SHOCK! HORROR! OUTRAGE! RELIGION HINDERS PROGRESS OF SCIENCE!

The title is supposed to make you think of a typical article in the Daily Fail, Britain’s most obnoxious representative of the gutter press. It represents one of the dominant reactions by members of the Gnu Model Army^TM to the Cosmos Bruno Affair^TM. According to people such as Jason Rosenhouse and P Z Myer the persecution of such notable scientists as Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei by the Catholic Church has definitely hindered the progress of science and for good measure they or their supporters quote the words of wisdom of Über-Guru Neil deGasse Tyson that without religion science would be a thousand years more advanced. What an outrage, truly horrific the Church it seems has a lot to answer for, although I find it rather strange that they can’t dish up more examples than poor old Giordano and that universal symbol of Church oppression Galileo. I’m sure if they re-read their Draper-White they could manage to find some new names to beat the ignorant historians around the head with. I say ignorant historians because it was the historians complaining about the Bruno cartoon on the first episode of Cosmos that has brought out this charge by these stalwart defenders of scientific integrity.

Let us assume for a moment that Rosenhouse-Myer are correct and that the Catholic Church did in fact persecute Bruno and Galileo to block scientific progress does this necessarily mean that they were successful in their dastardly deeds? Did they truly manage to interrupt, slow down, or hinder the adoption, acceptance or acknowledgement of the heliocentric hypothesis or the belief in an infinite universe or the perception that the sun is a star or vice versa? No doubt about it, this is a serious charge and one that should definitely be explicated.

Now Myer and Tyson are both practicing scientists whilst Rosenhouse is a mathematician, all of them work in disciplines that require one, if one makes a substantial claim, to provide the appropriate evidence or proof to support that claim. What is with their claim that religion has blocked the advance of science in general or in the case of Bruno and Galileo the acceptance of modern astronomy and cosmology in particular? Have our scientific practitioners provided the necessary evidence to back up their claims? Do they provide a tightly argued historical thesis based on solid documentary evidence to prove their assertions? Can they demonstrate that if the Church had not intervened modern astronomy would have become accepted much earlier than it was? Given their outspoken support of the ‘scientific method’, whatever that might be, you would expect them to do so, wouldn’t you? Do they hell! They don’t waste one single word on the topic. No evidence, no proofs, no academic arguments just plain straightforward unsubstantiated claims in the style of the gutter press. A pretty poor showing for the defenders of scientific faith.

But could they still be right? Even if they don’t take the trouble to provide the historical discourse necessary to substantiate their claims, could it be true that the Church’s actions against Bruno and Galileo did in fact have a negative influence on the acceptance of heliocentricity and other aspects of modern astronomy and cosmology? Let us examine the historical facts and answer the questions that Rosenhouse-Myer and Tyson are apparently above answering, the truth being apparently so obviously clear that they don’t require answering.

To start with the poor Giordano, Bruno was one of those who advocated Copernicus’ heliocentric astronomy already in the sixteenth-century. He however went beyond Copernicus in a series of cosmological speculations and it is these that Cosmos thought to be so important that they devoted eleven minutes of a forty-five minute broadcast to them. I shall deal with the acceptance of heliocentricity separately later and only address Bruno’s cosmology now. Copernicus himself expressly left the question as to whether the cosmos is finite or infinite, as he said, to the philosophers, with good reason. This question was purely speculative and could not, with the evidence and possibilities available to the Renaissance astronomer, be addressed in anything approaching a scientific manner. To all intents and purposes the cosmos appeared finite and Renaissance scholars had no means available to prove otherwise. Bruno’s speculation was of course not new.

In his own times Nicolas Cusanus had already considered the question and earlier, in the first-century BCE, the Epicurean philosopher poet Lucretius, Bruno’s inspiration, had included it in his scientific poem De rerum natura. Lucretius of course did not invent the concept but was merely repeating the beliefs of the fifth-century BCE Greek atomists. All of this demonstrates that the idea of an infinite cosmos was fairly common at the beginning of the seventeenth century and nothing the Church said or did was likely to stop anybody speculating about it. The thing that prevented anybody from going further than speculation was the lack of the necessary scientific apparatus to investigate the question, a similar situation to that of the string-theorists and multiverse advocates of today.

This does not mean that astronomers did not address the problem of the size of the cosmos and the distance to the stars. Amongst others Galileo, Jeremiah Horrocks, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton all tried to estimate/calculate the distances within the solar system and outward towards the stars. First in the middle of the eighteenth century with the transit of Venus measurements were these efforts rewarded with a minimum of success. It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that the first stellar distance measurements, through stellar parallax, were achieved. All of these delays were not caused by anything the Church had done but by the necessity of first developing the required scientific theories and apparatus.

Bruno’s next cosmological speculation was that the sun and the stars were one and the same. Once again there was nothing new in this. Anaxagoras had already had the same idea in the fifth-century BCE and John Philoponus in the fifth-century CE. Once again the problem with this speculation was not any form of religious objection but a lack of scientific theory and expertise to test it. This first became available in the nineteenth century with development of spectroscopy. This of course first required the development of the new matter theory throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a process that involved an awful lot of science.

Bruno’s last speculation and the one that bothered the Church was the existence of inhabited planets other than the Earth. Again this was nothing new and whatever the Church might have thought about it that speculation generated a lively debate in the seventeenth century that is still going on. We still don’t actually know whether we are alone or not.

Given my knowledge of the history of science I can’t see anywhere, where the Church hindered or even slowed down scientific progress on those things that Bruno speculated about in his cosmological fantasy. But what about heliocentricity, here surely the Church’s persecution of both Bruno and Galileo hindered science bay the hounds of anti-religious rationalism.

What follows is a brief sketch of the acceptance of the heliocentric astronomy hypothesis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is a subject I’ve dealt with before in various posts but it doesn’t hurt to repeat the process as there are several important lessons to be learnt here. To begin with there is a common myth that acceptance of ‘correct’ new scientific theories is almost instantaneous. To exaggerate slightly, Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915 and the world changed overnight or at the latest when Eddington confirmed the bending of light rays conform with general relativity in 1919. In reality the acceptance of the general theory of relativity was still a topic of discussion when I was being educated fifty years later and that despite numerous confirmatory tests. Before it is accepted a major new scientific theory must be examined, questioned, tested, reformed, modified and shown to be superior to all serious alternatives. In the Early Modern Period with communication considerably slower this process was even slower.

Copernicus published his De revolutionibus in 1543 and there were only ten people in the entire world, including Bruno but much more importantly both Kepler and Galileo, who accepted it lock, stock and barrel by 1600. This system had only one real scientific advantage over the geocentric one; it could explain the retrograde movement of the planets. However this was not considered to be very important at the time. There were some relatively low-key religious objection but these did not play any significant role in the very slow initial acceptance of the theory. The problematic objections were observationally empirical and had already been discussed by Ptolemaeus in his Syntaxis Mathematiké in the second-century CE. Put very simple if the world is spinning very fast and hurtling through space at an alarming speed why don’t we get blown away? Copernicus had the correct answer to this problem when he suggested that the atmosphere was carried round with the earth in the form of a bubble so to speak. Unfortunately he lacked the physics to explain and justify such a claim. It would take most of the seventeenth century and the combined scientific efforts of Kepler, Galileo, Stevin, Borelli, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Newton and a whole boatload of lesser lights to create the necessary physics to explain how gravity holds the atmosphere in place whilst the earth is moving.  This process was not hindered by the Church in anyway whatsoever.

There was a second level of acceptance of Copernicus theory, an instrumental one, as a mathematical model to deliver astronomical data for various applications, astrology, cartography, navigations etc. Here the system based on the same inaccurate data as the Ptolemaic one did not fair particularly well. Disgusted by the inaccuracy of both systems Tycho Brahe started a new long-term observational programme to obtain new accurate data. Whilst doing so he developed a third model, the so-called geo-heliocentric model, in which the planets orbited the sun, which in turn orbited the stationary earth. This model had the advantage of explaining retrograde motion without setting the earth in motions, a win-win situation.

The first major development came with the invention of the telescope in 1608 and its application to astronomical observation from 1609 onwards. The first telescopic discoveries did not provide any proofs for either the Copernican or the Tychonic models but did refute both the Aristotelian homocentric model and the Ptolemaic model. Around the same time a new candidate, the Keplerian elliptical astronomy, entered the ring with the publications of Kepler’s Astronomia nova in 1609. For a full list of the plethora of possible astronomical models at the beginning of the seventeenth century see this earlier post.

By 1620 the leading candidate was a Tychonic model with diurnal rotation. It should be pointed out that due to the attempts of Galileo and Foscarini to reinterpret Holy Scripture in favour of heliocentricity the Catholic Church had entered the action in 1615 and forbidden the heliocentric theory but not the heliocentric hypothesis. The distinction is important. The theory says heliocentricity is a scientific fact the hypothesis says it’s a possibility. At this time heliocentricity was in fact an unproved hypothesis and not a theory. This is the point where Rosenhouse-Myers step in and claim that the Church hindered scientific progress but did they. The straightforward answer is no. The astronomers and physicist carried on looking for answers to the open questions and solutions to the existing problems. There is no evidence whatsoever of a slowing down or interruption in their research efforts.

Between 1618 and 1621 Kepler published his Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae explaining his elliptical astronomy and his three laws of planetary motion in simple terms and in 1627 the Tabulae Rudolphinae the astronomical tables based on his system and Tycho’s new accurate data. It was these two publications that would lead to the general acceptance of heliocentricity by those able to judge by around 1660. Kepler’s publications delivered the desired accurate prognoses of planetary positions, eclipses etc. required by astrologers, cartographers, navigators etc.

At no point in the 120 years between the initial publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus and the general acceptance of heliocentricity in the form of Kepler’s elliptical astronomy is there any evidence of the Church having slowed or hindered progress in this historical process. To close it should be pointed out that it would be another seventy years before any solid scientific evidence for the heliocentric hypothesis was found by Bradley, in the form of stellar aberration.