Galileo, Science, and the Necessity Of Proof
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Not long ago, someone at a Web site called “The Smirking Chimp” saw an episode of my EWTN series “The Catholic Church: Builder of Civilization” (based on my book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization) and took me to task for my comments about Galileo. According to the Chimpster, my argument was: “Galileo had only a theory, and not ‘ironclad proof’ of anything.”
“With this kind of logic,” he goes on to warn, “what voter can parse subtly the relative merits of difficult moral issues?” Um, come again?
His argument, best as I can make it out, is this: People like me offer sledgehammerish arguments about subtle questions, and thus my point about Galileo is likely to lead Catholics to make poor electoral decisions. (See if you can glean from it anything more coherent than that.)
I’ll leave aside his strange point that if it weren’t for abortion, Catholics would surely see that “everything in their worldview” should lead them to vote for an establishment hack like Barack Obama. For what it’s worth, I support neither of the empty suits the major parties are offering us, since both are dangerous on the economy and hopeless on foreign policy (anyone who thinks Obama represents “change” hasn’t really been listening to him or looking at his foreign-policy team).
The three points I was making on the EWTN episode Mr. Chimp watched are not all that controversial, yet he seems to have grasped none of them. The first was that it was still intellectually respectable to be a geocentrist in Galileo’s day. It is not the case that 17th-century geocentrists were imbeciles who refused, or were unable, to follow a simple argument; Tycho Brahe was not exactly a moron, and he was unpersuaded by Galileo’s case. The latter’s attempt to use the tides as evidence of the earth’s motion could hardly be taken seriously. And he could not answer the key geocentrist objection involving stellar parallax, which I explained in great detail in the very episode my critic complains about. So describing Galileo’s case as lacking “ironclad proof” is the least one could say about it.
(Of course, my critic mentions none of this — all the better to caricature my position, and make me seem like the one oversimplifying things. Physician, heal thyself!)
Read the article: http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4259&Itemid=48
