were not, after all, flying into space from its surface, and if the earth was in motion, why weren't they? Thus, as Galileo perfectly well understood, biblical inerrancy and the claims advanced by Copernicus and Kepler stood in conflict. An irresistible force had encountered an immovable object.
The friction thus engendered, Galileo proposed to ameliorate by means of a semantic dodge. "Although the scriptures cannot err," he wrote, "nevertheless some of its interpreters and expositors can err in various ways." Such errors typically involve the confusion of metaphorical and literal meaning. Taken literally, scriptures would seem to assign to God "feet, hands and eyes," and this, Galileo assumes, is quite absurd, although he makes this assumption by means of no argument. Moslem theologians of the tenth century had, after all, argue the contrary with great heat and no little eloquence.
There then follows a passage of quite extraordinary importance, one that has worked its way through every part of our own scientific and secular culture: "Thus given that the Scripture is not only capable but necessarily in need of interpretation different from the apparent meaning of [its] words, it seems to me that in disputes about natural phenomena, it should be reserved to the last place." This opinion, although provocative in the context of seventeenth-century thought, is today uncontroversial. The sentences that follow are otherwise: "For the Holy Scripture and Nature both equally derive from the divine Word, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit, the latter as the most obedient executrix of God's commands." Although inspired by the Holy Spirit, scriptures belong to the world of appearances, and appearances can be confused or misleading. With nature, things are completely different. "Nature is inexorable and immutable," Galileo writes, "and she does not care at all whether her recondite reasons and modes of operation are revealed to human understanding, and so she never transgresses the terms of the laws imposed on her." What Galileo calls "sensory experiences placed before our eyes or necessary demonstrations concerning nature" have an intrinsic force denied scripture itself, and in a conflict between the two, it is nature that must prevail.
This is revolutionary doctrine, and in Galileo's mind, one revolution engenders another. "Philosophy is written in this grand book of the universe," he affirms, his words again canonical, "which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the alphabet in which it is composed."
From this remarkable declaration, it follows that Nature is a book; and from what Galileo has already written, it follows that "nature never transgresses the terms of the laws imposed upon her."
These assertions imply that the Book of Nature is inerrant, so that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, a staple of Christian thought, has not at all been discarded in Galileo's mind, but transferred. A new, greater, grander book now occupies his attention, but even though new, greater, and grander, the Book of Nature—the Book—is nonetheless very much like the old book. It is inerrant.
The "book of God's word" and the "book of God's works," Francis Bacon argued, are not in conflict.
How could they be?
They are the same book.
Hearing that unorthodox opinions were afoot, a Dominican, Niccolò Lorini, expressed his scruples in a letter written on February 7, 1615, to Cardinal Paolo, prefect of the Holy Office in Rome. Galileo's letter, he declared, was "suspicious or presumptuous." In order "to show their cleverness," Galileo and his followers were "airing and scattering broadcast [i.e., making known] in our steadfastly Catholic city, a thousand saucy and irrelevant surmises." Lorini had earlier admitted to Galileo that he knew nothing of mathematics or physics, and in words that even today compel admiration, admitted the he knew even less about this "Ipernic or whatever his name is." He was, of course, referring to Copernicus.
And then a Carmelite named Paolo Antonio Foscarini thought to compose a letter of his own, entitled "Copernicus and the Motions of the Earth and the Immobility of the Sun." It was, in fact, less a letter and more of a tract, a vigorous defence of the new astronomy. If mathematical physics and Holy Scripture were in conflict on certain matters, Foscarini suggested, then so much the worse for Holy Scripture. And they were plainly in conflict.
Exultavit ut gigas currendum viam, the Pslamist had written about the sun.
"He rejoiceth like a giant to run the way."
Foscarini had persuaded himself that his enthusiasm was infectious without ever once worrying that it might be contagious. He sent a copy of his letter to Robert Cardinal Bellarmine.
An engraving of Cardinal Bellarmine by the Flemish artist Valdor of Liege depicts a man of about fifty. The cardinal is wearing a red hat, the sign of his office, and his shoulders are sheathed in red clerical robes. His face suggests a man one would be glad to know but unwilling to cross—careful eyes, an aquiline nose, and round, rubicund cheeks descending smoothly into a smooth, trimmed Vandyke beard. The forehead is creased and the edges of his eyes are crinkled, but not in any way indicating amusement. The man is plainly a prince of the Church, familiar with power and accustomed to human vanity. When Church officials commented on his outstanding piety and almost supernatural goodness – he was said to be fond of the poor – they did so in order to justify denying him the papacy. He is today a saint, circumstances suggesting that at his trial, the Devil's Advocate was indisposed.
Receiving Foscarini's letter in 1615, Bellarmine sent a response that arrived on April 12.
"My very dear Reverend Father," Bellarmine begins suavely, and afterward I paraphrase. It has been a pleasure for me to read your letter. It exhibits such skill and learning.
Bellarmine's praise was not insincere. He had, various stories indicated, once looked through a telescope pointed inconclusively toward Saturn, and he had seen enough so that with ringed traces of the eyepiece raccooning his eyes, he had muttered something indicating his pleased astonishment.
Nevertheless, the tone of Bellarmine's letter now changes. He will be brief, he informs this provincial rustic. No doubt Foscarini has little time to read, but more to the point, he has little time to write.
The Copernican assumption, the cardinal affirms, that it is the sun that stands still and the earth that moves might well "save appearances," and so conform to the facts better than the ancient Ptolemaic theory, with its wearisome eccentrics and epicycles. Let us say that this is so. "There is in this," the cardinal allows, "nothing dangerous."
Sixteen years before, Bellarmine had served the Church as an inquisitor at the trial of Giordano Bruno, one of history's lamentable pests, and Bruno had been burned at the stake, Cardinal Bellarmine approving the verdict and having done nothing to prevent its execution. When written by a man prepared to put other men to death, the words very dangerous have a force they might not otherwise posses. The cardinal, one imagines, has caught Foscarini's attention.
"Whenever a true demonstration would be produced that the sun stands at the center of the world" – and none has been vouchsafed me, the cardinal is quick to affirm – "then at that time it would be necessary to proceed with great caution in interpreting Scriptures which seem to be contrary."
This is so very reasonable as to place in doubt the very idea of clerical intolerance. Bellarmine is arguing, after all, only that in matters of astronomy, judgement might be suspended and not that inquiry must be stopped.
But suppose, the cardinal continues, the conflict between astronomical fact and Holy Scripture should prove irremediable; suppose, in fact, that a demonstration – not a conjecture, not an assumption, not one of these, please forgive me, Your Reverence, amusing suppositions that are so prominently a feature of your letter – were made available that the sun is in fact immovable.
Yes, suppose just that.
The cardinal now contemplates this appalling possibility with all his intellectual sophistication. If it came to that, he writes – if the sun really does stand still – "it would be better to say that we do not understand Holy Scripture than to say that what has been demonstrated is false."
But this is, of course, precisely what Galileo had urged—a grand, quite self-conscious project of avoiding conflict by feigning confusion.
The passionate drama played out four hundred year ago is playing out again. And why not? The characters that it involved are a part of the human comedy. If in the seventeenth century, the cardinal was willing to say that we might have misunderstood religion in order to uphold science, in the twenty-first, he is willing to say that we might have misunderstood science in order to uphold religion. It is Western science that is our church, the place in which we repose our confidence and our trust. I am among the faithful. And I am devoted to the church. I have, after all, spent my life studying its texts.
Far more than Isaac Newton – implacable, remote, incomprehensible in his genius – Galileo Galilei has entered contemporary life as the very soul and symbol of a way of thought. He is intensely human, and for this reason, sympathetic. He gave way before the Roman Inquisition but in the end he got his way. The Western world now thinks in his terms. We have for more than three hundred years occupied a Galilean universe.
Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen, the great German mathematician David Hilbert affirmed in an address given in 1930.
We must know, we will know.
The long Galilean moment in the history of thought is coming to an end. Shortly after Hilbert delivered his address, Kurt Gödel demonstrated that mathematics was inherently incomplete. If science in the twentieth century has demonstrated anything, it is that there are limits to what we can know. What we might wish and what we can have are not necessarily the same. A far older view of human life has entered a position of authority in our affairs.
At the very same moment that Hilbert grandly affirmed his program of intellectual conquest, Galileo's other heirs were completing the last of the revolutions in physical thought. The Standard Model of particle physics is their monument. And thereafter there has been nothing. There has been nothing, that is, that could properly be expressed in Galilean terms.
Niccolò Lorini, so eager to denounce what he could not understand or did not wish to grasp, is also a familiar figure: He is destined now and forever to sound twittering notes of alarm with respect to doctrines that he finds alarming.
It hardly matters which doctrines have provoked his alarm; poor Niccolò is prepared to denounce them all. If in the seventeenth century they were scientific but not religious, in the twenty-first century they are religious but not scientific. Niccolò may today be found wherever the faith is under attack. Darwin's theory of evolution is the obvious example, because Darwin's theory is virtually the only part of church teaching commonly understood. It may be grasped by anyone in an afternoon, and often is. A week suffices to make a man a specialist. The great virtue of Darwin's theory, Richard Dawkins has argued, is that it has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Dawkins's claim, while it has been widely repeated, has not been widely believed. "Two-thirds of Americans," the New York Times reported, "say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools." But even among those quite persuaded of Darwin's theory, "18 percent said that evolution was 'guided by a supreme being.'"
Under these circumstances, freedom of thought very often appears as an inconvenience to those, like Niccolò Lorini, with a position to protect and enemies on all sides. A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington DC concluded that the so-called Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance of new life forms about 530 million years ago, could best be understood in terms of an intelligent design—hardly a position unknown in Western thought. The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists. Wise men attend to the publication of every one of the Proceedings' papers, but in the case of Stephen Meyer's "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," the Board of Editors was at once given to understand that they had done a bad thing. Their indecent capitulation followed at once.
Publication of the paper, they confessed, was a mistake. It would never happen again. It had barely happened at all.
"If scientists do not oppose antievolutionism," remarked Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, "it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak." Scott's understanding of "opposition" had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: "Avoid debates."
There is nothing surprising in any of this. I myself believe that the world would be suitably improved if those with whom I disagree were to lapse into silence.
There is finally Cardinal Bellarmine; he is today where he was in the seventeenth century, and that is within the shadows, a man disposed to display his hand only when his hand is forced. If he is on those occasions useful in virtue of the sliver of pure steel running through his character, his usefulness is circumscribed by his quivering intelligence. Stern as a defender of the faith, he is, in his heart of hearts, a witness to its limitations.
The cardinal speaks today to those whose faith is sincere but whose doubts are significant. He speaks for me, and I suppose that in seeing something sympathetic in the cardinal, I have in return spoken for him.
No less than other men, the cardinal understands that in the twenty-first century, the symbol and the glory of faith is that cathedral that science has constructed from its great physical theories. The thing is immense. It can be seen from every vantage point, and even those ill at ease in its presence cannot escape its shadow.
But the cathedral is now some four hundred years old. The walls have aged into ochre and umber. Within, statues of all the saints stand on their pedestals. Newton is there, noble, uncorrupted, and aloof; and so, too, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, and Paul Dirac; Richard Feynman is the last. There are no others. There are no young saints and none have been proposed.
With a peasant smile of satisfaction creasing his narrow Italian face, the cardinal very much enjoys the grand spectacle that every day takes place within the cathedral and on the plaza on which it has been built. There are architects carrying rolled-up designs under their arms, masons stirring wet loads of cement, bricklayers, and carpenters; and hanging like monkeys from their scaffolds, stonecutters carving out gargoyles on all the high ledges.
But the cathedral is not finished. The interiors are crudely appointed. While some windows glow in subtle colours, others have been put in place before they have been stained, and in some parts of the great vault, simple pine boards have been nailed onto window frames still lacking any windows at all.
Although workmen speaking any number of languages may be seen every day on the cathedral's work site, there is a certain disorganization to their affairs. It is hardly surprising, given the fact that almost every worker belongs to a separate guild. Guild officials have been known to bring work to a halt over the most trivial of circumstances.
When the cathedral was first proposed many long years ago, the great visionaries imagined a single unified and compelling structure, its massive walls embracing a serene volume of space and light, its flanks ascending smoothly upward so that a slender spire emerged naturally to pierce the sky. Sketches of the original cathedral may still be found in the cathedral's basement, where mice have taken over all the filing cabinets.
The spire has not been built, and in the clear moonlight, the cathedral looks unbalanced, almost as if it were a cripple defiantly waving a stump against the sky. The rumour is current among knowledgeable architects that from the first, the cathedral was constructed from incompatible blueprints.
The towers do not quite match. One is austere and classical. The other ornamented and baroque.
How was this overlooked?
At the very top of the cathedral, where the spire is intended to pierce the sky, but where only a small stub now exists, workmen have put down their tools. They do not know how to proceed. The architects are of little help. They consult their drawings, but the more their drawing occupy their attention, the less they are able to determine what they mean.
The cardinal longs to see the spire finished, thrust into the sky gleaming, so that he can step back and see it soar.
But the spire presents any number of difficult problems. Some of them are financial. Like every cathedral, this one is supported by public funds. Very often, the cardinal finds himself pleading for money before various church groups. It is a role he finds distasteful. Who would not?
There is dissension among the architects. Some now argue for a spire that is taller than the one planned; others for one that is shorter. And some believe that it should remain an idea, one thta all men can see, without ever being translated into stone.
Catching himself in these visions of grandeur, the cardinal reminds himself that cathedrals have been known to collapse, and in thinking of the weight of the faith he has invested in the cathedral, he wonders – it is only natural – whether any structure can support such weight.
Although a visionary, the cardinal is also a practical man. He believes in costs and is apprehensive about expenses. A design should really be tested by experiment. The architects have said so. But the spire is projected to weight tons and cost millions.
How could it be tested?
And if it could be tested, by what means could the test be tested?
What a question, the cardinal reflects. How can faith be tested? What is its test?
To discontinue work on the cathedral is unthinkable, the cardinal reflects, but even he does not know whether the spire will ever be built. No one is sure. It is possible that the cathedral will forever remain incomplete.
Every now and then careless tourists with no sense of its weight in history dismiss the cathedral as so much antique stone. What is its point? They snap pictures, and they are gone.
How little they understand.
But does the cathedral have a point?
Standing before the cathedral to which he has devoted his life, the cardinal says at least this to himself: that it has given meaning to those who have worked on it, and satisfaction to those who worship in its dim interior.
No one could bear its loss. It has become a monument, and when from the plaza the professional beggars and sly tradesmen and rouge-lipped prostitutes look up, they see that great looming familiar thing, as natural as the space that contains it and the space that it contains.
From time to time, the cardinal allows himself to be questioned by the faithful. He is courteous, polite, and reserved. But he is distant.
"Your Eminence," they ask in every language of the world, "does our cathedral support the faith by which it is supported?"
The cardinal smiles enigmatically, a sly, ironic, distant, tender smile. Standing there on the cathedral's steps, he pauses to reflect, the light glinting from his miter, and his hooded eyes troubled.
He does not answer, but if he did, this is what he would say:
Does any cathedral?
_______________
* Watch Berlinski's presentations on YouTube, here and here. See also my previous posts excerpted from the same book: TIME, DEATH, LIFE, AND LONGING and THE REASON.
THE CARDINAL AND HIS CATHEDRAL
In December 1613, a full sixty years after the death of Nicolaus Copernicus, the earth still stood at the center of the universe. It had not moved, and it had not been moved. Occupying distinguished positions in all the great universities of Europe, sophisticated astronomers saw no reason to dilute their faith in the ancient Ptolemaic system. It had stood the test of time, and it was accurate. The view that the earth was in motion around the sun they rejected because it seemed an offence to intuition and common sense. And so it was. To the obvious question why the earth's motion was not readily discernible, Copernican astronomy could offer no credible response.
Five years later, the Church placed Copernicus's treatise, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), on the index of banned books. In 1633, the Roman Inquisition placed Galileo Galilei on trial. He stood trapped, clever sniping Jesuits badgering him to renounce his view that the earth but not the sun was in motion. His tormentors capered and danced. In the end, Galileo did renounce his heretical doctrines, but he remained inwardly defiant. Eppur si muove, he was heard to mutter to himself when the proceedings concluded.
Yet it moves.
At least, this is the story that has been handed down to us. It is a tale that had engendered a long-standing myth of clerical ignorance and religious intolerance.
The facts are rather different, as the facts so often are.
🔯
Intoxicated by the new astronomical theories advanced by Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, and often helping himself to their ideas without bothering overmuch to credit their influence, Galileo had in 1613 committed his thoughts about science, religion, and astronomy to paper in a letter to his friend the Benedictine Benedetto Castelli. His letter is a great soulful cry, a plea for tolerance and freedom of inquiry. It is as well one of the governing documents of the modern scientific era, a kind of legal charter.
Now, Galileo's scientific career was, if nothing else, a matter of demonstrating that in certain fundamental respects, the ancient and subtle Ptolemaic system, according to which the heavens revolved around the earth in a series of celestial spheres, was mistaken. But the Ptolemaic account was the biblical account. It was, in fact, the account common in the ancient Near East, where only the Greeks were daring enough to speculate that the earth might be in motion around the sun, and even the Greeks were unable to reconcile this thesis with the plain evidence of their senses. They were not, after all, flying into space from its surface, and if the earth was in motion, why weren't they? Thus, as Galileo perfectly well understood, biblical inerrancy and the claims advanced by Copernicus and Kepler stood in conflict. An irresistible force had encountered an immovable object.
The friction thus engendered, Galileo proposed to ameliorate by means of a semantic dodge. "Although the scriptures cannot err," he wrote, "nevertheless some of its interpreters and expositors can err in various ways." Such errors typically involve the confusion of metaphorical and literal meaning. Taken literally, scriptures would seem to assign to God "feet, hands and eyes," and this, Galileo assumes, is quite absurd, although he makes this assumption by means of no argument. Moslem theologians of the tenth century had, after all, argue the contrary with great heat and no little eloquence.
There then follows a passage of quite extraordinary importance, one that has worked its way through every part of our own scientific and secular culture: "Thus given that the Scripture is not only capable but necessarily in need of interpretation different from the apparent meaning of [its] words, it seems to me that in disputes about natural phenomena, it should be reserved to the last place." This opinion, although provocative in the context of seventeenth-century thought, is today uncontroversial. The sentences that follow are otherwise: "For the Holy Scripture and Nature both equally derive from the divine Word, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit, the latter as the most obedient executrix of God's commands." Although inspired by the Holy Spirit, scriptures belong to the world of appearances, and appearances can be confused or misleading. With nature, things are completely different. "Nature is inexorable and immutable," Galileo writes, "and she does not care at all whether her recondite reasons and modes of operation are revealed to human understanding, and so she never transgresses the terms of the laws imposed on her." What Galileo calls "sensory experiences placed before our eyes or necessary demonstrations concerning nature" have an intrinsic force denied scripture itself, and in a conflict between the two, it is nature that must prevail.
This is revolutionary doctrine, and in Galileo's mind, one revolution engenders another. "Philosophy is written in this grand book of the universe," he affirms, his words again canonical, "which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the alphabet in which it is composed."
From this remarkable declaration, it follows that Nature is a book; and from what Galileo has already written, it follows that "nature never transgresses the terms of the laws imposed upon her."
These assertions imply that the Book of Nature is inerrant, so that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, a staple of Christian thought, has not at all been discarded in Galileo's mind, but transferred. A new, greater, grander book now occupies his attention, but even though new, greater, and grander, the Book of Nature—the Book—is nonetheless very much like the old book. It is inerrant.
The "book of God's word" and the "book of God's works," Francis Bacon argued, are not in conflict.
How could they be?
They are the same book.
🔯
Hearing that unorthodox opinions were afoot, a Dominican, Niccolò Lorini, expressed his scruples in a letter written on February 7, 1615, to Cardinal Paolo, prefect of the Holy Office in Rome. Galileo's letter, he declared, was "suspicious or presumptuous." In order "to show their cleverness," Galileo and his followers were "airing and scattering broadcast [i.e., making known] in our steadfastly Catholic city, a thousand saucy and irrelevant surmises." Lorini had earlier admitted to Galileo that he knew nothing of mathematics or physics, and in words that even today compel admiration, admitted the he knew even less about this "Ipernic or whatever his name is." He was, of course, referring to Copernicus.
And then a Carmelite named Paolo Antonio Foscarini thought to compose a letter of his own, entitled "Copernicus and the Motions of the Earth and the Immobility of the Sun." It was, in fact, less a letter and more of a tract, a vigorous defence of the new astronomy. If mathematical physics and Holy Scripture were in conflict on certain matters, Foscarini suggested, then so much the worse for Holy Scripture. And they were plainly in conflict.
Exultavit ut gigas currendum viam, the Pslamist had written about the sun.
"He rejoiceth like a giant to run the way."
Foscarini had persuaded himself that his enthusiasm was infectious without ever once worrying that it might be contagious. He sent a copy of his letter to Robert Cardinal Bellarmine.
🔯
An engraving of Cardinal Bellarmine by the Flemish artist Valdor of Liege depicts a man of about fifty. The cardinal is wearing a red hat, the sign of his office, and his shoulders are sheathed in red clerical robes. His face suggests a man one would be glad to know but unwilling to cross—careful eyes, an aquiline nose, and round, rubicund cheeks descending smoothly into a smooth, trimmed Vandyke beard. The forehead is creased and the edges of his eyes are crinkled, but not in any way indicating amusement. The man is plainly a prince of the Church, familiar with power and accustomed to human vanity. When Church officials commented on his outstanding piety and almost supernatural goodness – he was said to be fond of the poor – they did so in order to justify denying him the papacy. He is today a saint, circumstances suggesting that at his trial, the Devil's Advocate was indisposed.Receiving Foscarini's letter in 1615, Bellarmine sent a response that arrived on April 12.
"My very dear Reverend Father," Bellarmine begins suavely, and afterward I paraphrase. It has been a pleasure for me to read your letter. It exhibits such skill and learning.
Bellarmine's praise was not insincere. He had, various stories indicated, once looked through a telescope pointed inconclusively toward Saturn, and he had seen enough so that with ringed traces of the eyepiece raccooning his eyes, he had muttered something indicating his pleased astonishment.
Nevertheless, the tone of Bellarmine's letter now changes. He will be brief, he informs this provincial rustic. No doubt Foscarini has little time to read, but more to the point, he has little time to write.
The Copernican assumption, the cardinal affirms, that it is the sun that stands still and the earth that moves might well "save appearances," and so conform to the facts better than the ancient Ptolemaic theory, with its wearisome eccentrics and epicycles. Let us say that this is so. "There is in this," the cardinal allows, "nothing dangerous."
But to go further into the frank affirmation that the sun really is immovable and the earth really is in motion—this, Bellarmine declares, "is a very dangerous thing."
Sixteen years before, Bellarmine had served the Church as an inquisitor at the trial of Giordano Bruno, one of history's lamentable pests, and Bruno had been burned at the stake, Cardinal Bellarmine approving the verdict and having done nothing to prevent its execution. When written by a man prepared to put other men to death, the words very dangerous have a force they might not otherwise posses. The cardinal, one imagines, has caught Foscarini's attention.
"Whenever a true demonstration would be produced that the sun stands at the center of the world" – and none has been vouchsafed me, the cardinal is quick to affirm – "then at that time it would be necessary to proceed with great caution in interpreting Scriptures which seem to be contrary."
This is so very reasonable as to place in doubt the very idea of clerical intolerance. Bellarmine is arguing, after all, only that in matters of astronomy, judgement might be suspended and not that inquiry must be stopped.
But suppose, the cardinal continues, the conflict between astronomical fact and Holy Scripture should prove irremediable; suppose, in fact, that a demonstration – not a conjecture, not an assumption, not one of these, please forgive me, Your Reverence, amusing suppositions that are so prominently a feature of your letter – were made available that the sun is in fact immovable.
Yes, suppose just that.
The cardinal now contemplates this appalling possibility with all his intellectual sophistication. If it came to that, he writes – if the sun really does stand still – "it would be better to say that we do not understand Holy Scripture than to say that what has been demonstrated is false."
But this is, of course, precisely what Galileo had urged—a grand, quite self-conscious project of avoiding conflict by feigning confusion.
🔯
The passionate drama played out four hundred year ago is playing out again. And why not? The characters that it involved are a part of the human comedy. If in the seventeenth century, the cardinal was willing to say that we might have misunderstood religion in order to uphold science, in the twenty-first, he is willing to say that we might have misunderstood science in order to uphold religion. It is Western science that is our church, the place in which we repose our confidence and our trust. I am among the faithful. And I am devoted to the church. I have, after all, spent my life studying its texts.
Far more than Isaac Newton – implacable, remote, incomprehensible in his genius – Galileo Galilei has entered contemporary life as the very soul and symbol of a way of thought. He is intensely human, and for this reason, sympathetic. He gave way before the Roman Inquisition but in the end he got his way. The Western world now thinks in his terms. We have for more than three hundred years occupied a Galilean universe.
Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen, the great German mathematician David Hilbert affirmed in an address given in 1930.
We must know, we will know.
At the very same moment that Hilbert grandly affirmed his program of intellectual conquest, Galileo's other heirs were completing the last of the revolutions in physical thought. The Standard Model of particle physics is their monument. And thereafter there has been nothing. There has been nothing, that is, that could properly be expressed in Galilean terms.
Niccolò Lorini, so eager to denounce what he could not understand or did not wish to grasp, is also a familiar figure: He is destined now and forever to sound twittering notes of alarm with respect to doctrines that he finds alarming.
It hardly matters which doctrines have provoked his alarm; poor Niccolò is prepared to denounce them all. If in the seventeenth century they were scientific but not religious, in the twenty-first century they are religious but not scientific. Niccolò may today be found wherever the faith is under attack. Darwin's theory of evolution is the obvious example, because Darwin's theory is virtually the only part of church teaching commonly understood. It may be grasped by anyone in an afternoon, and often is. A week suffices to make a man a specialist. The great virtue of Darwin's theory, Richard Dawkins has argued, is that it has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Dawkins's claim, while it has been widely repeated, has not been widely believed. "Two-thirds of Americans," the New York Times reported, "say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools." But even among those quite persuaded of Darwin's theory, "18 percent said that evolution was 'guided by a supreme being.'"
Under these circumstances, freedom of thought very often appears as an inconvenience to those, like Niccolò Lorini, with a position to protect and enemies on all sides. A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington DC concluded that the so-called Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance of new life forms about 530 million years ago, could best be understood in terms of an intelligent design—hardly a position unknown in Western thought. The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists. Wise men attend to the publication of every one of the Proceedings' papers, but in the case of Stephen Meyer's "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," the Board of Editors was at once given to understand that they had done a bad thing. Their indecent capitulation followed at once.
Publication of the paper, they confessed, was a mistake. It would never happen again. It had barely happened at all.
"If scientists do not oppose antievolutionism," remarked Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, "it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak." Scott's understanding of "opposition" had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: "Avoid debates."
There is nothing surprising in any of this. I myself believe that the world would be suitably improved if those with whom I disagree were to lapse into silence.
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There is finally Cardinal Bellarmine; he is today where he was in the seventeenth century, and that is within the shadows, a man disposed to display his hand only when his hand is forced. If he is on those occasions useful in virtue of the sliver of pure steel running through his character, his usefulness is circumscribed by his quivering intelligence. Stern as a defender of the faith, he is, in his heart of hearts, a witness to its limitations.
No less than other men, the cardinal understands that in the twenty-first century, the symbol and the glory of faith is that cathedral that science has constructed from its great physical theories. The thing is immense. It can be seen from every vantage point, and even those ill at ease in its presence cannot escape its shadow.
But the cathedral is now some four hundred years old. The walls have aged into ochre and umber. Within, statues of all the saints stand on their pedestals. Newton is there, noble, uncorrupted, and aloof; and so, too, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, and Paul Dirac; Richard Feynman is the last. There are no others. There are no young saints and none have been proposed.
With a peasant smile of satisfaction creasing his narrow Italian face, the cardinal very much enjoys the grand spectacle that every day takes place within the cathedral and on the plaza on which it has been built. There are architects carrying rolled-up designs under their arms, masons stirring wet loads of cement, bricklayers, and carpenters; and hanging like monkeys from their scaffolds, stonecutters carving out gargoyles on all the high ledges.
But the cathedral is not finished. The interiors are crudely appointed. While some windows glow in subtle colours, others have been put in place before they have been stained, and in some parts of the great vault, simple pine boards have been nailed onto window frames still lacking any windows at all.
Although workmen speaking any number of languages may be seen every day on the cathedral's work site, there is a certain disorganization to their affairs. It is hardly surprising, given the fact that almost every worker belongs to a separate guild. Guild officials have been known to bring work to a halt over the most trivial of circumstances.
When the cathedral was first proposed many long years ago, the great visionaries imagined a single unified and compelling structure, its massive walls embracing a serene volume of space and light, its flanks ascending smoothly upward so that a slender spire emerged naturally to pierce the sky. Sketches of the original cathedral may still be found in the cathedral's basement, where mice have taken over all the filing cabinets.
The towers do not quite match. One is austere and classical. The other ornamented and baroque.
How was this overlooked?
At the very top of the cathedral, where the spire is intended to pierce the sky, but where only a small stub now exists, workmen have put down their tools. They do not know how to proceed. The architects are of little help. They consult their drawings, but the more their drawing occupy their attention, the less they are able to determine what they mean.
The cardinal longs to see the spire finished, thrust into the sky gleaming, so that he can step back and see it soar.
But the spire presents any number of difficult problems. Some of them are financial. Like every cathedral, this one is supported by public funds. Very often, the cardinal finds himself pleading for money before various church groups. It is a role he finds distasteful. Who would not?
There is dissension among the architects. Some now argue for a spire that is taller than the one planned; others for one that is shorter. And some believe that it should remain an idea, one thta all men can see, without ever being translated into stone.
Catching himself in these visions of grandeur, the cardinal reminds himself that cathedrals have been known to collapse, and in thinking of the weight of the faith he has invested in the cathedral, he wonders – it is only natural – whether any structure can support such weight.
Although a visionary, the cardinal is also a practical man. He believes in costs and is apprehensive about expenses. A design should really be tested by experiment. The architects have said so. But the spire is projected to weight tons and cost millions.
How could it be tested?
And if it could be tested, by what means could the test be tested?
What a question, the cardinal reflects. How can faith be tested? What is its test?
To discontinue work on the cathedral is unthinkable, the cardinal reflects, but even he does not know whether the spire will ever be built. No one is sure. It is possible that the cathedral will forever remain incomplete.
Every now and then careless tourists with no sense of its weight in history dismiss the cathedral as so much antique stone. What is its point? They snap pictures, and they are gone.
How little they understand.
But does the cathedral have a point?
Standing before the cathedral to which he has devoted his life, the cardinal says at least this to himself: that it has given meaning to those who have worked on it, and satisfaction to those who worship in its dim interior.
No one could bear its loss. It has become a monument, and when from the plaza the professional beggars and sly tradesmen and rouge-lipped prostitutes look up, they see that great looming familiar thing, as natural as the space that contains it and the space that it contains.
From time to time, the cardinal allows himself to be questioned by the faithful. He is courteous, polite, and reserved. But he is distant.
"Your Eminence," they ask in every language of the world, "does our cathedral support the faith by which it is supported?"
The cardinal smiles enigmatically, a sly, ironic, distant, tender smile. Standing there on the cathedral's steps, he pauses to reflect, the light glinting from his miter, and his hooded eyes troubled.
He does not answer, but if he did, this is what he would say:
Does any cathedral?
(David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion, ch. 10)
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* Watch Berlinski's presentations on YouTube, here and here. See also my previous posts excerpted from the same book: TIME, DEATH, LIFE, AND LONGING and THE REASON.
See also my page:
