The Evolution-Creation Ground War; The Geological Column

Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango? Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me

(Galileo) Galileo, (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo Figaro magnifico, (Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh) Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody

Galileo 2.0

The Galileo vs. the Catholic Church controversy is often portrayed as a conflict between religion and its sworn enemy, science. Religion won the battle that lost the war; end of story, lesson apparently learned. This makes a good narrative but a false one.

 The real lesson is quite different and it goes out to the scientific establishment. Science should beware of fossilized thinking; it should remain flexible and open to new ideas and avoid becoming doctrinal. The study of science in service of some brand loyalty will grow stagnant and cease to pursue truth. Scientists discover more by thinking outside the box rather than doubling down on a current position without new evidence.

Religion, in turn, must avoid cozying up to briefly popular political, scientific, and academic world views. In short, we, the Church, need to quit trying to be "one of the cool kids", and try being the light of the world.

But first some background. A war of scientific opinions raged between geocentrism (the sun revolves around the Earth) and heliocentrism (the Earth revolves around the sun). Both Galileo and Pope Urban VIII both appeared to believe the earth revolved around them. Galileo often focused on dispelling the ignorant than dispelling ignorance. He referred to opponents of heliocentric theory as "sub-human morons and pygmies", yet he struggled to answer the objections to the heliocentric model. In the end, the conclusive proof was left to others.

The war of cosmologies was being fought on two fronts: the collection of data through astronomy and the interpretation of such data. Galileo advanced the heliocentric cause by his observations of the planets via telescope, but his glitchy interpretation of the overall data prevented him from winning the argument. Today, a similar war of worldviews has arisen in the evolution vs. creation debate. The collection of data advances relentlessly as we gain a more complete picture of the fossil record and the geological column. The interpretation of the data is where the real clash is going on. Is the fossil record evidence for a worldwide flood, or is it evidence of 500 million years of yoyo stasis and extinction events? To me, both interpretations have their strong points. For that reason, examining the last war of this type could be instructive.

The Name Recognition Game: "Copernicus" or "Ptolemy".

Ask the man on the street today about Copernicus and Ptolemy, chances are they'd say "Yes, for my man Copernicus but... Ptolemy who?" It would have been the exact opposite in Galileo's day. Ptolemy, who died in 160 A.D., was considered a cross-disciplinary genius in the sciences, reaching G.O.A.T. status, most especially in the field of astronomy. He managed to maintain his scientific celebrity status well over 1200 years. The Aristotelian establishment was fangirling Ptolemy the way Karl Marx did with Darwin. (Sorry, mainstream media, the prize goes to Karl, but you definitely get an honorable mention) In science education today, there is too much fangirling of Darwinism and too little critical thinking about it. A debate on the subject would do much to spur interest and learning for all. But I digress.

Circular Thinking and Epicycles

In 1543, a Polish priest, Nicolas Copernicus, came up with the heliocentric model. Unfortunately, the Copernican system didn't make accurate predictions of the positions of planets in time while the incorrect Ptolemaic system could. Why? Circular thinking and epicycles.

Ptolemy assumed that the orbits of the sun and planets around the earth were perfectly circular. However, to reach mathematical accuracy, he had to add fudge factors called epicycles. These were smaller loop-de-loops the planets made during their larger orbit. This greatly added to the complexity of the geocentric model but allowed it to accurately predict such phenomena as eclipses and conjunctions of the planets. Plus, it had been doing this for over a 1000 years. For centuries, the trustworthiness of the Ptolemaic model was as incontrovertible as the colour of the sky.

Copernicus went ahead and adopted the Ptolemaic circular reasoning and assumed that the planets orbited the sun in perfect circles. The heliocentric system was much simpler and more elegant than the Ptolemaic system, but the math wouldn't work; it couldn't predict the conjunctions of planets. In an effort to fix that problem, Copernicus had to add 34 epicycles of his own to his model, and it became clunky with the elegance of a brick wall. The right basic concept had been over complicated by the one simple assumption that the universe moved in perfect circles.

A separate difficulty for the heliocentric model was explaining the absence of stellar parallax, which was an expected slight shift in the angle of observation of northern stars when the Earth was at opposite ends of its orbit. Telescopes and other such instruments were not advanced enough to observe stellar parallax until the 1830's.

Copernicus' and Ptolemy's models battled each other to a standstill, but the geocentric model held its ground based on it's very close mathematical accuracy. Had their computing power been better, perhaps it could have survived with more epicycles or fudge factors. Galileo gained ground for the Copernican model with his telescope when he discovered that Venus had phases like the moon. Tycho Brahe proposed a modified Ptolemaic system where Mercury and Venus orbited the sun with the sun, in turn, continuing to orbit the earth. Unfortunately, no one at this point was able to solve the Copernican model's math problem.

A Misinformation and Disinformation Governance Board for God!

In Luke Chapter 12, a man approaches Jesus and says "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Jesus replies “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?”

It would have been wise for the Catholic Church in the 1600's to take a lesson from Jesus (i.e. WWJD), but this didn't happen. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine was serving as the Vatican's Master of Controversial Questions. This post amounted to being somewhere between a peer review officer and a Misinformation and Disinformation Governance board. The Copernican model had been called heretical by some because Joshua 10:13 records that during a battle, a miracle occurred. "The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day". Many, including Galileo, subscribed to Cardinal Baronio's dictum, "the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." Nonetheless, the short passage in Joshua had been press-ganged into the debate on the geocentric side. As the scientific question was still very much debated and very much undecided, Bellarmine went for a compromise. He allowed Galileo to hold the Copernican system as a working hypothesis and publish as such, but forbade him from claiming it as a proven fact. Before we get too worked up about these speech restrictions and declare them Whore-of-Babylon-worthy, let us recall our recent past. Not many years ago, to hold publicly that the Covid-19 virus resulted from a Wuhan lab-leak rather than a Wuhan wet market, was being against humankind and science. Galileo chafed under these regulations from 1616 on, but by 1630 the landscape had totally changed. Cardinal Bellarmine was dead and Pope Urban VIII, a friend of Galileo, stood at the head of the Catholic Church.

Fossilized Thinking and Rhetorical Excesses

Galileo wasted little time securing permission from Pope Urban VIII to revisit the cosmology question in the form of a play, specifically Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems. Pope Urban required that the dialogue end in a draw and neither system be endorsed. However, when the work was published, the Copernican spokesman utterly demolished the Ptolemaic speaker Simplicio, whose name strongly echoes the word simpleton. To add to the insult, Simplicio, with a parrot's sense of timing, chirps up woodenly with the Ptolemaic arguments Pope Urban had requested Galileo include. The Pope was infuriated, not least because he assumed Simplicio was a caricature of himself due to some noticeable similarities.

In the dialogue, the thunderous success of the Copernican side was crowned with Galileo's pet "proof" for heliocentrism, one that he had come up with himself: (drum roll please), the Theory of the Tides. This was the bogus concept that tides arose from the sloshing back and forth of the oceans as the Earth made its circuit around the sun.

Galileo was a great scientist and had the openness of mind and sense of curiosity that allowed him to make great strides in discovery. However, he did have his share of fossilized thinking and ego that prevented to from reaching greater heights. In any scientific debate, both humility and curiosity of the disputants will lead to uncovering fresh truth. Let's make science great again.

On a side note, if Galileo and Donald Trump were to have a humility contest, it's hard to predict who would win (although we can be pretty sure both would claim victory.) Galileo wrote, "To me and to me alone, it has been given to make all the discoveries in astronomy." This attitude caused him to spurn offers for collaboration from Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who would effectively end the debate. Kepler theorized correctly that tides were caused by the moon and that the planets orbits were elliptical, not perfect circles. Had Galileo thought outside the box, given Kepler more of a hearing, he might have discovered more of the secrets of the universe. He may have been the man to definitively prove heliocentrism. Due to his egocentric behaviour, he lost that opportunity. He clung tenaciously onto Copernicus's cumbersome epicycles and to his theory of the tides until his death.

Galileo's stunt with his play was "punished" with house arrest in a palace. A French visitor recorded that Galileo worked "in an apartment covered in silk and most richly furnished." The only instrument of torture inflicted Galileo was a requirement that he attend a weekly recitation of penitential psalms, but even those he was allowed to pass off to his daughter, Sister Marie Celeste, a Carmelite nun.

Are there Epicycles Today?

One may ask, does modern science have a new set of epicycles to make theories work? I'm not an astrophysicist, but I wonder about such things as the recent idea that 85% of the universe is made up of dark matter. Apparently, there is no way to observe dark matter, but it somehow stabilizes both the universe and our theoretical math. There's also the phenomenon that galaxies at the edge of the universe are moving away at impossible speed-of-light velocities; either that or our interpretation of what is causing the red shift is incorrect. Then there is the assumption that the speed of light is perfectly constant. This leads to all sorts of weird stuff like bends in the space-time continuum. Science is full of working theories and assumptions for the sake of calculation, as it has been for many centuries. The Oracle of Delphi declared Socrates to be the wisest man in Athens, primarily because he knew what he didn't know. Is it possible that both laymen and the scientific community need that wisdom and humility today?

P.S. The bulk of the Galileo info I got from "The Six Days of Creation" by Thomas Mary Sennott. It is well researched, and it shares similarities to Galileo's Dialogue in that it adopts a discussion format.

Please check out the other comics on the FearoftheLordcomics  website:

Repentance                      The Refining Fire           The Christmas Present 

The NROP Glasses           The Rise of Nothing   God vs Man: Who made Who?

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