“In a generation which saw the Thirty Years’ War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”
Alfred North Whitehead
[...] the sun Posted on 17 September 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf // I was recently alerted to a blog, The Deeps of Time, which deals with science and the Catholic faith. Even as I am starting at a book on my desk [...]
Let’s see now.
The Inquisition condemned the proposition:
“….that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from its place”
This turns out to have been true.
No one believes this proposition any longer.
Score:
Inquisition 1, Galileo 0.
The Inquisition also condemned the proposition:
“….that the Earth is not the center of the world and immovable but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion”
Now here is the really interesting part.
No scientific experiment ever conducted has ever directly measured that motion.
After two and a half centuries of trying, physics reinvented itself, adopted Relativity, and explained that no absolute motion exists, hence explaining the failures.
But the assertion that no absolute motion exists is itself not a scientific statement.
It is a metaphysical one.
Therefore, science experimentally vindicates the Inquisition on proposition #1, and admits it cannot, even in theory, ever provide direct experimental proof of proposition #2.
Now Relativity makes certain predictions about the large scale structure of space time, which we have not been in a position to experimentally test……..
Until the last ten years or so, when the totality of the observable universe became an object of direct scientific measurement.
The predicted isotropic, homogeneous large scale structure is *not* borne out by observations.
What *is* borne out by observations, is the existence of Earth-oriented structure on the largest scales.
If it winds up Inquisition 2, Galileo 0, we will spend less time making excuses for the Inquisition and a whole lot more making excuses form the decision of the subsequent magisterium to abandon them.
Interesting, that four centuries on, a solid Faith in Scripture and patristic consensus, has outdone science, in the foundational battle that marks the beginning of the modern world……