Letter
from Galileo to Madama Christina, the Grand Duchess Dowager (excerpts)
1615
Some years ago, as Your Serene Highness well knows,
I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before
our own
age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which
followed
from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held
among
academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of
professors-as
if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to
upset
nature and overturn the Sciences ....
Showing
a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth, they sought
to deny
and disprove the new things which, if they had cared to look for
themselves,
their own senses would have demonstrated to them. To this end they
hurled
various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain
arguments, and
they made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken
from places
in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly…
Hence,
in expounding the Bible, if one were always to confine oneself to the
unadorned
grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions
and
propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible,
but even
grave heresies and follies. Thus it would be necessary to assign to God
feet,
hands, and eyes, as well as corporeal and human affections, such as
anger,
repentance, hatred, and sometimes even the forgetting of things past
and
ignorance of those to come.... For that reason it appears that nothing
physical
which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary
demonstrations
prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon
the
testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning
beneath
their words....
I question whether there is not some
equivocation in failing to specify the virtues which entitle sacred
theology to
the title of 'queen'. It might deserve that name by reason of including
everything that is learned from all the other sciences and establishing
everything by better methods and with profounder learning .... Or
theology
might be queen because of being occupied with a subject which excels in
dignity
all the subjects which compose the other sciences, and because her
teachings
are divulged in more sublime ways.
That the title and authority of queen belongs to
theology
in the first sense, I think will not be affirmed by theologians who
have any
skill in the other sciences. None of these, I think, will say that
geometry;
astronomy, music, and medicine are more excellently contained in the
Bible than
they are in the books of Archimedes, Ptolemy, Boethius, and Galen.
Hence it
seems likely that regal pre-eminence is given to theology in the second
sense;
that is, by reason of its subject and the miraculous communication, by
divine
revelation, of conclusions which could not be conceived by men in
any other
way, concerning chiefly the attainment of eternal blessedness.
Let us grant then that theology is conversant with the
loftiest divine contemplation, and occupies the regal throne among the
sciences
by this dignity. But acquiring the highest authority in this way, if
she does
not descend to the lower and humbler speculations of the subordinate
sciences
and has no regard
for them because they are not concerned with blessedness, then her
professors
should not arrogate to themselves the authority to decide on
controversies in
professions which they have neither studied nor practiced. Why, this
would be
as if an absolute despot, being neither a physician nor an architect,
but
knowing himself free to command, should undertake to administer
medicines and
erect buildings according to his whim-at grave peril of his poor
patients'
lives, and the speedy collapse of his edifices....
And as to the propositions
which are stated but not
rigorously demonstrated, anything contrary to the Bible involved by
them must
be held undoubtedly false and should be proved so by every possible
means..Now if truly demonstrated physical conclusions need
not be subordinated to biblical passages, but the latter must rather be
shown
not to interfere with the former, then before
a physical proposition is condemned it must be shown to be not
rigorously demonstrated-and this is to be done not by those
who hold the proposition
to be true, but by those who judge it to be false. This seems very
reasonable
and natural, for those who believe an argument to be false may much
more easily
find the fallacies in it than men who consider it to be true and
conclusive....
Source: Arthur Koestler, Sleepwalkers
(1959).