And though the news was rather sad – well, I just had to laugh….

Astronomer Copernicus Reburied As Hero In Poland (Vanessa Gera/The Associated Press; May 22)

FROMBORK, Poland: Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

His burial in a tomb in the cathedral where he once served as a church canon and doctor indicates how far the church has come in making peace with the scientist whose revolutionary theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun helped usher in the modern scientific age.

Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died as a little-known astronomer working in a remote part of northern Poland, far from Europe’s centers of learning. He had spent years laboring in his free time developing his theory, which was later condemned as heretical by the church because it removed Earth and humanity from their central position in the universe.

His revolutionary model was based on complex mathematical calculations and his naked-eye observations of the heavens because the telescope had not yet been invented.

After his death, his remains rested in an unmarked grave beneath the floor of the cathedral in Frombork, on Poland’s Baltic coast, the exact location unknown.

On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland’s highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005.

A black granite tombstone now identifies him as the founder of the heliocentric theory, but also a church canon, a cleric ranking below a priest. The tombstone is decorated with a model of the solar system, a golden sun encircled by six of the planets.

At the urging of a local bishop, scientists began searching in 2004 for the astronomer’s remains and eventually turned up a skull and bones of a 70-year-old man — the age Copernicus was when he died. A computer reconstruction made by forensic police based on the skull showed a broken nose and other features that resemble a self-portrait of Copernicus.

In a later stage of the investigation, DNA taken from teeth and bones matched that from hairs found in one of his books, leading the scientists to conclude with great probability that they had finally found Copernicus.

In recent weeks, a wooden casket holding those remains has lain in state in the nearby city of Olsztyn, and on Friday they were toured around the region to towns linked to his life.

The pageantry comes 18 years after the Vatican rehabilitated the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted in the Inquisition for carrying the Copernican Revolution forward.

Wojciech Ziemba, the archbishop of the region surrounding Frombork, said the Catholic Church is proud that Copernicus left the region a legacy of “his hard work, devotion and above all of his scientific genius.”

Saturday’s Mass was led by Jozef Kowalczyk, the papal nuncio and newly named Primate of Poland, the highest church authority in this deeply Catholic country.

Poland also is the homeland of John Paul II, the late pope who said in 1992 that the church was wrong in condemning Galileo’s work.

Jacek Jezierski, a local bishop who encouraged the search for Copernicus, said that he considers Copernicus’ burial as part of the church’s broader embrace of science as being compatible with Biblical belief.

“Today’s funeral has symbolic value in that it is a gesture of reconciliation between science and faith,” Jezierski said. “Science and faith can be reconciled.”

Copernicus’ burial in an anonymous grave in the 16th century was not linked to suspicions of heresy. When he died, his ideas were just starting to be discussed by a small group of European astronomers, astrologers and mathematicians, and the church was not yet forcefully condemning the heliocentric world view as heresy, according to Jack Repcheck, author of “Copernicus’ Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began.”

The full attack on those ideas came decades later when the Vatican was waging a massive defense against Martin Luther’s Reformation.

“There is no indication that Copernicus was worried about being declared a heretic and being kicked out of the church for his astronomical views,” Repcheck said.

“Why was he just buried along with everyone else, like every other canon in Frombork? Because at the time of his death he was just any other canon in Frombork. He was not the iconic hero that he has become.”

Copernicus had, however, been at odds with his superiors in the church over other matters.

He was repeatedly reprimanded for keeping a mistress, which violated his vow of celibacy, and was eventually forced to give her up. He also was suspected of harboring sympathies for Lutheranism, which was spreading like wildfire in northern Europe at the time, Repcheck said.

Copernicus’ major treatise — “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” — was published at the very end of his life, and he only received a copy of the printed book on the day he died — May 21, 1543.

One of the world’s leading Copernicus scholars, Owen Gingerich, traveled from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend the ceremony. “I missed the first funeral back in 1543 and thought this was an occasion not to be missed,” he joked.

Owen also argued that the church has, in fact, long reconciled faith and science, noting that the Vatican removed Copernicus from its index of banned books nearly 200 years ago.

Bishop Jezierski said church officials began looking for Copernicus’ remains two centuries ago but were blocked by the upheaval of wars in the area.

And only thanks to modern scientific tools like DNA testing was it possible to identify such old remains.

(For more context and background, see the entries I posted on July 13, 2000; Nov 8, 2001; Aug 15, 2002; June 9, 2004; April 23, 2006; Dec 8, 2008; and May 13, 2010.)

Related posts:

1. Top Ten News for 2009
2. Some More Catholic League Nonsense
3. The Bones of Saint Paul

Well, you can always try to take refuge in the past.

Ah, yes – those wonderful days before gOd was kicked out of the classroom and sex ed was invited in.

Let’s go visit it now!

Professor Explores Bigotry Behind 1921 Murder Of Priest (Mike Curtin/The Columbus Dispatch; April 11)

On Aug. 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Ala., Methodist minister Edwin Stephenson walked to St. Paul’s Catholic Church. On the front porch, he shot and killed the Rev. James E. Coyle, the city’s most prominent Roman Catholic leader.

Earlier that day, Coyle had married Stephenson’s 18-year-old daughter, Ruth – who had converted to Catholicism three months earlier – to Pedro Gussman, 42, a Puerto Rican Catholic.

After shooting Coyle three times, Stephenson walked a short distance to the county jail and turned himself in. Two months later, a Birmingham jury acquitted him of second-degree murder.

Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America is first-rate history. Detailed yet fast-paced, it lays bare the common, deep-rooted bigotry of a region and era that made the jury verdict predictable.

Sharon Davies, a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, didn’t set out to write a book. After the 2004 presidential election, she began research for a law-review article on the evolution of marriage laws.

During her research, she found a reference to the Stephenson murder trial. Reading the trial transcript, she realized that she had unearthed a long-forgotten case worthy of illumination.

Stephenson was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which revived in the 1920s to “protect” America against the perceived degradations of blacks, Catholics and Jews.

Raised one block from St. Paul’s, Ruth was attracted to the church even though she always knew of her parents’ hatred of Catholics. Upon turning 18, she secretly converted and made plans to marry Gussman.

As soon as Stephenson learned of the marriage, he set off for the Catholic church.

The Klan, much of Birmingham’s ruling elite and The New Menace – with 1.6 million subscribers, the nation’s most successful anti-Catholic publication – sprang to the defense.

Hugo L. Black, later to become a U.S. senator and justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, headed the defense team, which claimed that Stephenson had been rendered temporarily insane by years of Catholic torment. Black also led the jury to believe that Gussman, of Spanish descent, was black.

At the time, marriages between blacks and whites were illegal in Alabama and many other states.

The nation’s tortuous path toward racial and religious tolerance has special meaning for Davies, a child of an interracial marriage.

“Had my parents been swayed by the marriage laws that were still in place in various states… I would never have been born. (Nor) would any of my five brothers or sisters,” she wrote for the American Constitution Society Web site. “I was nearly 7 years old by the time the U.S. Supreme Court finally got around to striking those laws down” (in its 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia). “Seems my siblings and I weren’t crimes after all.”

More than 45 years after Stephenson’s trial, Black was part of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision ending race-based restrictions on marriages in the United States. He became regarded as a champion of civil rights.

Davies’ fascinating book is an excellent work of narrative history. Rising Road deserves a wide audience.

Oops!

If we don’t like the present, looks like we might be better off working to make a better future….

(In the mood to see a few more glimpses of the Good Old Days before moving forward? See the entries I posted on Sept 5 and Sept 9.)

Related posts:

1. The Good Old Days (2)
2. The Good Old Days
3. Two More Good Reasons Not To Listen To God

“Dubious miracles increased with the competition for pilgrims. The Rood of Boxley, a life-size figure of Christ on the Cross that actually shed tears, rolled its eyes, and foamed at the mouth, was finally discovered to contain ‘certain engines and old wires with rotten sticks in the back.’” - Daniel J. Boorstin, “Chapter 32: Joys of Pilgrimage,” The Creators, p. 278

Here are a few more details:

“The [Boxley] abbey was famous, and later infamous, for a relic known as the Rood of Grace, a wooden cross, the figure upon which was supposed to miraculously move and speak. In 1538 during the dissolution of the monasteries, the person employed with the closure of the institution examined the famed relic and unsurprisingly discovered it to be a grotesque fake, observing the levers and wires that enacted the so called miracles. It was taken down and displayed in Maidstone market so as to demonstrate the fraud.” - Wikipedia, Boxley Abbey

Now here’s a story I read a few days ago:

Thousands Of Orthodox Celebrate Holy Fire Ritual (Yaniv Zohar/The Associated Press/The Washington Post; April 3)

JERUSALEM: The sound of drumbeats and hymns and light from thousands of candles and torches filled Christianity’s most revered shrine Saturday as Orthodox faithful celebrated Easter Week’s holy fire ritual.

Orthodox Christians believe Jesus was crucified and buried at the site where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher now stands, and that a flame appears spontaneously from his tomb on the day before Easter to show he has not forgotten his followers.

Worshippers carrying torches or bundles of 33 tapers signifying the years of Jesus’ life waited in excited anticipation as the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in the Holy Land, Theofilos III, removed his embossed gold-and-white mitre and descended with Greek Orthodox, Armenian and other Eastern rite clergy into the tomb.

After the flame appeared there, he passed it from inside the tomb to believers inside the church’s main hall, who rushed to light their own candles and torches, illuminating the darkened church within seconds and filling it with smoke. Church bells pealed, and some of the faithful passed their hands through the flames they held, reflecting their belief in the fire’s divine and beneficial nature.

Worshippers hoisted one of the clerics who had gone into the tomb on their shoulders after he emerged, waving a bundle of lit tapers.

“It’s (a) very huge experience and it’s a holy place,” said a Serbian woman who identified herself only as Irena.

Light from the holy fire was taken afterward to the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, where tradition holds Jesus was born, and aboard special flights to Athens and other cities, linking many of the 200 million Orthodox worldwide to their spiritual core.

The thousands who filled Jerusalem’s cavernous Church of the Holy Sepulcher began lining up for the ceremony hours earlier. Video screens set up in various places in the Old City broadcast the ceremony live for the thousands more who could not fit inside.

Some of the celebrants held church flags, while others beat hand drums and sang hymns.

The various Orthodox denominations grouped into different areas of the church, which was heavily secured by Israeli forces.

Police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said about 2,500 police were stationed in the area, including as many as 1,500 within the church itself. He estimated that between 8,000 and 10,000 worshippers packed the church and about 7,000 more spilled over into its cobbled courtyard.

The holy fire ritual dates back at least 1,200 years. The precise details of the flame’s source are a closely guarded secret….

Why should anyone believe that this flame actually has a supernatural origin?

In the absence of extraordinary evidence to the contrary, why shouldn’t one use Occam’s Razor to conclude that Christians are once again being played for suckers by the leaders of their church?

Given the many lies and deceptions of those leaders over the centuries and the obvious gullibility of many Christians, why should anyone believe anything those leaders or their followers might have to say about a crucified demigod allegedly rising from the dead nearly 2000 years ago?

More Info For Those Who Care: According to Wikipedia, “As with all alleged miracles, many question the validity of the Holy Fire, noting, for instance, that cold-handed pilgrims generally withstand the fire for the same very brief periods of time as can be achieved with any fire. Criticism dates at least to the days of Islamic rule of Jerusalem, but the pilgrims were never stopped, because of the significant revenue they brought to local governments even at the end of the first millennium. When the apparently uninitiated Crusaders took over the Orthodox clergy in charge of the fire, it failed to appear, increasing the scepticism among Western Christians. For the Orthodox, however, this was further evidence of the truth of Orthodox Christianity. Only the canonical Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem or another Orthodox bishop has the grace to receive the Holy Fire. Feeling the lack of pilgrim revenues, Baldwin I of Jerusalem reinstated the Orthodox priests in charge, and the Fire, as well as the stream of revenues, returned.“

Still More Info For Those Who Care: According to a story by Alan Philps that appeared in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper on April 16, 2001 under the headline Mystery Of Jerusalem’s Holy Fire Comes To Light, “For more than 1,200 years the ritual of the Holy Fire has been performed in Jerusalem every Easter, with a flame ‘miraculously’ appearing at the darkened tomb of Jesus to symbolise the Resurrection…. This year, however, the mystery of how the flame appears has been penetrated…. [O]ne Armenian torch-bearer, Soukias Tchilingirian, felt the truth had to be told. He said: ‘It’s not a miracle. The Greek priests bring in a lamp – one that has been kept burning for 1,500 years – to produce the Holy Fire. For pilgrims full of faith who come from abroad, it is a fire from Heaven, a true miracle. But not for us. Of course the source of the fire is ancient and symbolic. I heard this from my father and I think he knew the truth.’ For most of the year Mr Tchilingirian is a chef, living in Raynes Park, south-west London. But at Easter he is an aristocrat of Jerusalem’s Armenian community and enjoys the ancient privilege of racing the fire up to the Patriarch’s throne. At the age of 53, Mr Tchilingirian, who left Jerusalem in 1968, is now handing over to his ‘much faster’ son. A senior member of the Armenian community was shocked by the suggestion that Greek priests smuggled in the flame. ‘I have never seen it as my business to ask the Patriarch from where the Holy Fire comes,’ he sniffed.”

And for those who think believing comforting nonsense is harmless, there’s this line about the annual Holy Fire ritual from Reuters: “At times, terrible stampedes have left worshippers injured or even killed. Several hundred died in a crush in 1834.”

Related posts:

1. Another Holy Fraud Revealed
2. Holy Smokes
3. Holy Water Kills AGAIN!

Being Christian “generally guarantees a much higher level of freedom of fairness of a democracy… [Canadians may have a harder time understanding this than Americans] America is a country that was founded by Christians. That is a fact. And Liberals can be pouty about it, bu that is a fact. Maybe, you know, it could have been founded by Buddhists but it wasn’t. And it was because of the Christian concepts of no man being above another man, we are all equal before God, that is what leads to the American Revolution. You can’t have a king you can’t have royalty. That is the whole point of the Declaration of Independence, that is the whole point of the Constitution. And that is what has led to the freedom and prosperity of the United States of America until last night’s health care vote.”

These are amazing statements, but they are also statements that are often repeated by right-wing conservative Christians who seek to legitimize their politics by appealing to the supposedly Christian character of the United States’ founders and the government. At best, historically, it is gross simplification, but I am more inclined to call it just plain rubbish. As far as historical arguments go, it is terrible. Coulter is either ignorant, mislead, or dishonest.

First, there are many ways one could interpret what “founded” means. Does she mean the founding of the American colonies by the British? The American colonies were founded for a variety of reasons ranging from religious to economic. The religious dissenters who fled England, of course, were leaving a state in which the King was the head of the Anglican Christian Church! The most well known of these groups are the Puritans (of Mayflower fame). The Puritans, however, tried to set up a strict society, rather than a free one, ruled by their own particular religious views and norms. Another group of dissenters, the Quakers, were banished on pain of death from the Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony for being too heretical. In other words, the Puritans wanted the freedom to worship as they pleased without giving others that same freedom within their own midst.

The Quakers rejected the idea that Christianity must be mediated through clergyman and therefore they tended towards more individualistic (each person has his or her own direct experience of God) and universalist  (all souls will eventually be reconciled in Christ) views. This belief that all are equal before God, as embodied in Quakerism, is probably one of the reasons that the Quakers have a long history of social activism some of which Coulter herself would probably not approve of, including the rights of homosexuals to marry. Incidentally, Greenpeace was founded by participation from Quakers. Nevertheless, the variety of colonial beliefs and practices are too numerous to adequately generalize from.

However, I assume that what Coulter means by “founded” is the founding of the United State’s government and the framing of its constitution. Two questions then arise: Who were these people and on what principles did they base their conception of our society? Many of the founders were Christians, but this term is too homogenized to be useful because their individual beliefs varied quite a bit. Some attended church while others did not. Some were certainly deists. Thomas Paine wrote a book (The Age of Reason) that attacked the Bible as superstitious nonsense. Thomas Jefferson (who referenced a Creator in the Declaration of Independence), produced his own version of the gospels in which he cut out all the miracles of Jesus and left the moral philosophy. John Adams was a Unitarian (rejected the trinity) who did not believe in the divinity of Christ or that God intervened in human affairs. And so on. Then there is the Constitution itself, with no reference to any higher authority other than “We the people…”

If Coulter is still somehow right, though, that the principle behind the American Revolution was a distinctly Christian one, then one must ask oneself the following question: How is it that Christians essentially ignored this principle for hundreds of years throughout the Roman Era, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern period when the entire Western World was ruled by pious Christian kings (via a divine right!) and the supposedly universal or Catholic authority of the Pope? The answer is simple: there is no such distinct principle in Christianity. Recall that Jesus said to his followers “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17), after all, and not overthrow your nation’s royalty and bring to them a democracy. That is about all that Jesus had to say about politics, which is no surprise if, as many scholars believe, Jesus was in fact preaching to a world he thought would come to an end very soon.

No – the real fact of the matter is that the American Revolution is grounded in the Enlightenment principles of a rational governmental structure and a universal reason that rejects claims to secular and religious authority such as kings and popes. These are not derived from Christianity in so much as they are a reaction against the dominant Christian and Western political structures of the time and that may be retroactively made to square with (some forms of) Christianity. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that we are “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and wrote of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” he was not looking at Christianity for these ideas but on the principles of the philosopher John Locke. Locke’s political philosophy was founded, in turn, not on Christianity but on social contract theory. He believe that human nature is characterized by reason and tolerance and therefore in a natural state all people are equal and independent. They did believe that these natural characteristics were endowed by a distant Deity (how else could they image or defend this?). However, it is hard to imagine what about the Christian teaching of original sin – that all people are inherently evil – could possibly have led them to that conclusion. If some Christians today believe that Christianity teaches instead that people are all equally good and deserving of freedom then it is despite of, not because, its history.

Finally I will add that the Treaty of Tripoli, which was ratified by the Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1797, included a declaration that “the Government of the United States of America was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” While not in any way binding (the US wanted to avoid religious war with the Arabics in Tripoli) the statement did not appear to cause one iota of controversy or debate. My feeling is that conservative Christians today who make such claims would not feel at all comfortable with the Christianity as practiced (if at all) by most of the important founding gentlemen. And that is really the heart of the problem. People like Coulter project a unified and homogeneous image of Christianity onto the past that happens to conform with their own modern evangelical brand.

It is, quite frankly, an abuse of history.

Related posts:

1. Alex Wolinsky Speaks Out!
2. Ed Buckner Presents
3. The Bible & History: Creation

To quote Oumkheyr once again, “I really believe that France is scared of Muslims, which is the motivation for this law, but people shouldn’t generalize as not all Muslims are the same. Yes, some have done terrible things, but it is done in the name of man, never in the name of God.”

If you happen to be an atheist yourself, I bet you can readily reel off a few similarly annoying examples of your own. (Praising gOd for saving one person in a plane crash but not blaming him for the terrible deaths of the other hundred people on the plane seems to be an especially popular example among my friends.)

One of the claims that I personally find especially annoying is that religion has inspired a lot of great art. Even if we overlook the problematic nature of that claim and simply take it at face value it still commits what I call the logical sin of misemphasis by failing to acknowledge that religion has also pre-empted and destroyed a lot of great art.

This is a point that I’ve made before but it was brought into sharp focus for me again several times this week when I wasn’t expecting it. The details bear repeating as they help counter the pro-religion argument we hear so much more frequently.

1) In the course of reading the first 165 pages of Daniel J. Boorstin’s mind-expanding book, The Creators, I encountered no fewer than six assaults by theists on the art of those who came before them.

—– On pages 89-90 I learned that “In 1215, according to the Arab chronicler Abd al Latif, Caliph Malek al Aazis Othman was offended by these monuments of idolatry [i.e., the Egyptian pyramids]. As a work of piety he assembled a large crew to destroy one of the smaller pyramids, the pyramid of Menkaure at Giza. After eight months’ labor, his crew made so little impression that he gave up. The mark of that hopeless effort is still visible in a small scar on the north slope of that pyramid.” Only the size of those magnificent structures saved them. How many smaller pieces over the centuries haven’t been as lucky?

—– On pages 124-125 I learned how one of the greatest creations of the Romans, Hadrian’s Pantheon – a temple dedicated to and apparently depicting all the Greco-Roman deities (128 CE) – was consecrated as a Christian church by Pope Boniface IV in 608 CE “after the pagan filth was removed… so that the commemoration of the saints would take place henceforth where not gods but demons were formerly worshipped.” Later (circa 1632), Pope Urban VIII stripped the bronze off the roof beams and used it to make 80 cannons, allegedly in the belief that it was better to use the metal to protect the Holy See than to keep the rain off silly old buildings.

—– On page 135 Boorstin describes how the Great Church in Constantinople (Hagia Sophia), built in 532 by Justinian, was assaulted no fewer than three times. First the Christian Iconoclasts championed by Emperor Leo III covered up its “diabolical” images in 726; then Christian Crusaders stripped it of its gold and silver pieces in 1204; and then even more radical changes were made when Muslims took over Constantinople in 1453 and converted the place into a mosque.

—– On page 162 Boorstin in passing shares the fact that medieval Muslim iconoclasts chipped away the Sphinx’s nose.

With some 550 pages left to go, I shudder to think what other examples remain to be discovered….

2) This morning I opened up my copy of Stefano Zuffi’s Dictionary of Painters: From A to Z. The very first artist listed is Pieter Aertsen, a 16th century Dutchman. Three examples of his work are provided. One of them is described this way: “The tranquil head of the ox and the partial but expressive figures of two shepherds are all that remain of the Adoration of the Shepherds, a large altarpiece painted by Aertsen for the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and destroyed in 1566 during a violent iconoclastic campaign launched by the most outspoken radical Calvinist preachers…. These [painted] figures are so intense and real that they truly deserve to be described as the precursors of Dutch painting in the ‘golden age.’”

Wikipedia adds this: “Several of his best works, including altarpieces in various churches, were destroyed in the Netherlands’ religious wars.”

Clearly, no one has been absolutely safe from the destructive, art-hating wrath of theists – not even the fellow members of the same religion!

And of course the impulse among theists to ban or destroy the art and images of others hardly disappeared with the end of the Age of Religious Wars.

Here’s a recent example that’s humorous in its absurdity but quite sad when one stops and recalls the long, ignoble tradition it’s part of:

Foam Cleavage Cover-Up (The Age; Feb 25)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado: Puppet cleavage has been ruled out for advertising posters on bus shelters in Colorado Springs.

Lamar Advertising rejected posters for a touring production of the Broadway show Avenue Q because they show the cleavage of a fuzzy pink puppet.

Lamar account executive Jeff Moore told The Gazette of Colorado Springs that the company took a conservative approach in the area.

The city is known for its political conservatism and is home to the headquarters of conservative Christian groups.

The poster has been replaced by one showing the face of another puppet.

Avenue Q is a Tony-winning musical about New Yorkers, human and puppets, searching for life and love.

The show bills itself as “60 per cent adult situations and 40 per cent foam rubber” and features the adventures of puppets and humans in New York.

Praise Jesus for protecting us from diabolical puppet cleavage! We’ll never know exactly how many stuffed animal rapes were prevented as a result….

(For a bit more on this subject, see the entries I posted on Aug 6, 2008 and Jan 7, 2010.)

Related posts:

1. Religion Never Inspires Anything Bad
2. Atheism vs. Religion
3. Religion & Health (32)

I just learned about it today.

Sounds yummy! :-)

Not the Impossible Faith (Richard Carrier; 456 pages; Feb 2009)

Dr. Richard Carrier is an expert in the history of the ancient world and a critic of Christian attempts to distort history in defense of their faith. Not the Impossible Faith is a tour de force in that genre, dissecting and refuting the oft-repeated claim that Christianity could not have succeeded in the ancient world unless it was true. Though framed as a detailed rebuttal to Christian apologist J.P. Holding (author of The Impossible Faith), Carrier takes a general approach that educates the reader on the history and sociology of the ancient world, answering many questions like: How did Christians approach evidence? Was there a widespread prejudice against the testimony of women? Was resurrection such a radical idea? Who would worship a crucified criminal? And much more. Written with occasional humor and an easy style, and thoroughly referenced, with many entertaining “gotcha!” moments, Not the Impossible Faith is a must-read for anyone interested in the origins of Christianity.

(To learn more about Carrier, see the entries I posted on Sept 19, 2005; June 1, 2006; Jan 2, 2007; and Jan 3, 2007.)

Related posts:

1. Notable Atheist: Richard Carrier
2. Richard Carrier’s Testimony
3. Richard Dawkins on The Greatest Show on Earth

The relation of eugenics to evolution and Darwin’s idea of “selection” is obvious. Galton was an admirer of his cousin’s work. However, one might get the impression that Darwin himself advocated such application of his theory to human populations. While he certainly entertained questions pertaining to positive eugenics (he had, after all, married his first cousin Emma Wedgewood), he resisted anything approaching negative eugenics as devaluing human life.

Near the end of The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin wrote:

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind.

(via here)

Related posts:

1. Darwin – Change You Can Believe In
2. Happy Darwin Day!
3. Darwin Scores Again

Related posts:

1. The Good Old Days
2. The Good Old Days
3. Harris Lays the Smack Down on Collins

Back to Part 1

Both John Draper and Andrew Dickson White used the Galileo Affair as one of their many examples of the religious oppression of scientific progress. However, lingering in the background to this affair is Copernicus and his monumental work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which revived the heliocentric model of the universe that eventually earned Galileo’s favor. I will thus begin by analyzing Draper and White’s historical accounts of the publication and reception of Copernicus’ astronomical theory and what this means for Draper and White’s original conflict thesis.

Draper describes Copernicus as being aware that his doctrines were opposed to revealed truth and therefore putting them forward only suppositionally or hypothetically, as is stated in the introduction to the book. Draper seems to be unaware that Copernicus did not write the anonymous introduction to De Revolutionibus and that its message is inconsistent with his actual position. Draper thus presents Copernicus as an individual who was “full of misgivings” (Draper, 167-169). White, on the other hand, blames the actual author of the introduction, the Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander, for forcing Copernicus’ great truth to appear before the world sneaking and crawling by “pretending that the book…suggested a hypothesis instead of announcing a truth” (White, 124).

Draper moves immediately from the publication of De Revolutionibus in 1543 to its condemnation by the Inquisition in 1616, without any explicit mention of the long span of time between these two events. The effect is that the condemnation appears like an immediate and inevitable reaction on the part of the Catholic Church. White acknowledges that in the intervening seventy-three years the Church and theologians were, while against it, largely quiet on the matter. However, he notes that Protestants, too, also rejected the doctrine. He points to Martin Luther, but also to the University of Wittenberg, where “the facts confirming the Copernican theory” were “carefully kept out of sight” (White, 128). Of the four most important members of the circle of astronomers at Wittenberg from 1530 to 1560, White identifies Melanchthon and Caspar Peucer as condemning the Copernican doctrine, with Rheticus and Reinhold believing the system to be true but prevented from teaching or disseminating the new ideas. As for Reinhold, White writes, “convinced of the truth of the new theory, he was obliged to advocate the old; if he mentioned the Copernican ideas, he was compelled to overlay then with the Ptolemaic” (White, 129).

Rheticus, to be sure, was indeed a total convert to the reality of the Copernican system of astronomy, but Reinhold did not seem to accept it in the way that White suggests, that is, as a physical description of reality. Reinhold’s own copy of De Revolutionibus is heavily annotated in the later, highly technical chapters, but hardly contains anything in the early cosmological ones in which Copernicus argued in favor of placing the sun at the center of the universe (Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, 23-24). In fact, Reinhold had scribbled across the title page of the book what he admired most about Copernicus’s achievement and it had nothing to do with assigning any motion to the Earth: “The axiom of astronomy: Celestial motions are circular and uniform or composed of circular and uniform parts.” Ptolemy had introduced a device known as the equant to his geocentric cosmology which seemed to violate the elegant an ancient principle of uniform circular motion (only angular motion is uniform around an equant). Thus, Reinhold praised Copernicus for his elimination of the equant (by means of a series of epicyclets) and thereby restoring for astronomy that grand principle (Gingerich, 54-55). Such a mathematical device was not tied to Copernicanism, but could potentially be applied to the Ptolemaic system.

History does not always fit kindly into rigid dichotomies. White wants people in the 16^th century to either accept or reject Copernicanism in its strictest and fullest sense: as a physically true scientific theory of cosmology. Yet, the manner in which people of that time engaged with Copernicus’ work is far more complex, and this is none the more evident than in the Melanchthon circle at Wittenberg. Reinhold may have rejected the physical principles but he found it useful to use Copernican planetary mechanisms to produce his Prutenic Tables. Melanchthon himself praised Copernicus’ lunar theory and made use of Copernican data. Caspar Peucer did much to consolidate these pragmatic aspects of Copernicus’ system into the scientific curriculum at Wittenberg, contrary to the impression given by White. This demonstrates that, at least among Protestants at Wittenberg, some sort of pragmatic assimilation is a much more appropriate interpretive framework than conflict.

Draper is effectively able to portray the adversaries of Copernicus’ heliocentricism in an even more negative light by claiming Copernicus’ book to be much more than it actually is. This is apparent when he writes:

Astronomers justly affirm that the book of Copernicus, “De Revolutionibus,” changed the face of their science. It incontestably established the heliocentric theory. It showed that the distance of the fixed stars is infinitely great, and that the earth is a mere point in the heavens. Anticipating Newton, Copernicus imputed gravity to the sun, the moon, and heavenly bodies, but he was led astray by assuming that the celestial motions must be circular. (Draper, 168)

If Copernicus’ book had really “incontestably established the heliocentric theory” then one wonders why Galileo had struggled at all in his attempts to advance that theory! Of course, De Revolutionibus did not establish the truth of heliocentricism nor would we consider much of it correct today. Other than the fact that Copernicus assigns motion to the Earth and makes it a planet revolving around the sun, the rest of the book resembles the works of ancient and medieval astronomers (Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 135). Copernicus kept much of what he inherited from the Ptolemaic traditions, including epicycles and eccentrics, and, as the title of his work suggests, the celestial spheres that carried the planets around (on the revolution of the heavenly spheres or orbs). Draper indicates that Copernicus was “led astray by assuming that the celestial motions must be circular,” but preserving uniform and circular celestial motion was essential to his project. He did so by doing away with the equant which had contributed in turning Ptolemy’s system into, in Copernicus’ opinion, a “monster.” The uniform and circular motion of the planets was accepted in principle by all astronomers in his day and even later, by Galileo himself.

Draper also states that Copernicus showed that the distance from the solar system to the outer stars is “infinitely great.” Copernicus, however, did not demonstrate this to be true, rather, what he did carried significantly less force. One consequence of the Earth’s annual revolution around the sun is stellar parallax, where the apparent position of a star against the stellar backdrop shifts over the course of the year (Kuhn, 163). The closer the star is to the Earth, the more apparent this shift will be, the further, the less apparent. No stellar parallax, however, is visible with the naked eye (the only instrument of observation available to 16^th century astronomers), so Copernicus merely suggested that the distance between the fixed stars and the rest of the planetary system must be much further away than initially thought. This is not a proof, because the lack of any visible stellar parallax is also perfectly explainable under the hypothesis that the Earth does not move. Indeed, this remained a potent argument against the Earth’s motion for some time, and stellar parallax was not even seen with a telescope until 1838.

As for Copernicus’ supposedly anticipating Newton by imputing gravity to the rest of the heavenly bodies, Draper again exaggerates what Copernicus actually attempted to do. He certainly did not conceive of gravity as a force as Newton would, but rather, he conceived it entirely within an Aristotelian framework as a natural motion of bodies made of the elements Earth and Water. Only, he broke from Aristotle by attributing a natural circular motion to all Earthly objects as well to explain why they don’t fly off of the Earth as it rotates on its axis (Kuhn, 148-155). This was about as far as Aristotelianism could be stretched to accommodate a sun-centered solar system. Science would have to invent an entirely new physics before heliocentrism could be fully assimilated – a project that would not be completed until Newton’s Principia. Until then, there were numerous philosophical objections (not to mention religious ones) to the physical truth of the Copernican system.

We have now seen at least two ways in which the conflict thesis, in respect to Copernicus, has been unjustly advanced. By forcing the participants into strict dichotomies, such as pro and anti-Copernican, and by exaggerating the actual content of Copernicus’ book itself, conflict is created. This is not to say that there was no conflict, only that the nature of that conflict is far more complex and nuanced. One could accept the hypothesis as a supposition that deserves careful consideration, as Andreas Osiander did, or one could accept the mathematical models that Copernicus produced while rejecting or simply not considering whether the Earth actually moves, as the Wittenberg circle did. Or, one could even accept some physical aspects of Copernicus’ theory and reject others, as did Nicolai Reymers Baer and Tycho Brahe, who each accepted the axial rotation of the Earth but rejected any orbital revolution (Brooke, Science and Religion, 90-91).

In the next part I will move on to Galileo and his famous telescope.

Related posts:

1. Galileo & The Church (1): The Conflict Thesis
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3. Robert Bellarmine’s Questionable Quotation

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It would not be unreasonable to observe that the figure of Galileo Galilei has emerged as the emblematic example of the conflict between science and religion. Galileo was put on trial in 1633 by the Roman Catholic Inquisition for advancing a heliocentric cosmology, in contradiction to the sacred scriptures, found guilty, and placed under house arrest. No other eminent figure of science has suffered such a fate. Thus, it is easy to understand the appeal of the Galileo Affair to those who view the advancement of science as continuously being impeded by the persecution and suppression of religious authorities. However one feels about the applicability of that issue today, it is thus worth considering the historical merit of such an assessment.

The so-called “conflict thesis” of the relationship between science and religion arose to prominence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century largely by the efforts of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. The notion of a conflict between science and religion comes straight out of the title of Draper’s popular book, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874). White, building off of the success of Draper’s thesis, elevated the status of the relationship from one of conflict to one of “warfare,” in his two volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).

John William Draper was an American scientist, specializing in Chemistry, and historian who held various posts at New York University. Draper was asked by Edward Youman in the early 1870s to contribute what became the History of the Conflict between Religion and Science to Youman’s International Scientific Series of popular works by prominent men of science (of which it is volume XIII). Yet it is not entirely coincidental that Draper’s book appeared only four years after the First Vatican Council had met before being suspended in 1870. The entire final chapter of his book, in fact, discusses these particular developments and what he viewed as the impending intellectual and religious crisis they were sure to cause.

Two significant outcomes of the council were the doctrine of papal infallibility and a confirmation of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864. Draper viewed this as the Catholic Church’s attempt to solidify its authority against the intrusive progress of science, which posed a significant threat to the Church’s power (Draper, 332). Papal infallibility, along with several of the propositions condemned by the Syllabus of Errors, seemed to be an attempt to elevate revealed religion above the sciences. The Syllabus is a long list of propositions that the Church declared to be erroneous. Proposition 8, for example, condemned as an error the statement that “As human reason is placed on a level with religion itself, so theological must be treated in the same manner as philosophical sciences.” Proposition 9 found erroneous the statement that “all the dogmas of the Christian religion are indiscriminately the object of natural science or philosophy, and human reason.” Church dogma, therefore, is not susceptible to scientific or philosophical inquiry. Even more significant, however, is proposition 12, which essentially declares the conflict thesis itself, as applied to the Catholic Church, to be erroneous. The proposition reads, “The decrees of the Apostolic See and of the Roman congregations impede the true progress of science.”

According to Draper, however, this was precisely the case. “The History of Science,” he wrote in his preface, “is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other” (Draper, vi) Draper did not, however, view religion or even Christianity in general as the second of the “contending powers” but focused instead almost exclusively on the Catholic Church. He exonerates Protestantism and the Greek Orthodox Churches for having a “reverential attitude to truth” and never aligning itself “in opposition to the advancement of knowledge” (Draper, x) The real problem, for Draper, lies with the pretentiousness of the Vatican, which has historically used its civic power to cruelly enforce its ideas and in his own day tried to use its influence to limit the freedoms of scientific and rational thought. The concluding paragraph of Draper’s book is an impassioned plea against the latter:

Religion must relinquish that imperious, that domineering position, which she has so long maintained against Science. There must be absolute freedom for thought. The ecclesiastic must learn to keep himself within the domain in which he has chosen, and cease to tyrannize over the philosopher, who…will bear such interference no longer. (Draper, 327)

Draper’s book outsold every other volume in Youman’s series, and in the preface Draper indicated that he considered his contribution to be merely the beginning of what would become a larger body of literature documenting the conflict between science and religion (Lindberg and Numbers, 2). Draper would not live long enough to see the next significant contribution to that body of literature. After nearly thirty years of research, Andrew Dickson White published his more influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. White was a historian and the co-founder and first president of Cornell University. Cornell, at its founding in 1865, was unusual in that it was a private university with no affiliation to any particular religious sect or church, and in its emphasis on the role of science in education. Opposition to the new university began at once, from claims of infidelity to claims that all professors should be in holy orders. In response to this experience White began to write on the role of conflict between science and religion. “Then it was that there was born in upon me a sense of the real difficulty—the antagonism between the theological and scientific view of the universe and of education in relation to it” (White, viii). White differentiated his work from Draper’s by noting that, while Draper viewed the conflict as a struggle between science and religion, White viewed the conflict as a struggle between science and dogmatic theology (White, ix). It was dogmatism, not religion, which had erected a barrier to science and required “dissolving away” (White, vi).

In the next post I will look at Draper and White’s treatment of Copernicus (as a prelude to Galileo) in advancing their conflict theses.

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