by Thomas Dixon
This was when the real trouble started. Although the Dialogue was presented as an even-handed discussion among three characters – an Aristotelian, a Copernican, and a common-sensical everyman – it was perfectly clear to most readers that the arguments given in favour of the Copernican system were very much stronger than those made in defence of the old earth-centred astronomy, and that Galileo had in effect produced a pro-Copernican piece of propaganda, thus breaching the conditions of the 1616 injunction and the instructions given by Urban in 1624. That was not all. The Aristotelian character was named ‘Simplicio’. This was the name of a 6th-century Aristotelian philosopher but also one that hinted at simple-mindedness. Even more provocatively, one of the arguments put forward by simple Simplicio was the one that had been put to Galileo by Urban himself in 1624 – namely that God could have produced natural effects in any way he chose, and so it was wrong to claim necessary truth for any given physical hypothesis about their causation. This apparent mockery of the Pope added personal insult to the already grave injury delivered by Galileo’s disobedience. And the timing could not have been worse. The Dialogue arrived in Rome in 1632 at a moment of great political crisis. Urban was in the midst of switching his allegiance from the French to the Spanish during the Thirty Years War and was in no mood for leniency. He needed to show his new conservative allies that he was a decisive and authoritative defender of the faith. So Galileo was summoned to Rome to be tried before the Inquisition.
3. Maffeo Barberini, Pope Urban VIII, painted by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1632, the year that Galileo’s Dialogue was published, in which the Pope’s views were put in the mouth of the Aristotelian philosopher Simplicio
As with the Scopes trial in America three centuries later, the trial of Galileo in 1633 was one in which the outcome was never in doubt. Galileo was found guilty of promoting the heretical Copernican view in contravention of the express injunction not to do so that he had received in 1616. It was for disobeying the Church, rather than for seeking to understand the natural world through observation and reasoning, that Galileo was condemned. Galileo’s political misjudgement of his relationship with Pope Urban VIII played as much of a role in his downfall as did his over-reaching of himself in the field of biblical interpretation. Galileo’s work was to be one key contribution to the eventual success of the Copernican theory, which, when modified by further scientific insights such as Kepler’s replacement of circular by elliptical orbits, and Newton’s discovery of the law of gravitation, was virtually universally accepted. However, in 1632 there was sufficient doubt about the relative merits of the Copernican system and the alternatives (including Tycho Brahe’s compromise according to which the sun orbited the earth but all the other planets orbited the sun) that an objective observer would have pronounced the scientific question an open one, making it even harder to decide how to judge between the teachings that the Church declared to be contained in the book of scripture and those which Galileo had read through his telescope in the book of nature.
Appearance and reality
Historians have shown that the Galileo affair, remembered by some as a clash between science and religion, was primarily a dispute about the enduring political question of who was authorized to produce and disseminate knowledge. In the world of Counter-Reformation Rome, in the midst of the Thirty Years War, which continued to pit the Protestant and Catholic powers of Europe against each other, Galileo’s claim to be able to settle questions about competing sources of knowledge through his own individual reading and reasoning seemed the height of presumption and a direct threat to the authority of the Church.
The case can also be used to illustrate one further philosophical question that has been central to modern debates about science and religion, namely the issue of realism. Arguments about realism particularly arise in connection with what scientific theories have to say about unobservable entities such as magnetic fields, black holes, electrons, quarks, superstrings, and the like. To be a realist is to suppose that science is in the business of providing accurate descriptions of such entities. To be an anti-realist is to remain agnostic about the accuracy of such descriptions and to hold that science is in the business only of providing accurate predictions of observable phenomena. Urban VIII was not alone among theologians and philosophers in the 16th and 17th centuries in taking an anti-realist or ‘instrumentalist’ approach to astronomy. On that view, the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems could be used to calculate and predict the apparent motions of the stars and planets, but there was no way to know which system, if either, represented the way that God had in fact chosen to structure the heavens. Indeed, when Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was first published, it had attached to it a preface written by the Lutheran Andreas Osiander stating that the theory was intended purely as a calculating device rather than as a physical description.
Galileo, on the other hand, took a realist attitude – indeed, it was his insistence on arguing the case for the physical reality of the sun-centred system which resulted in his trial before the Inquisition. Galileo was a member of one of the earliest scientific societies, the Academy of Lynxes, founded in 1603 by Prince Cesi. The lynx was thought to be able to see in the dark and so to perceive things invisible to others. Using new scientific instruments such as the telescope and the microscope in conjunction with the power of reason and the language of mathematics, Galileo and his fellow ‘lynxes’ aimed not just to find useful models for predicting observable phenomena but explanations of those phenomena in terms of the invisible structures and forces of the universe. They seemed to be succeeding. In addition to Galileo’s telescopic and astronomical discoveries, the microscope was opening up a different kind of previously unseen world. Using an instrument sent to him by Galileo, Prince Cesi made the first known microscopic observations in the 1620s. Cesi’s observations of bees were recorded in engravings by Francesco Stelluti and used as a device to seek approval for the Academy of Lynxes from Urban VIII, whose family coat of arms featured three large bees.
Debates between realists and anti-realists continue to form a lively and fascinating part of the philosophy of science. Each side rests on a very plausible intuition. The realist intuition is that our sense impressions are caused by an external world that exists and has properties independently of human observers, so that it is reasonable to try to discover what those properties are, whether the entities in question are directly observable by us or not. The anti-realist intuition is that all we ever discover, either individually or collectively, is how the world appears to us. We live in an endless series of mental impressions, which we can never compare with the nature of things in themselves. We cannot, even for an instant, draw back the veil of phenomena to check whether our descriptions of reality are right. We can have no knowledge of the world beyond the impression it makes on us, and so, the antirealist concludes, we should remain agnostic about the hidden forces and structures which scientists hypothesize about in their attempts to explain those impressions.
4. Francesco Stelluti’s Melissographia (1625), produced using a microscope provided by Galileo, and dedicated to Pope Urban VIII
Modern debates about scientific realism have centred on the question of the success of science. Realists argue that the success of scientific theories – quantum physics, for instance – that posit unobservable entities in explaining physical phenomena, in intervening in nature to produce new effects, and in providing ever more detailed and accurate predictions, would be a miracle unless those entities, such as electrons, actually existed and had the properties scientists ascribed to them. Anti-realists have a couple of good responses to this. First, they can point out that the history of science is a graveyard of now-abandoned theories which were once the most successful available but which posited entities we now do not believe existed. This would apply to the 18th-century theory of combustion, according to which a substance known as ‘phlogiston’ was given off when things burned. Another example is the ‘ether’ of 19th-centu
ry physics – a physical medium that was supposed to be necessary for the propagation of electromagnetic waves. Since theories we now take to be untrue have made successful predictions in the past (including also Ptolemaic astronomy, which was hugely successful for many centuries), there is no reason to suppose that today’s successful theories are true. Both true and untrue theories can produce accurate empirical predictions.
A second anti-realist argument was put forward by two influential philosophers of science in the 20th century – Thomas Kuhn and Bas van Fraassen. Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, has become a classic in the field and one of the most widely read books about scientific knowledge. The book focused on what Kuhn called ‘paradigm shifts’ in the history of science, when one dominant world view was replaced by another, as in the case of Copernican astronomy replacing the Ptolemaic theory, or Einsteinian physics replacing pure Newtonianism. Kuhn portrayed scientific progress as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. He did not think that the improved accuracy and predictive power of later theories showed that they had progressed further towards true descriptions of reality, but rather that they had been chosen by the scientific community from among the various proposed theories because of their improved instrumental power and puzzle-solving ability. Bas van Fraassen, in his 1980 book The Scientific Image, also made use of this ‘Darwinian’ explanation of the success of science. Since scientists will discard theories that make false predictions (as nature discards non-adaptive variations) and keep hold of those that make successful predictions, he argued, the fact that as time goes on their predictions get better is no surprise at all, let alone a miracle. They were selected for precisely that instrumental success, and there is no need for a further appeal to unobservable realities to explain that success.
Science and religion have a shared concern with the relationship between the observable and the unobservable. The Nicene Creed includes the statement that God made ‘all that is, seen and unseen’. St Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that ‘since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made’. However, there are anti-realists among theologians too. The intuition here is similar to that of the scientific anti-realist. We have no way (at least not yet) to check our ideas about God against divine reality, and so propositions about God derived from scripture, tradition, or reason should not be treated as literally true but only as attempts to make sense of human experiences and ideas. At one extreme, theological anti-realism can seem akin to atheism. There is also a more orthodox tradition of mystical and ‘negative’ theology which emphasizes the gulf between the transcendence of God and the limited cognitive powers of mere humans, and draws the conclusion that it would be presumptuous to suppose any human formulation could grasp divine reality. One problem with this is that if human reason is too weak to make any true statements at all about the attributes of God, then it would seem that the statement that God exists does not amount to much. For that reason, many have continued to try to look beyond the seen to the unseen, hoping to succeed in the apparently impossible task of drawing back the veil of phenomena to discover how things really are.
Among those who believe they have succeeded in seeing behind the veil, there are conflicting accounts of what is to be found there – an impersonal cosmic machine, a chaos of matter in motion, a system governed by strict natural laws, or an omnipotent God acting in and through his creation. Which should we believe?
Chapter 3
Does God act in nature?
Supernatural signs and wonders have historically performed an important social function, marking out individuals, movements, or institutions as endowed with special God-given authority. The ability to perform miracles has been ascribed to revolutionaries, teachers, prophets, saints, and even to particular places and physical objects. The apparent power to resist the most irresistible of all forces – the forces of nature – has provided inspiration and hope to many communities facing persecution, poverty, or natural disasters.
Take, for example, the story of an early Christian martyr called Agatha. This beautiful and chaste young woman was a member of a group of persecuted Christians in 3rd-century Sicily. She rejected the amorous advances of a local Roman official, who punished her by banishing her to the local brothel. The legend has it that when Agatha refused to give up either her purity or her faith she was subjected to further tortures and punishments, which included having her breasts cut off with pincers. In Roman Catholic iconography, Agatha is sometimes depicted carrying her amputated breasts on a plate. Although her wounds were said to have been healed miraculously by a vision of St Peter, Agatha was condemned to further punishments, including being dragged across burning coals and broken glass. During this final punishment, the story goes, an earthquake was sent by God, which killed several Roman officials. Shortly afterwards Agatha herself died in prison.
The story of St Agatha, virgin and martyr, does not end there, however. After her death, Agatha was adopted by the people of Catania in Sicily as their protector and patron saint. According to local folklore, in the year after Agatha’s death Mount Etna erupted, and when the martyr’s veil was held up towards it, the volcanic lava was seen to change direction, leaving the city unharmed. The veil is reported to have protected the inhabitants of Catania from volcanic eruptions in the same miraculous way on several subsequent occasions. St Agatha’s intercession is also credited by some believers with having prevented the plague from spreading to Catania in 1743. In these cases, the supernatural intervention of a particular saint was sought as protection against natural disasters which were themselves interpreted as acts of God. The supposed interactions between natural and supernatural agencies are not straightforward, but the message is clear: God cares for the people of Catania and, because of their association with St Agatha, will protect them.
The ability of God, either directly or through the intercession of specially chosen saints and prophets, to contravene the laws of nature in order to achieve his will is asserted by all the major religious traditions. God’s various revelations of himself to Moses, to St Paul and the apostles, and through the angel Gabriel to Muhammad are themselves believed to be miraculous. The Bible records that Moses divided the Red Sea, that God sent plagues upon the Egyptians to punish them, and provided manna from heaven to feed his chosen people. The gospels assert that Jesus walked on water, healed the sick, brought the dead back to life, and was himself miraculously resurrected after dying on the cross. The Quran includes reports of miracles performed by Moses and Jesus, including an episode, not included in the Bible, when Jesus is said to have fashioned clay into the shape of a bird and miraculously breathed life into it to create a real bird.
5. St Agatha carrying her breasts on a plate, as depicted by the 17th-century painter Francisco de Zurbaran
Although there has been debate among Muslims about whether Muhammad himself performed any miracles, there is a reference in the Quran to the splitting of the moon, which was interpreted as miraculous confirmation of Muhammad’s prophetic status.
Reports of miracles persist to this day. They frequently come in the form of miraculous cures of the kind sought by pilgrims to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes in France, or by those who attend revivalist religious meetings presided over by charismatic preachers offering divine healing. From time to time there are reports of religious statues weeping blood or, as occurred in New Delhi in September 1995, drinking milk. When the story spread that statues of the Hindu deities Ganesh and Shiva had seemed to drink spoonfuls of milk, the phenomenon was soon being replicated in temples not only in India but all around the world, including in Britain, where some supermarkets experienced a sudden increase in demand for milk. In this case, as in most others, a rational and scientific explanation was soon offered – namely that the liquid was being drawn out of the spoon by capillary action (the same process tha
t allows sponges and paper towels to absorb liquid), and was then simply running down the front of the statue. There was also a political explanation readily to hand. The ruling Congress Party in India claimed that the news of the alleged miracle was being spread by their Hindu nationalist opponents for electoral gain. The leader of one right-wing Hindu party, speaking in defence of the miracle, said: ‘Scientists who dismiss it are talking nonsense. Most of them are atheists and communists.’
Signs, wonders, and miracles have a central place in religious traditions, whether as evidence of the special status of particular individuals, as proofs of the truth of particular doctrines, or as support for the broader secular and political aspirations of a movement. Although some believers welcome such things as apparent proofs of the reality and power of God, others are embarrassed by them. Reports of miracles seem, all too often, to be the results of such human weaknesses as wishful thinking, credulity, or even fraud, rather than anything supernatural. They can make religion seem superstitious and primitive. Believers as well as sceptics ask themselves whether stories of the miraculous and the supernatural are really credible in a scientific age. And, as we shall see in this chapter, the theological, philosophical, and moral questions raised about miracles are every bit as difficult to answer as the scientific ones.