Galileo Goes to Jail is a collection of essays by historians of science that examine various common misconceptions about the historical relation of science and religion. The editor, Ronald Numbers, has provided many historical analyses of the evolution/creationism debates, such as his book The Creationists. He's selected contributors based on their contributions to the history of science - about half of whom identify as atheist or agnostic, the remaining of whom identify with various religious traditions. The essays correct fallacies committed both by religious apologists who want to downplay the tensions between science and religion and by those committed to a thoroughgoing scientific humanism who want to exaggerate the tensions. This is a book I wish every Kossack would read, and read carefully, and then pass along to relatives and friends.
In some cases, I didn't feel that the essays settled the matter - there is still room for debate. But I think that points more to the necessity of paying attention not just to facts in and of themselves, but also to the interpretive frameworks within which we see facts. In each of the myths discussed, one can usually find an accurate fact in a more or less significant detail, which the myth then renders disproportionate in relation to the whole picture.
The introduction of the book lays out the basic narrative that the book sets out to combat. This is the story of a uniform and constant conflict between science and religion laid out by late-nineteenth-century polemicists such as Andrew Dickson White, author of A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, and John William Draper, author of History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. Numbers contextualizes these writings and notes that "historians of science have known for years that White's and Draper's accounts are more propaganda than history." (6) The rest of the book is devoted to the myths, understood in the context of the book simply as "a claim that is false," and careful contextualizations that show how the "conflict narrative" can only rise to the level of an encompassing explanation by gross distortion of the facts.
The book is organized roughly chronologically, beginning with accounts of early Christianity, and ending with contemporary debates. Instead of giving you a synopsis of every debunked myth in order, I've organized my review by putting selected "pro-religion" myths first, followed by selected "anti-religion" myths.
Set One: Myths that Inflate Religious Claims and Denigrate Science
These are the examples you want to have handy if you have Fundamentalist relatives.
Myth 9: That Christianity Gave Rise to Modern Science
This was a new one to me. That there are some continuities between the intellectual commitments of the premodern era and the scientific revolution - documented by historians such as Amos Funkenstein and Brian Easley - is one thing. This does not translate into "Christianity giving rise to modern science." Culprits in the propagation of this myth include the sociologist Robert Merton, who theorized that the path to scientific inquiry in seventeenth-century was Puritanism and more recently the sociologist Rodney Stark, who credits Christianity with emergence of scientific thinking in For the Glory of God.
The rebuttal to this myth by Noah Efron first points out that Christian thought on the eve of the scientific revolution owed an enormous amount to classical and Muslim forbears, such that any idea that Christianity single-handedly gave rise to science is render preposterous. Furthermore, historians have shown that changes in commerce and technology provided independent catalysts for science apart from the importance of natural theology in medieval Christianity.
Myth 19: That Darwin and Haeckel Were Complicit in Nazi Biology
In this chapter, Robert Richards takes on, among others, Stephen Jay Gould, who certainly is not an apologist for anti-evolutionary views. Still, Gould reiterated the view that Ernest Haeckel, the primary interpreter of Darwin in nineteenth-century Germany, was a direct precursor to Nazi ideology, implicating Darwin in a direct line of influence. It is clear that Darwin and Haeckel agreed on the fundamentals of evolutionary theory. Richards poses and answers a series of questions to establish a clear break between Darwinism and Nazi ideology:
Was Darwinian theory progressivist, holding some species to be "higher" than others? Was it racist, depicting some groups to be "higher" than others? Was it racist, depicting some groups of human beings to be more advanced than others? Was it specifically anti-Semitic, casting Jews into a degraded class of human beings? Did Darwinian theory rupture the humanitarian tradition in ethics, thus facilitating a depraved Nazi morality based on selfish expediency? And, finally, did the Nazis explicitly embrace Haeckel's Darwinism?
Richards is a bit more sanguine than I am on the first two questions, arguing yes, but who wasn't in the nineteenth century? On the remaining questions, Richards offers evidence for a sound "no" in each case.
Myth 21: That Einstein Believed in a Personal God
The theologian Paul Tillich noted that Einstein rejected the notion of personal God on four grounds in his paper "Science and Religion":
Einstein attacked the idea of a Personal God from four angles: The idea is not essential for religion. It is the creation of primitive superstition. It is self-contradictory. It contradicts the scientific world view. Theology of Culture (127)
For Tillich, none of these ideas were new or powerful, but the fact that Einstein articulated them meant they deserved a fresh response. For the purposes of the argument of the book, however, they simply serve as irrefutable evidence that Einstein did not believe in a personal God. The essay in
Galileo Goes to Jail goes on to unpack Einstein's recurring references to God, showing their connection to Spinoza's pantheism and the extent to which "God" is an evocative placeholder for "Nature" in Einstein's thought.
But really, Einstein explicitly denied it, and that settles it.
Myth 23: That "Intelligent Design" Represents a Scientific Challenge to Evolution
While the philosopher Michael Ruse presents a clear presentation of the arguments of "intelligent design" proponents, and a devastating exposition of the extent to which they need to redefine "science" to make inevitable appeals to supernatural causation seem "scientific," perhaps it's best to let this one rest with the words of our Vice President Joe Biden: I refuse to believe the majority of people believe this malarkey.
Set Two: Myths that Exaggerate the Gulf between Science and Religion
These are the examples that you want to look at for self-reflection if you feel that the scientific destruction of religion is inevitable and desirable.
Myth 1: That the Rise of Christianity Was Responsible for the Demise of Ancient Science
This myth recently received strong reinforcement in popular culture with the movie Agora, which recounts the story of the stoning of the philosopher-scientist Hypatia by a Christian mob. Unfortunately for the myth, recent historical work on Hypatia has shown that her murder was politically motivated and had nothing to do with her status as a scientist.
The quote that one sees frequently in this regard is by the third-century theologian Tertullian, "What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?" David Lindberg's approach to this quote is two-fold. First, he notes how early Christian polemics against philosophy and inquiry into the natural world (precursors of science in the sense we understand it today) regularly occur in arguments that show very intimate engagement with exactly the traditions against which they rail. He sees early critics of proto-scientific activity as critics from within the philosophical tradition. Second, he contrasts Tertullian with Augustine, who held philosophy and inquiry into the natural world in higher esteem than Tertullian (Augustine wrote a couple centuries later than Tertullian, but one can find a similar contrast in the thought of Tertullian's near-contemporary Origen). It was Augustine's view, not Tertullian's, that was the dominant perspective throughout the middle ages.
For an absolutely fascinating account of how ancients thought about religious matters, with a careful attention to the meanings of ancient terminology that pulverizes anachronistic assumptions, see Dale Martin's Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians.
Myth 2: That the Medieval Christian Church Suppressed the Growth of Science
Papal endorsement of the medieval university system is the indisputable historical fact that puts this myth to rest. The chapter quotes John Heilbron in saying "The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial support of the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and probably all, other institutions." After going into the varied relations posited between science and theology in the medieval era, Michael Shank, the author of this essay, goes on to highlight the scientific discoveries that were fostered in the medieval university from the solution to the problem of primary and secondary rainbows to theoretical ways of measuring uniformly moving bodies.
Myths 3 and 6: That Medieval Christians Taught That the World Was Flat and That Copernicanism Demoted Humans from the Center of the Cosmos
The idea that "flat earth" theories dominated the medieval era gets demolished fairly easily, just by counting medieval sources that advocate a spherical earth versus those that advocate a flat earth. The former vastly outnumber the latter.
One of my favorite chapters, though, is the one on Copernicanism, because it shows how radically wrong we can get a story, just by assuming one piece of the puzzle. The story goes that people resisted the implications of a heliocentric model because it would displace humanity from the center of creation, and thus belie the progression in Genesis 1, which culminates with the creation of humanity. However, medieval thought worked not with the assumption that to be at the center is a good thing. Rather, there was an Aristotelian assumption that gravity is a force of centrality, not of motion and mass. Pair that assumption with the assumption that humanity consists of flesh and spirit, and you get a worldview where the closer you are to the center, the more you're going to be weighed down by base matter, and less free to ascend into a purely spiritual realm. Copernicanism, with these two assumptions in place, actually elevates the place of humanity.
Myth 8: That Galileo Was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism
The basic historical verdict on the Galileo trial is unambiguous and essentially correct: Galileo lost in the papal trial in 1633, but ultimately won in the court of scientific assessment of his ideas. No one in their right mind would dispute that established fact. The question is does a detailed historical examination of the conditions of the trial confirm the basic narrative of a conflict between science and religion? Modern historians have shown that the Galileo trial has a much more complex relation to how science and religion interacted in the first half of the seventeenth century. The importance of this episode for rethinking the historical relation of science and religion can be seen in the fact that Numbers chose this example for the title of the book.
The most thorough scholarly reassessment of Galileo's career is Galileo, Courtier by Mario Biagioli, which I have begun, but haven't gotten far enough into to assess properly. It forms the basis for the picture of Galileo in Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Dixon notes that
On all sides of the Galileo case there was agreement that it was proper and rational both to seek accurate knowledge of the world through observation of nature and also to base one's beliefs on the Bible. The conflict was not between empirical science and authoritarian religion but rather between differing views within the Catholic Church about how to interpret nature and scripture. (18)
Indeed, at the time of the trial, Galileo was one of very few astronomers who held the Copernican theory; the Catholic Church at this point was taking the side not simply of a particular interpretation of the Bible, but of the dominant scientific consensus. In retrospect, it is hard to see Galileo as anything other than a hero for the truth. But the fact that the skeptical philosopher Cesare Cremonini, who undermined several Catholic doctrines, like the immortality of the soul, based on careful readings of Aristotle, refused to look in Galileo's telescope shows the extent to which the lines of the debate did not fall neatly into religious authority versus reasonable skepticism.
Maurice Finocchiaro's essay in Galileo Goes to Jail examines discrepancies between the historical documents that gave rise to the impression that Galileo had been imprisoned and tortured and other historical documents that show that that was not the case. Clarification based on comment below - the essay in question notes the persistence of the idea of imprisonment and torture, but this is an argument against outdated assumptions. Although some literature persists in the "imprisoned and tortured" idea, the fact remains that Galileo was interrogated under threat of torture and placed under house arrest, facts the essay does not dispute.
These are just some of the myths discussed in the book, and there's a lot more detail in the essays themselves. Again, I hope this diary has inspired some people to pick the book up and engage it first-hand.