Our Common Humanity

Europa & the Galileo Myth: The Pope Delusion

As Europe celebrates the half-century of the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of what is now the EU, Pope Benedict XVI’s battle against science, Islam and cultural pluralism, threatens to turn the European clock back to a pre-Enlightenment era.…

On the centenary of Einstein’s birth, an impassioned John Paul II expressed his hope before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome that the Church will revisit the infamous Galileo case. This set alarm bells ringing – and not only within the ancient walls of the Vatican. Many scientists viewed the setting up of a special Commission in July 1981 as a retrial of Galileo, a concern perhaps justified in retrospect by the Vatican’s startling conclusions.

While the Vatican praised Galileo paradoxically for his perceptiveness to scripture, it nevertheless criticised him for confusing science with philosophy and, more seriously, for going against the very “experimental method of which he was the inspired founder.” All in all, “a tragic mutual incomprehension” was judged to have created the “Galileo myth.”

Remarkably, in a speech delivered at Parma, Italy, in March 1990, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, went so far as to state that "At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just."

A critique of a critique

In 1616, the Galileo-supported heliocentric model of the universe was rejected by the Church on the grounds that Galileo was unable to produce conclusive evidence that the Earth orbited around the Sun. At the same time, he was prohibited from conducting any further research to seek such evidence. While the aim of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 was to force the Muslims and Jews of Spain to abandon their religious convictions, the aim of the Roman Inquisition in 1633 was to force Galileo to abandon his scientific convictions. Galileo, who remained a sincere Christian, was subsequently sentenced to house arrest for life, and his books were banned.

“Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.” This is the decisive statement in the alleged argument of Emperor Manuel II against violent conversion, as pointed out by Pope Benedict XVI in his much-publicised Regensburg speech. Given his apparent approval of Galileo’s persecution, we are compelled to question the Pope’s very notion of “reason,” not to mention that of “justice.”

In fact, the 12th September 2006 Regensburg speech outlines an attempt, according to the Pontiff, “at a critique of modern reason from within,” which we are assured “has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age.”

“Modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology,” remarks the Pope before rushing to declare: “Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.” Since what the Pope seems to be after is nothing short of a radical revision of the methodology of science, the inescapable question, which Galileo would undoubtedly have asked, is: why?

While making no attempt to provide any answer, the Pope firmly declares that this question “has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology,” that is to a Greek philosophy scientifically undermined by the empiricism of Ibn Haitham (Alhazen) in optics, and Galileo in cosmology, and to a theology based on what Blackwell of Saint Louis University calls a “logic of centralised authority.” Far from being a critique from within, Pope Benedict’s authoritarian approach to reason ironically fuels what he so desperately wishes to extinguish – “the dictatorship of relativism”!

From Aristotle to Kant

A high profile poll, conducted in 2005 by the BBC writer and presenter Melvyn Bragg, titled the “Greatest Philosopher,” saw Aristotle barely make it into the ten greatest philosophers list, with five of the top six being more recent figures such as the Germans Kant, Nietzsche and surprisingly Marx.

Yet, the scope of philosophical inquiry in general has been so much reduced by the sheer technicality of modern science, particularly since Einstein, that the best known philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, concluded that “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” Even the once unthinkable idea among philosophers that logic is inherently limited has been dramatically confirmed by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in mathematics (1931), and more recently by the incredible discoveries of quantum computation (including the science-fiction-like quantum teleportation). Commenting on Wittgenstein’s words, Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking exclaimed: “What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!”

Collision course

Samuel Huntington’s terrifying vision of an inevitable Clash of Civilisations relies, according to Edward Said, “on a vague notion of something Huntington called ‘civilization identity’ and ‘the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations’ of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention.”

Since more and more experts have now come to view the self-fulfilling Clash of Civilisations prophecy as the blueprint of American foreign policy post 9/11, we are compelled to take Huntington’s ideas seriously – including that of civilisation identity. Having forcefully announced in his controversial summer 1993 article “The Clash of Civilizations?” that “The fault lines between Civilizations will be the battle lines of the future," Huntington went on to single out culture and religion as the most important elements of a civilisation identity.

For instance, he argues that “The European Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture and Western Christianity.” If we accept, for the sake of argument, Huntington’s over-optimistic claim regarding the status of Christianity in modern Europe, we still have to ask: what constitutes European culture? Here, not unwisely, Huntington does not define what European culture is. He stops short of the trap of reducing such a hugely complex notion unjustifiably to merely one or two of its numerous and constantly evolving aspects.

In the Regensburg speech, however, the Pope takes Huntington’s ideas one precarious step further. He attempts to nail down a European identity based on the contentious fusion of Western Christianity with Greek, and subsequently Roman, heritage – a fusion eroded by centuries of relentless dehellenisation from within the Church. Timed alarmingly close to the anniversary of 9/11, Pope Benedict’s speech contrasts Europe’s supposed Greco-Christian identity with a cartoon-like mythical Islam, bloodthirsty and inherently irrational – thus recklessly putting Europe and Islam on an imaginary collision course unencountered in the so-called Dark Ages.

Let there be light

Despite the fact that the European Renaissance was preceded by a revival of the Aristotelian tradition – primarily through the penetrating commentaries of Spanish Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) who concluded based on the Quran that the study of logic was a religious obligation – the birth of modern science was marked, nevertheless, by the collapse of the Ptolemaic worldview. Ptolemy’s widely accepted theories had to give way to new theories based on experimentation rather than the authority of Aristotle and Plato. This empirical worldview was mathematically articulated using analytic geometry, powerfully combining Euclid’s geometry with the Algebra of Al-Khwarizmi (Iraq, 780-850).

Ptolemy’s worldview had two main aspects, one optical and another cosmological. In cosmology, he elaborated Aristotle’s view that the Earth was the centre of the universe into a complete cosmological model. Although Ptolemy’s model of spheres within spheres gave generally accurate predictions, it nevertheless placed the Moon on an orbit that sometimes brought it twice as close to the Earth than at other times. This meant that the Moon ought to have sometimes appeared twice as big!

While this flaw did not prove fatal to Ptolemy’s model, a major technological breakthrough in around 1608 did. The invention of the telescope, by Dutch spectacle-makers, enabled Galileo soon after to observe various stars and planets with unprecedented clarity. Galileo found that the planet Jupiter in particular had several moons which orbited around it – in direct contradiction to Ptolemy’s geocentric model in which all heavenly bodies orbited around the Earth. Despite the Church’s trial and subsequent persecution of Galileo, Ptolemy’s model was eventually replaced by Kepler’s heliocentric model in which the Earth orbits elliptically around the Sun.

In optics, on the other hand, Ptolemy incorrectly explained the phenomenon of vision in terms of his “visual ray” theory, the origin of which goes back to Plato. According to the visual ray theory, otherwise known as the emission theory of vision, the eye emitted rays which travelled through the air sensing various objects. These rays then conveyed back to the eye a visual representation of the viewed objects. Ptolemy’s visual ray was said to be like a “blind man’s stick.”

Remarkably, at the turn of the first millennium, a major technological breakthrough in the form of an experiment enabled Iraqi physicist Ibn Haitham to successfully explain vision solely in terms of light travelling into the eye. Using the pinhole camera (the principle behind photography) which he pioneered, he experimentally demonstrated how reflected light-beams from illuminated objects travel into the eye to project a point-for-point image of the visual scene. Not only did Ibn Haitham’s work discredit Ptolemy’s erroneous emission theory, it also established experiments as the norm of proof in optics and, more generally, in physics. (See “The Miracle of Light,” A World of Science, Vol. 3, No. 4, October-December 2005).

While, in optics, the study of the burning properties of lenses began shortly before Ibn Haitham, the study of their visual and magnifying properties was effectively launched with his seminal Kitab Al-Manazir or Book of Optics. This underpinned the craft of the Dutch spectacle-makers who, by holding one lens in front of another, invented the telescope – enabling Galileo to scientifically challenge Ptolemy and the Church.

Clash of ignorance

“Let there be no compulsion in religion,” the Quran (2:256) unequivocally announces in opposition to violent conversion. Why? The famous verse goes on to explain: “Truth stands out clear from Error,” that is, through evidence and argument.

Strikingly, in his much-anticipated subsequent version of the Regensburg speech, “complete with footnotes,” Pope Benedict XVI failed to provide any supporting evidence to justify his widely criticised claim that “according to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat.” More strikingly still, consulting any major Quranic exegesis (scholarly explanation or Tafsir) confirms the exact opposite of the Pope’s claim! Yet, strangely, despite saluting the scientific “will to be obedient to the truth,” the Pontiff opted for a superficial rewording of his erroneous claim.

“The story about ‘spreading the faith by the sword’ is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims,” says Jewish peace activist Uri Avnery in his recent article “Mohammad’s Sword.” Since Christians are accorded the same status by Islam as Jews, it might be illuminating to ask whether Jewish minorities were forced under Muslim rule to change their religion. The same question can be put differently: what is Islam’s equivalent of the Inquisition?

“There is no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on Jews,” says Avnery who then adds, “As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time.… In Muslim Spain Jews were ministers, poets, scientists.” Avnery goes on to conclude: “That was, indeed, the Golden Age.”

In fact, many of the works of Arab polymath Ibn Rushd (Spain, 1126-1198) only survived in their Hebrew or Latin translations, thanks to his Jewish and Christian students in Muslim Spain, and later throughout Europe. For instance, his influential commentary on Plato’s Republic was only recently translated from Hebrew back to its original Arabic! The crucial question, as put by Avnery, regarding the age-old participation of religious minorities in Muslim scientific, cultural and even political life, is: “How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the ‘spreading of the faith by the sword’?”

As a genuine advocate of the often-elusive dialogue of religions and cultures, Pope John Paul II once observed: “A clash ensues only when Islam or Christianity is misconstrued or manipulated for political or ideological ends.” This insight – most applicable to the current crisis – perfectly mirrors that of Edward Said dispelling the myth of the Clash of Civilisations as a mere clash of ignorance.

Hatim Salih
York
March 30th, 2007

I heard Mr. Taylor on Charlie Rose and he like his other counter parts were imparting mistaken information.

Christmas has nothing to do with the Jesus Christ of the Bible. No one knew the birth date of Christ. Hence, Herod ordered all the Israelite chiildren two years old and under to be put to death.

Sunday has nothing to do with the Christ of the Bible. Jesus Christ commanded the seventh day of the week, the sabbath day.

Jesus Christ was not Jew-ish. He was an Israelite of the tribe of Judah.

Price said his ministry was 18 months or less. His ministry was 3-1/2 years. He began that ministry at age 30. The same age Christ had made law for the Levitical priesthood.

Faith is not a person or thing. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Price misunderstands this as he misunderstands everything else he states. I understand his lack of knowledge, it is because he has no teacher.

No man has ascended to heaven except he who came down from heaven. This too, would require a teacher. A teacher who fears God and whose faith is not built on the doctrine of men.

The problem here is theology versus the true Word of God.

Reverend, I commend the very gentle way you have made powerful points. You have also in true christian fashion regarded the plank in your own eye- im awfully glad i read it and will keep watch for your good opinion in the future
peace

im going to look right now for any more of your thoughts on this site

REV.TAYLOR
PLEASE GO TO YOUR NEAREST SYNAGOGUE AND ASK THE RABBI WHAT THEIR BOOK SAYS ABOUT SLAVERY.

Alex, good point about theocracies. The Christian extremists pushing for intolerance and theocracy in the US, however, would actually be happy if the US weren't part of the UN as a part of their reactionary political agenda.

Rev Taylor wrote: "The first step in understanding such pathology is an awareness and acknowledgement of "violent and extreme" elements which have sometimes been present in Roman Catholic history and, surely, in Protestant America. One has only to mention the painful recollection of the Inquisition in Roman Catholic history and the Ku Klux Klan in some of American Protestantism's past."

But, are'nt "violent and extreme" elements still present in the proselytizing brands of both Christianity and Islam when their preachers continue to hold on to their respective exclusivist faith doctrines? I am afraid they are.

As long as we have Talibanic type of evangelists like Falwell, Robertson and others, as well as the Bin Ladens, Zawihiris and others who also want to Islamize the entire world, I do not believe that there is much hope for peoples on this planet, not unless zealots of the Abrahamic faiths accept and promote pluralism and secularism as the only means of preserving world peace.

Also, the separation of church and state must be universally required of all countries and theocracies ought to be considered unfit to maintain full memberships in the United Nations.
Alex

Pope Benedict's words have already got Muslims talking about Islamic Extremism. Soon they will examine what is happening to their faith.

My common humanity has nothing whatever to do with any religious irrationalism. All human beings are identical when you suffle off the mortal coil of religion. We are all in the same boat. Anything that confuses our understanding of this simple fact isn't worth discussing.

Koranic Verses in Referring to Judaism and Christianity

5:72 They surely disbelieve who say: Lo! Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary. The Messiah (himself) said: O Children of Israel, worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord. Lo! whoso ascribeth partners unto Allah, for him Allah hath forbidden paradise. His abode is the Fire. For evil-doers there will be no helpers.

5:73 They surely disbelieve who say: Lo! Allah is the third of three; when there is no God save the One God. If they desist not from so saying a painful doom will fall on those of them who disbelieve.

5:74 Will they not rather turn unto Allah and seek forgiveness of Him ? For Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

5:75 The Messiah, son of Mary, was no other than a messenger, messengers (the like of whom) had passed away before him. And his mother was a saintly woman. And they both used to eat (earthly) food. See how We make the revelations clear for them, and see how they are turned away!

9:5 Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

9:30 And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved of old. Allah (Himself) fighteth against them. How perverse are they!

9:31 They have taken as lords beside Allah their rabbis and their monks and the Messiah son of Mary, when they were bidden to worship only One God. There is no God save Him. Be He Glorified from all that they ascribe as partner (unto Him)!

9:32 Fain would they put out the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah disdaineth (aught) save that He shall perfect His light, however much the disbelievers are averse.

9:33 He it is Who hath sent His messenger with the guidance and the Religion of Truth, that He may cause it to prevail over all religion, however much the idolaters may be averse.

The Rev.Taylor,
I commend you on your thoughtful and soothing words.The Popes' words were very unfortunate, misplaced besides being inacurate from the original source,out of historical context and the present charged context post 911, Palestine and Iraq.
Such infamatory statements did not reflect positively on the pope as the head of the world's largest christian church, as an academic and as a head of a state.
Certainly this is not the best way to start a dialogue. The pope needs to refrain from condcension, show some humility and walk in footsteps of Jesus.He needs to put his own house in order first as Muslims are mature and can and should put their own house also in order by dealing with the few radicals who resort to violence and certainly don't represent Islam.

Reverand:

The pope's goal, wether or not it was intentional has been realized. People, important one's like yourself, the pillars of Christianity are talking about it. His exalted position is now higher than before.

Using the KKK to point out the violent nature of Christianity in general makes me think of another place it is used, "just one of many possible examples." I can't tell you exactly where you will find it at the site, http://www.hoax-buster.org The KKK assumes the lynched share cropper is going to hell, will not be there in the next life to revenge himself or that there is a forgiving God, Jesus to get them off the hook. Only sinners need forgivness. Murder is a sin.

The theme of this blog is common ground for the three great faiths to negotiate what? Could we be about establishing the kingdom of God right here on earth? No matter the reason, there is common ground for them.

The common ground of the three great faiths is an individual named Moses. And there is a common event, Moses making a deal with an entity, "the God of your [Moses] father." All three great faiths claim that there was a being in the fire and that being was God. So, the place for the three great faiths to begin negotiations is with that event and of course, the common thread of their faiths, Moses.

There are lots of folks that don't even believe, have fatih that the pope actually represents God, has the power to sign God's name.