On Lew Rockwell, Gene Callahan comes up with a quiz which allegedly shows that religion is not the enemy of scientific progress. That may well be true but did he have to doctor the results to prove it? His first question reads:
1. When Galileo faced the Inquisition, he held that the Earth moved around the Sun, while the Inquisition believed that the Sun moved around the Earth. According to modern science:
a) the Inquisition was correct
b) Galileo was correct
c) neither was more or less correct than the other
His ‘answer’ is the following quote from Whitehead
c. As Alfred North Whitehead puts it: “Galileo said that the earth moves and that the sun is fixed; the Inquisition said that the earth is fixed and the sun moves; and Newtonian astronomers… said that both the sun and the earth move. But now we say that any one of these three statements is equally true, provided that you have fixed your sense of ‘rest’ and ‘motion’ in the way required by the statement adopted” (1967 [1925]
Umm, the point being? Of course all objects in space move and galaxies revolve too but that is not the point or was not the point at issue – none of the parties involved would have known about revolving galaxies and the Big Crunch and all that. Nor was the dispute over semantics a la Clinton’s definition of ‘is’ – it was over which was the better model for explaining and predicting astronomical phenomena. And for reasons that had little to do with logic and efficaciousness the church was violently opposed to the heliocentric model – that is the point.
And what about Question 6 where he asserts with complete confidence that none of these people were atheists?
a) Aristotle
b) Frances Bacon
c) Galileo
d) Descartes
e) Pascal
f) Newton
g) Robert Boyle
h) Michael Faraday
i) Joseph Clerk Maxwell
j) Gregor Mendel
k) Louis Pasteur
l) Max Planck
m) Albert Einstein
Never mind that some of them lived in an age when to be branded an atheist was to fall into pariahdom. Never mind that Einstein probably used the term ‘God’ metaphorically.
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