In announcements and press efforts this past month, the Vatican is promoting Galileo as a symbol of collaboration between science and religion. The initiative is part of a larger campaign by the Vatican to repair the Pope's image on matters of science and to promote dialogue on the relationship between reason and faith.
Overall, the Vatican's efforts should be welcomed. In a media environment that chronically pits science and faith against each other, we need powerful cultural symbols that counter the conflict narrative and that can serve as conversation starters rather than generating finger-in-the-eye insults and attacks.
There's just one problem: It's going to be difficult to switch Galileo from being a centuries old symbol of conflict to one of accommodation and co-existence. So while the Vatican might have the right strategy in mind in promoting dialogue between science and faith, they might be choosing the wrong figure and symbol to push.
As I've written, the larger strategic need for collaboration around shared common values and goals is something that scientists such as EO Wilson has recognized and that Carl Sagan emphasized later in his career.
From an Associated Press article:
At a Vatican conference last month entitled "Science 400 Years after Galileo Galilei," the Vatican's No. 2 leader, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said Galileo was an astronomer, but one who "lovingly cultivated his faith and his profound religious conviction."
"Galileo Galilei was a man of faith who saw nature as a book authored by God," Bertone said.
The head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture, which co-sponsored the conference, went further. Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi told Vatican Radio that Galileo "could become for some the ideal patron for a dialogue between science and faith."
He said Galileo's writings offered a "path" to explore how faith and reason were not incompatible.
The Rev. John Padberg, a church historian and the director of the Institute of Jesuit Sources at St. Louis University, said he suspected the Vatican's new emphasis on Galileo's faith came from the pope himself.
"Pope Benedict XVI is ardently convinced of the congruence of faith and reason, and he is concerned, especially in the present circumstances, of giving reason its due place in the whole scheme of things," he said.
While it is widely accepted that Galileo was a convinced Catholic, Padberg questioned whether he could ever be accepted as some kind of a poster child for the faith and reason debate. "That's going to be a long shot for an awful lot of people, on both sides, by the way," he said.
Benedict, a theologian, has made exploring the faith-reason relationship a key aspect of his papacy, and has directed his daily newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, to take up the charge.
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eduxrox, in fact the burning of Bruno was pretty much his own fault. Long story short, he spent most of his adult life traveling around Europe systematically defrauding and alienating more or less everyone he met. His cosmological views didn't help him any, but in fact the Copernican system wasn't even considered heretical at the time. Adam Frank's The Constant Fire has a pretty well-cited discussion on this point.
A tragic episode nonetheless, but not exactly a sainted martyr for science either.
I have an experience with this dichotomy of Galileo as symbol of conflict verses accommodation. Last year I was in a program that allowed me to be an assistant teacher at my college, where I am an undergraduate. The class I worked in was called Intellectual Heritage 1 (basically the history of western thought from the ancient Greeks, to the historical origins of the Bible, to the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment), and the syllabus that the teacher and I put together involved a unit on science for the first time.
On the day we started the science unit (beginning with Galileo's Letter to the Dutchess Christina), the teacher was sick, so I was responsible for teaching the class. I went in there, bit my tongue, and advocated NOMA (or at least, Galileo's arguments at the time, which are strikingly similar to Gould's non-overlapping magisteria), using Galileo as an example.
I will say for the record that I think NOMA is B.S. However, by arguing for accommodation I knew I could make some of the more religious students more comfortable with science- not a bad thing.
The problem that I encountered, however, was that some of the students seemed to think NOMA was an excuse for apologia in their papers. I quickly had to correct that misunderstanding, and I don't think I did it in the most diplomatic way possible. The point is, I was working with students largely in their late teens, most of whom had not received, prior to their college career, an adequate understanding of the philosophy of science. When I was in high school, there was no class equivalent to philosophy of science. Science, to these kids, was largely a collection of facts instead of a methodology.
So yeah, Galileo as the post child of faith/reason is confusing. I would say Francis Bacon is a better poster child, but he's a lot harder for first-year college students (much less high school students) to understand. And he wasn't Catholic.
If you look at what Galileo actually had to say about the relations between faith and reason, religion and science, he was an advocate of accommodation and coexistence. He was an early proponent of the non-overlapping magisteria idea. (I think he was wrong on that point, just like I think Steve Gould was wrong.)
Apparently that little problem with burning Giordano Bruno at the stake was just an innocent mistake while toasting marshmellows. And that centuries-long inquisition was just a minor clerical error. The Huguenot massacres, the Crusades, the extermination of the Cathars ... just misunderstandings resulting from the very same dogma, the very same hubris we see coming from the Vatican today.
I took "philosophy of science" course while studying computer science. The pair teaching the course agreed that the burning of Bruno was mostly his own fault. He had really called it over him. I was too stunned ask why.
Dear Zarathustra. I am a prof at good university in which the excellent science students have no idea about philosophy of science or the difference between basic science and social science. I am the lone voice in the wilderness "wasting time" lecturing just a bit about these topics. Some of my colleagues believe that my efforts along these lines indicate my eccentricity and believe that teaching anything but facts and methodology is "dumming down" the curriculum. You are very fortunate to have found yourself in the situation that you describe above.
Thank you Don. I do feel very fortunately, though teaching, as I'm sure you know, can be frustrating. Science has to be taught as a methodology, otherwise it's not really being taught. There's nothing critical about just listing facts.