{"id":3733,"date":"2015-01-22T14:05:21","date_gmt":"2015-01-22T21:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/?p=3733"},"modified":"2020-01-09T04:15:59","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T11:15:59","slug":"galileo-and-the-book-of-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/index.php\/2015\/01\/galileo-and-the-book-of-nature\/3733\/","title":{"rendered":"Galileo and the Book of Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while back, Morgan over at BCC wrote a fantastic post about Galileo<\/a> and his immense influence on modern science. \u00a0While the post was fantastic and well worth reading, it was somewhat tangential to the interests that I have in the “Galileo event”. \u00a0Yes, Galileo was a major figure in promoting heliocentrism, and the mathematization of natural philosophy, and a theory of gravity, etc. and, NO, I am not interested in defending the Catholic Church in any way or getting into the historical details and political intrigue surrounding the inquisition. \u00a0I am, however, very interested in using him as an example of the ways in which reason and science can come into conflict with religious authority. \u00a0I’m not sure that the case gives us clear advice on how to negotiate such tensions, but it does give us a clearer map of the terrain.<\/p>\n

It’s very easy to see Galileo as a clear case of progressive reason being vindicated \u00a0against the\u00a0authorities and prejudices that riled against him. \u00a0Again, since I’m not at all invested in that particular authority and or those particular traditions, I have nothing against this. \u00a0All the same, we should not allow ourselves to be\u00a0too uncritical\u00a0in our praise of Galileo and our appropriation of his metaphors and rhetoric. \u00a0This is especially the case with\u00a0his “Book of Nature” metaphor.<\/p>\n

The BBC post quotes Galileo as follows:<\/p>\n

“Philosophy [i.e. physics] is written in this grand book \u2014 I mean the universe \u2014 which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Galileo believed there to be two books of truth that God had given to us: 1) the Book of Scripture which has been written and interpreted by religious authorities, and 2) the Book of Nature which has been written in the language of mathematics and as such open to all you can read that language. \u00a0He insists the the truth of each\u00a0book must, somehow or another, be fully consistent with the truth of the other. \u00a0From these claims follow what has become a fairly standard approach to the relationship between religion and science to the extent the same metaphors and claims can be found within the church. \u00a0Again, I am not necessarily hostile to the meaning that most people bring to these claims today, but I do want to insist that Galileo meant something very different than what we usually mean.<\/p>\n

For starters, the proclaimed unity of science and scripture is by no means an invitation to inclusive harmony between the two sides. \u00a0Instead, it is a\u00a0premise, accepted by both sides of the science\/religion debate,\u00a0by which each side\u00a0demotes or excludes the claims made by the other. \u00a0From the religious side, they will speak of “‘true’ science” or “science, so called” and other such euphemisms that amount to “They’re wrong, and God will one day show them the error of their ways. \u00a0So, in the mean time, do not place too \u00a0much trust in them.” \u00a0The other side uses this same exact premise to label those passage of scripture that cannot be squared with science as “metaphorical”, “morally true” or some other euphemism for “less than completely true.” \u00a0Each side\u00a0uses the idealized\u00a0harmony of religion and science, not to show that they themselves are true and infallible, but to keep the other side from being the judge of and possibly falsifying their own claims.<\/p>\n

Secondly, when Galileo said that the Book of Nature was written in the language of mathematics, he did not mean that math in general is really, really useful for studying nature. \u00a0He meant something much, much stronger than that. \u00a0By “mathematics” Galileo meant specifically “Euclidean geometry” and by the “language of nature” he meant it in a very deep, Pythagorean way. \u00a0In other words, Galileo is claiming that\u00a0the natural world is the literal embodiment of Euclidean geometry. \u00a0Furthermore, since Euclidean geometry is demonstrably true in the sense of being a deductively sound system and since the axioms of Euclidean geometry are embodied within and therefore true of reality, then a Euclidean model of the world gives us truth in the exact same qualitative (although not quantitative) sense that God knows it. \u00a0Euclidean geometry, then, gives us knowledge of truth that is deductively certain, universal in scope and necessarily true for any and all possible observers. \u00a0This is an enormously strong claim that not only pretends to infallibility, but was seriously undermined with the invention of non-Euclidean geometries – like the one that Einstein used.<\/p>\n

Given these two perspectives, we can more easily see why Galileo was bound to come into conflict with the church. \u00a0If a Euclidean geometry gives us God’s knowledge of reality and it the scripture contradicts it, then the latter quite obviously has to be demoted in some sense. \u00a0Within this context, it is worth mentioning that if Galileo had taken the “Book of Nature” metaphor in the way that we usually accept it today –\u00a0saying that this particular mathematical model makes some elegant and breathtakingly confirmed predictions in the astronomical data, the interpretation of which is open to various interpretations – \u00a0it is not at all clear that the church would have acted the way they did. \u00a0This interpretation, however, sends up warning flags for those who are today on Galileo’s side since “mathematical model that is open to interpretation” also sounds like (is?) a demotion of sorts.<\/p>\n

I hope by now the tension between science and religion is becoming clear, especially as it is expressed rather than dissolved in the idealized\u00a0harmony of “true” science with “true” religion. \u00a0The first side wants to shake off those scare quotes by resisting an instrumental interpretation of scientific knowledge. \u00a0The other side wants to shake off their own\u00a0scare quotes by resisting a metaphorical interpretation of religious knowledge. \u00a0Both sides today admit that they are fallible, but neither one is willing to allow the other side to be the judge of that fallibility. \u00a0Of course, us Mormons all reject both the authority of the Catholic Church and its geocentric model of times past, but this does not dissolve the tension that lies at the heart\u00a0of the Galileo event. \u00a0We still find ourselves confronted with a tension between the ways in which science teaches us to read the book of nature and the ways in which priesthood authorities (that we do accept) teach us to read the book of scripture.