The Google front page alerted me to the fact that it’s been 400 years since Galileo demonstrated his first telescope – a 8x magnifier that changed the world. More than anyone else, Galileo is responsible for the birth of modern science.
Science is best seen, I think, not as a thing or a discreet body of knowledge, but a particular way of observing reality. And, while we pretty much take it for granted these days, scientific observation was a pretty significant shift from how things had been done before. At its root, scientific observation requires the honest interpretation of experimental results. Galileo saw the relationship between math and the laws of nature. He observed and measured, experimented and repeated.
Observed reality, of course, got in the way of reality as decreed by clergy. In Galileo’s case, it was the inconvenient fact that he observed things which could only be explained in a model where the earth revolved around the sun. This was contrary to church dogma that the sun revolved around the earth. Truth is often not a real match for temporal power, so, for his heretical heliocentric views, Galileo spent the end of his life on house arrest by order of the Pope.
Eventually, the Catholic Church came around. In 1835, it took Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” off the index of forbidden books. Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published in 1859. If we figure a 200 year lag time on these things, maybe the evangelicals will come around on evolution in another 50 years or so.
Leave a Reply