Will the Pope Send Galileo a Birthday Card Today?

[Update] Poll Added

While February 15th  is, indeed, Galileo’s Birthday (he’d be 444 years old), given recent pronouncements from the current papacy, I doubt he’d find any Hallmark cards bearing a "Vatican City" postmark in his mailbox today ... and here’s why:

Last month Pope Benedict XVI chose to cancel his speech at Rome’s most prestigious university (La Sapienza) following widespread protests as a result of his own words spoken there 17 years ago as Cardinal Ratzinger when he then declared that during the time of the Church’s Inquisition, its heresy trial and conviction of Galileo for asserting that the earth actually revolves around the sun (which the Inquisition judged "absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures") was, in Benedict’s humble opinion, a "rational and just" verdict.

Or to be more precise ...

The familiar gambit Benedict has frequently employed to proclaim his controversial opinions (in that instance, to say the Church was quite correct in convicting Galileo of heresy for believing the earth revolves around the sun) was by concurring with his chosen surrogate’s quote – that time by the late 20th century maverick philosopher Paul Feyerabend who opined: "The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just."

Benedict’s pattern of using a surrogate to do his dirty deeds continued from the onset of his papacy when his good friend and ally, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn as the archbishop of Vienna, wrote a 2005 Op-Ed essay in The New York Times.  In it he contradicted Pope John Paul II’s stand by claiming that "Evolution in the Neo-Darwinian sense... is not true."  And going even further in his effort to draw a line between evolution and religious faith, Schönborn dismissed John Paul’s II’s landmark 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy by calling it "rather vague and unimportant."

Pope Benedict’s enmity toward science is particularly disturbing in light of Pope John Paul II and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ study of the Galileo heresy trial culminating in 1996 when Pope John Paul II expressed deep regret at the way the Church had treated Galileo.

Their determinations included these conciliatory words: "The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture."

Using Schönborn as his proxy, Benedict’s deeply disturbing papal conversion against science immediately prompted a response from Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss (Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Director, Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics, Case Western Reserve University).

More astonishingly, Prof. Krauss was joined in the signing of his gentle rebuke of the Church’s stand against evolution by two eminent and uniquely qualified scientists: Dr. Francisco Ayala (University Professor and Donal Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine), who had previously been a priest; and Dr. Kenneth Miller (Professor of Biology, Royce Family Professor for Teaching Excellence, Brown University), who is not only a devout Catholic, but was a key witness in assisting the ACLU in prevailing against "Intelligent Design" during the landmark Dover, PA trial – the first direct challenge brought in our federal courts against a public school district that had required the presentation of "Intelligent Design" as an alternative to Evolution.

In their letter to Pope Benedict they wrote:

Your Holiness:

In his magnificent letter to the Pontifical Academy in 1996 regarding the subject of Evolution, Pope John Paul II affirmed that scientific rationality and the Church's spiritual commitment to divine purpose and meaning in the Universe were not incompatible.  The Pope accepted that biological Evolution had progressed beyond the hypothetical stage as a guiding principle behind the understanding of the evolution of diverse life forms on Earth, including humans.  At the same time, he rightly recognized that the spiritual significance that one draws from the scientific observations and theory lie outside of the scientific theories themselves.  In this sense, claiming that evolution definitely implies a lack of divinity, and/or divine purpose in nature is as much an affront to science as it is to the Church.

The Holy Father also recognized: "It is important to set proper limits to the understanding of Scripture, excluding any unseasonable interpretations which would make it mean something which it is not intended to mean. In order to mark out the limits of their own proper fields, theologians and those working on the exegesis of the Scripture need to be well informed regarding the results of the latest scientific research. "   Since scientific investigations have repeatedly confirmed evolution by natural selection as a guiding principle for understanding the development of the diversity of life on Earth, theologians who are interested in exploring such questions as human dignity and purpose must take this mechanism into account in their considerations. As he put it, quoting from Leo XIII, truth cannot contradict truth.

It appears that such days of bonhomie are no longer possible under the stark prescript of Benedict.

Just a little over a year ago Pope Benedict’s preferred pattern of calumny by surrogacy received widespread media attention when he chose to quote a 14th century Byzantine emperor: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."  But when Muslims rightfully took umbrage, Benedict took refuge by claiming it wasn’t him actually saying it ... it was just him quoting somebody else saying it.

(Not sure about you, but I lose count how many times a day an unbidden quote from some 14th century Byzantine emperor just happens to pop into my head for no reason whatsoever.)

In this same lecture, Benedict discussed the role of religion in rational inquiry and made the claim that Science is deficient in the search for Truth if it ignores the contribution made by Religion.

Let’s listen to Benedict’s exact words concerning modern science: "While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them.  We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons.  In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith."

But, Your Holiness, Science is precisely about the empiric testing of hypotheses – whereas Religion is based on "faith" and people employing it to help them in life (both here and now, and the hereafter).  The notion of "God" is most certainly of great value to billions of people.  But it is not anything that can be empirically verified – and so it is not useful in scientific inquiry into the nature of reality.  Benedict’s assertion that Science is somehow irrational or deficient by excluding Religion from its search for Truth, to be blunt about it, is just holy hokum.

Benedict has not been dissuaded: neither chastened in his stance, nor feeling he’s gone far enough in waging his "Holy War on Science", in his 2007 encyclical "Spe Salvi Facti Sumus" (in hope we were saved) he urged Christians to place their hope in God – to the virtual exclusion of modernity – implying science’s "soulmate", atheism, was responsible for some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" in history.

Given the Church’s own less than exemplar past as witnessed by its Crusades, its Inquisitions (there were more than just one), its history of anti-Semitism along with its sheltering of pederastic priests guilty of sexually molesting children, it would seem that before branding those who have not cleaved to Benedict’s notions as being responsible for the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" in history, Benedict may have been better served by heeding the admonition in Matthew 7:3 (KJV): "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

Both as a physician and as someone who believes in God, I am deeply concerned at the risk to all of us if Science becomes perverted by the motives of pious theocrats who are interested in pandering to fear, who want to gain dominance by the promotion of ignorance, and who try to distort the fruits of those who labor in the vineyards of science.  Throughout history, this very pattern is the "canary in the coal mine" that preceded each Dark Age.

Across America, school boards are approving the teaching of "Intelligent Design" right alongside Evolution in science classes.  They employ the flawed notion that all conjectured hypotheses are equally entitled to a "look-see".

Science does not work that way: some hypotheses are collectively rejected because either they are not supported by empiric testing and observation – or, in the case of creationism, because there is no known feasible way of testing the claims made.  This means that the assertions made by creationist zealots are neither provable nor refutable, and therefore not within the discipline of scientific scrutiny.

While both Science and Religion may be informed by one another in certain aspects – to conflate them would be like comparing apples to lug nuts.  And yet that is what Benedict appears to be dangerously trying to accomplish.

In turning the tables on traditional Birthday gift-giving, I’ll conclude by letting Galileo bestow his gifts to all of us through his own sage words:

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.