Science
Truth Held Hostage
Galileo Galilei
How do we begin to deal with the tension between science and faith?
by Gene Breitenbach
The last half of this century has seen a growing battle between Christianity and science, particularly in North America. Suspicion, distrust, and ignorance has polarized many on both sides of the debate, while a quieter set just tries to get along in the work of discovering truth. There are those within the scientific community who have overstepped the tools of their discipline to make philosophical and theological pronouncements under the guise of scientific observation. There are also Christians who have reacted to discoveries about the natural world before they have understood the discoveries. In their reactions they have failed to reexamine their assumptions about their own interpretation of Scripture to make sure those interpretations were in fact correct. It is this Christian reaction that can be best informed by looking back to the controversy that surrounded Galileo’s later life.
Galileo Galilei’s contribution to science and to the Christian community as a whole is significant. Some point to this man, with his strong devotion to truth and to God, as the father of modern science. His first interest was in mathematics and physics, but when the telescope was invented in 1608, his attentions were devoted. His interests were partly financial. He thought that if he could improve upon the first telescopes it would lead him to a better position. In fact, his work did better his position. But his involvement didn't stop there. His telescope was powerful enough to begin to scan the heavens, and Galileo’s interest turned to astronomy. It was because of this shift that Galileo found himself in the middle of controversy.
His observations of the planets, sun, and stars led him to believe that Copernicus’s earlier observation that the Earth revolved around the sun was in fact true. As he published these observations, Galileo began to receive opposition from within the church. There were those who believed that everything written within Scripture was to be read literally. For them, Scripture not only explained the nature of God, mankind, and salvation, but it also contained a flawless picture of the natural world. Since Scripture used phrases that described the sun rising and setting, and since the story in Jeremiah described the sun stopping in the heavens, they had decided the sun must revolve around the Earth. From their perspective, anyone who questioned this belief was questioning the validity of Scripture itself.
In the debate that followed, Galileo wrote extensively about the relationship between scientific inquiry and scriptural authority. In that debate Galileo lost out. He was forced to renounce what he knew to be true and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. Yet, while he lost in the short run, both his observations about the relationship between the sun and the Earth and his observations about the relationship between science and Scripture have been shown to be accurate.
I don’t claim originality for what follows. My hope here is to convey some of Galileo’s thoughts and some of the sources of that thought. Perhaps one of the best, concise sources for Galileo’s ideas is found in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (this can be found in The Galileo Affair edited and translated by Maurice A. Finocchiaro. I have used this for the quotations found below).
First, Galileo made the observation that his detractors were more involved in proving themselves right than in serving the truth. Instead of observing nature, gathering data, and presenting rational reasons for their positions, many of Galileo’s detractors involved themselves in a smear campaign. They attacked his character rather than his data. The label “heretic” was quickly brought into the battle. This practice is easy to find repeated today in the Christian debate over the age of the Earth. Galileo observed that this is the tactic of someone trying to protect their ego and unwilling to reexamine their assumption for fear of having to change their position.
Secondly, Galileo believed that God’s primary concern in Scripture was to communicate the truth about His own nature and character, mankind’s nature, and salvation. In that task, specific references to nature were incidental. God made use of figures of speech such as sunrise and sunset because they were familiar and not because He was trying to describe the sun’s flight around the Earth. This idea did not originate with Galileo. It had long been common knowledge that Scripture uses familiar images to describe God that are not to be taken literally. There is mention of God’s hands, feet, wings, finger, etc. Yet Scripture is quite clear that God is spirit and has no physical form. The use of imagery to describe the invisible is one to communicate attributes of God that we cannot directly observe or understand. God uses the familiar to convey the unfamiliar.
John Calvin spoke of this in his Commentary on the Psalms (vol. 5). “The holy Spirit had no intention to teach astronomy; and in proposing instruction meant to be common to the simplest and most uneducated person, he made use by Moses and other prophets of the popular language that none might shelter himself under the pretext of obscurity.” In other words, God wanted to communicate himself to humanity and didn't want the message to be lost because he was referring to side issues in astronomy (biology?) that were difficult to understand without years of study.
In addition, Galileo believed that since the author of Scripture and the universe is one in the same then the two should agree with each other. If they appeared to disagree, then the fault did not lie in the Scripture or nature but in the interpretation of Scripture being held to. In this Galileo was not alone. St. Augustine had written the same thing in his “Letter to Marcellinus”. Pererius had written in his work “On Genesis” that “In treating of Moses’ doctrine, one must take diligent care to completely avoid holding and saying positively and categorically anything which contradicts the decisive observations and reasons of philosophy or other disciplines; In fact, since all truth always agree with one another, the truth of the Holy Scripture cannot be contrary to the true reasons and observations of human doctrines.” (realize here that the word “doctrine” is being used differently than we currently tend to use the word. Here it speaks of conclusions, such as physical laws, derived from observation and logical thought.)
Here the idea of truth is central. All truth originates with God whether it is transmitted through Scripture or reflected in the natural order. To ignore the observations of science in order to maintain and propagate a personal interpretation does damage to the ministry of the gospel. Again, Galileo draws on the wisdom of one of the church’s great early apologists: St. Augustine (On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis). “In fact, it often happens that even a non-Christian has views based on very conclusive reasons or observations about the earth, heavens, the other element of this world, the motion and revolutions or the size and distances of the stars, the eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of years and epochs, the nature of animals, of plants, of rocks, and similar things. Now, it is very scandalous, as well as harmful and to be avoided at all costs, that any infidel should hear a Christian speak about these things as if he were doing so in accordance with Christian Scripture and should see him err so deliriously as to be forced into laughter. The distressing thing is not so much that an erring man should be laughed at, but that our authors should be thought by outsiders to believe such things, and should be criticized and rejected as ignorant, to the great detriment of those whose salvation we care about. For how can they believe our books in regard to the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they catch a Christian committing an error about something else they know very well, when they declare false his opinion taken from those books, and when they find these full of fallacies in regard to things they have already been able to observe or to establish by unquestionable argument?”
This does not mean that we throw away Biblical truth. None of the authors and teachers mentioned so far would suggest that. But we must make sure that our pronouncements from Scripture deal with the true subject matter of the Scriptures. Scripture is not completely silent about nature, but our interpretations must be informed by our observations. It is easy to misunderstand any piece of communication when we don’t have all the facts. A new piece of information may shed a whole new light on our understanding of the author’s intent. At the same time, God’s main intent throughout Scripture, that which He intended we understand from the beginning, has been clear from the beginning. The basics of His gospel are there for all to see. The depth of the gospel will require more than a lifetime to understand, but the basic message is clear.
There are two more solutions Galileo suggests. One is that we remain humble in our understanding. God has a corner on the truth, but we are still learning. That requires us to keep asking questions and to allow God to teach and surprise us. The second is to start our examination of nature in a different place than we start our exploration for God. God is a person and, as with any person, can only be truly understood through revelation. Therefore, we seek His revelation in Scripture in order to begin to know Him. But nature is different. Nature is a thing and can be studied. Here Galileo suggests that we not try to find our answers in Scripture and then look at the natural world. Science begins with observation, exploration, and experimentation. It is this distinction that makes Galileo the father of modern science. He doesn't begin with Scripture or philosophy. Instead, he first gets his hands dirty in the physical world.
Galileo’s words are a needed guidance for the current interaction between science and Christianity. We do God a favor, when we remember these past warnings. What conclusions do pre-Christians come to when they hear us talk about a universe that’s only 4,000 years old when we can easily measure light from distant stars that is much older? When science slips into philosophy, as in those moments when biologists insist that their observations about mutations imply there is no God, we should be there to protest the sloppy use of other disciplines and illogical conclusions. But who will be listening if we ignore the simple observations and try to believe things are as they are not? We can retreat into our personal and unquestioned interpretations and declare everyone a heretic who does not agree with us. But Galileo and most of church history would suggest that there is a better way.