Flying Pig, thank you for your reply - I notice that you haven't disagreed with the main points I was making, about the variety of religious attitudes towards faith and the (partially) non-cognitive nature religious faith, so I take it that you agree with these points, which is very gratifying. So there are only minor points to clear up.
So what was he doing at the time, when he said 'I can prove that God exists'?
If you look at
the actual text you'll see that the word he uses is
probare, which has a similar range in meanings to "prove" in its fullest and most old-fashioned sense: ie, not simply to demonstrate, but to test. So some people have argued that what Aquinas means to do with his Five Ways is not demonstrate God's existence, but to demonstrate the reasonableness of belief in God, which is not the same thing. Support for this interpretation comes from the fact that some of his proofs do not seem to be proofs for God at all (either good or bad). The first three ways, in particular, seem to prove only that there is a first mover, a first cause, or a necessary being. If you accept his Aristotelian metaphysics, these are not very controversial conclusions (indeed some of them may be fairly uncontroversial conclusions even today). What is odd is that he ends each argument by simply asserting that the thing whose existence he has demonstrated is God. On the grounds that a philosopher as good as Aquinas would hardly make such an unwarranted leap, some scholars have argued that his intention is not to demonstrate God's existence, but to show that it is
reasonable to identify the first mover etc. with God - that is, that the conclusions of philosophy/science are compatible with theism.
However, I notice that you haven't challenged my other points on this matter - that (a) Aquinas' theistic proofs are not the only ones in existence, and (b) rational faith is hardly limited to theistic proofs anyway, but covers a whole range of endeavours. So I take it that you agree with these more important points, in which case the rather narrow and purely exegetical question of Aquinas' intention in ST I 2 3 isn't relevant to the point I was originally trying to make.
It's a symbol of what happens when somebody who uses outdated beliefs comes into contact with someone who does experiments and neither will budge an inch.
Then you agree with me. If you think that Urban VIII was "somebody who uses outdated beilefs" (I assume it's Urban VIII you're referring to), and Galileo was "someone who does experiments", then you're agreeing with me that religious people have a very wide range of approaches to the nature of faith and reason and their interaction, which is the point I was trying to make. Because
both the pope and Galileo were religious people. You can't take just one of them as representative of religion in general and ignore the religious sensibilities of the other! So your "symbol" is nicely representative of the incredible diversity of religious attitudes.
Of course, from a historical point of view, like most "symbols" it's pure fiction. The beliefs that Urban VIII "used" (I'm not sure what you mean by "using" a belief, but we'll let that pass) weren't "outdated" in the slightest. If you'd followed the link I gave you'd know that, in the 1630s, the overwhelming body of available evidence and scientific opinion, as well as general common sense, supported geocentrism. If the ecclesiastical authorities stuck to geocentrism in favour of heliocentrism they were only following the majority scientific opinion of their day.
Moreover, the church sought to determine the truth of the matter through the collection and examination of scientific evidence. Much of the evidence that ultimately did prove the truth of heliocentrism was collected by Jesuits, who travelled throughout the world partly with the deliberate purpose of observing astronomical phenomena from different parts of the globe in order to work out the truth of these matters. Look up names such as John Baptist Riccioli, Charles Malapert, Christoph Scheiner, Jacques Grandami (whose work Galileo plagiarised, and then had the gall to accused Grandami of plagiarising
him!), and (best of all) Athanasius Kircher, who would have himself lowered on ropes into erupting volcanoes to try to discover what caused them. These figures were geocentrists, but they argued for their position on the basis of evidence, and they sought more evidence and more experiments to support it. On the basis of these experiments, most Jesuits came to believe that the traditional form of geocentrism was false, and they generally adopted some form of Tycho Brahe's hypothesis, according to which the sun revolves around the earth and everything else revolves around the sun. This hypothesis was supported by the new evidence such as the phases of Venus but still retained the basic geocentric view. There were, however, seventeenth-century Jesuits who agreed with Galileo - indeed, there were Jesuits in China teaching heliocentrism to the Chinese even while Galileo's trial was taking place. Later, Johannes Kepler found support among some Jesuit astronomers even while he was lambasted by his fellow Protestants for his heliocentrism. By the eighteenth century, of course, the evidence for heliocentrism had become overwhelming enough to make it clear that it was the correct theory. Much of that evidence had been collected by the Jesuits themselves. By then the Jesuits mostly held the theory. And the Catholic magisterium itself did, too, abandoning its opposition - admittedly rather later than most other people.
So one could mount a pretty reasonable case that the church behaved in a reasonably scientific manner. It was sceptical about the radical new idea, sent out its researchers to conduct experiments and determine the truth of the matter, and when the evidence proved overwhelming, changed its mind and accepted the new idea. That is a reasonable way of proceeding. It's not reasonable to accept some radical new idea just because it is radical and new. Most scientists don't do that either. When some young scientist comes up with a radical new scientific theory, how do you suppose the scientific establishment normally reacts? Do you think they all embrace the new idea eagerly? Or do you think they are reluctant to abandon the established theories until they are given very good reason to do so? A genuinely scientific outlook is inherently pretty conservative, because a real scientist requires good evidence before he will accept a theory. In Galileo's case, he didn't have good evidence. Why should the magisterium have accepted his theory?
So what does all this prove about the religious mindset? Nothing at all - which was my point. I'm not citing all these Jesuits to try to prove that religious people are rational. I'm citing them to try to show that religious people have
different attitudes to these matters. In my earlier post I cited Kierkegaard and Whichcote as diametrically opposed: one thought that faith and reason have nothing to do with each other (so that faith is inherently irrational), and the other thought that faith and reason are exactly the same thing (so to have faith is simply
to be rational). I'm not endorsing either of those two views or any of the myriad possibilities that lie between them. I'm pointing out that such a variety of views exists - and this is just within Christianity, not even within religion as a whole. You can't cite some particular incident, such as the Galileo affair, and suppose that it represents a universal religious
modus operandi.
The moral is that people are basically just people, and they have all kinds of different views on pretty much everything, and this is true whether they are religious or not. It would be nice and neat if all religious people had a similar outlook on these matters (and if all non-religious people had a similar outlook as well), but the real world doesn't work that way.
Apologies; but you can't deny that they kept a list of books which it was banned to read, many of which are now considered important works of science and philosophy.
Why would I want to deny it? But what does it demonstrate? That the Catholic magisterium didn't want people to read views it considered heretical? Well, dur. What can you conclude from that? That the Catholic magisterium is quite conservative? Well, again, dur. You describe the banned books as "important works of science and philosophy". But the vast majority of those books
were written by Christians. For example, banned authors included figures such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Fenelon. But Descartes, Malebranche, and Fenelon were all Catholics (one was a layman, one a priest, and one a bishop). So the conclusion one might draw from this is that some Catholics were in the habit of writing important works of science and philosophy, and other Catholics were in the habit of banning said works. In other words, it's a case of some Catholics versus other Catholics, which means that you can't draw general conclusions about the attitudes of Catholics in this matter. As I said above - people are just people, whether they are religious or not. Some people are conservative and some people are not. Some people are rational and some people are not. Some people are radical and some people are not. These things are true whether we are talking about religious people or not. That is human nature.
Although personally I'm less than interested in what the Catholic church considers heresy (it has a bad track record on what should be considered as such and certainly has no monopoly on faith, by whatever definition), I'd like to hear more about that faithful - yet rational - proof of God's existence.
There are lots of (supposed) proofs of God floating around which I'm happy to discuss. We should probably do so in my Theologian thread though, if you want to ask it there.
It seems to me the point of the matter was more the pseudo-authority the church claimed (and still does) over matters beyond its concern:
a) religious authorities have no business issuing statements concerning matters of science*
b) Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus proved that Venus orbited the Sun
After 1610, when he began supporting heliocentrism publicly, he met with bitter opposition from some philosophers and clerics, and two of the latter eventually denounced him to the Roman Inquisition early in 1615. Although he was cleared of any offence at that time, *the Catholic Church nevertheless condemned heliocentrism as "false and contrary to Scripture" in February 1616,[8] and Galileo was warned to abandon his support for it—which he promised to do. When he later defended his views in his most famous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, he was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
From September 1610, Galileo observed that Venus exhibited a full set of phases similar to that of the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Nicolaus Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun. In contrast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its orbit around the Earth. Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus proved that it orbited the Sun and lent support to (but did not prove) the heliocentric model. However, since it refuted the Ptolemaic pure geocentric planetary model, it seems it was the crucial observation that caused the 17th century majority conversion of the scientific community to geoheliocentric and geocentric models such as the Tychonic and Capellan models, and was thereby arguably Galileo’s historically most important astronomical observation.
Of course the notion that there is a distinction between
scientific matters on the one hand, and
religious matters on the other, did not really exist in the 1630s, so it would be a bit unreasonable to expect the church at the time to have adhered to such a distinction. In fact the distinction really arose later in the seventeenth century, as a result of
theological disagreements that were
internal to the church. The Jansenists, whom the church regarded as heretical, developed the notion that the church is authorised to pronounce upon matters of faith, but not matters of fact, and they developed an account of the difference between them (ensuring that their own views were firmly on the "fact" side of the fence, meaning that the pope had no business condemning them...). This distinction was later taken up by other theorists, including many Protestants, and it developed into the modern distinction that you allude to. That's a bit of a simplification, but I think it's largely what happened. So applying that distinction to the time of the Galileo affair is rather anachronistic.
Now the sections you quote state that Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus were inconsistent with the Ptolemaic theory. And, as a result, many Catholics did abandon that theory. As I stated above, the prevailing theory among many astronomers in the seventeenth century was that of Brahe, which was consistent with the phases of Venus. This was the favoured model of most Jesuits. The point here is that Galileo's observations didn't prove heliocentrism - at most they proved that Ptolemaism wasn't true.
Now, it's obvious there is some progress in such matters, but a papal statement such as that people in Africa should not use condoms (both a private, personal and a medical matter) is tantamount to being immoral in the light of the dangers of viral diseases.
I would agree with you, but I don't think that's an example of the kind of thing we're talking about. The church's main reason for instructing people not to use condoms is not based upon some false scientific view (although of course certain church figures have appealed to false scientific views in its defence, but that is not the
primary motive here), but on the view that contraception is simply
immoral. Now I think that that is a daft notion that doesn't withstand scrutiny, but it is not a position on a matter of science.
Wikipedia states that the church warned Galileo to stop simply because challenging the geocentric viewpoint was against scripture, not to mention one attempt at trying him before an inquisition for it. Shows pretty strongly that it was religion vs. science, a very gestapo-minded religious polity at that. It showed a strong lack of liberalism towards scientific inquiry by the church at the time, while it may not be a modern accusation against the modern church and science. Regardless of whether the facts were correct, it was scientific inquiry.
Wikipedia is not a reliable authority. It is at its least reliable in matters such as this. The Galileo affair is one of the most popularly misunderstood incidents in history. Wikipedia can be edited by absolutely anyone. Don't you think that these factors might, jointly, make it a little unreasonable to take the work of Wikipedia over that of one of the leading historians of the period, whose summary of the affair I linked to before? To put it bluntly, Wikipedia is simply wrong if it thinks that "the church warned Galileo to stop" - on the contrary, the church was happy for Galileo to publish his ideas and discuss them, as long as he did not present them as proven fact. And their rejection of heliocentrism was
not "simply because challenging the geocentric viewpoint was against scripture", but because it was against the whole scientific consensus of the day. Moreover, as I have tried to explain already, there was a far more fundamental issue at stake than heliocentrism versus geocentrism. This was the very nature of scientific theories themselves. The church generally held that scientific theories are only models that are constructed to predict phenomena. To hold the geocentric theory, for example, was to hold that geocentrism was the model that most accurately predicted astronomical phenomena. It did not necessarily mean believing that the sun literally does go around the earth. This, incidentally, is what most scientists today believe. Galileo rejected this view. He said that a scientific theory is an accurate description of how things actually are. Not only did most scientists of the day think that this was a false view, they thought it was potentially blasphemous (because accurate knowledge of how things actually are is the province of God). And this was a major reason for much of the antagonism to Galileo. Many other people were quite happy to entertain the notion that heliocentrism might be
true in a literal sense, but still accept geocentrism as the simplest and most accurate way of predicting phenomena. Bellarmine himself seems to have held this view. But Galileo's insistence upon his literalist interpretation of scientific theories - coupled with his insistence that he could
prove the truth of heliocentrism with his theory of the tides (a false theory, as Newton proved fifty years later) - made his own position extremely unattractive philosophically as well as scientifically, and alienated most of the people whom he might otherwise have been able to win over.
So in other words, no, it wasn't "religion vs. science".
EDIT: But anyways, Galileo doesn't have much to do with a proof to convince an atheist that God exists.
I'll certainly agree with that. But then, given that the very first post in this thread had nothing whatsoever to do with the title of the thread, I'm still unclear what this thread is even supposed to be about.
