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GALILEO AND THE INFINITE SPECK:  TWO MYTHS

Copper Fox

(Copyright 1992.  The text of this work may be reproduced, in its entirety and without alteration of any kind, for free distribution.)



I was once for a short time an atheist and for a much longer time an agnostic.  If someone asked me why I rejected religious or mystical belief, I might have answered like this:

"You want me to believe in an entity -- a God, a Being, a Principle -- that created our universe and whose divine nature we somehow share.  But how?

"If our ancestors looked at the night sky and saw a divine face there, they can be forgiven.  They were ignorant.  They knew no better.  To the people of ancient and medieval times, the stars were only sparkling points of light, and the sun and moon were only globes of fire and ice no more than a few miles from the ground on which they stood.  Our forefathers had no inkling of the universe's staggering infinity and could innocently suppose themselves to be the center of all existence.

"We have no such excuse.  We know our world to be an infinitely small speck lost in a swarm of galaxies.  Our universe is vast -- vast and cold and empty.  Life must be rare in all that emptiness and intelligent life must be rarer still.  Quite likely we are the only creatures which look upon the stars and know the meaning of what we see.

"No, I'm sorry, your naive optimism won't do.  Such cosmic desolation allows us no illusions.  What was appropriate for simpler ages is not appropriate for ours."

Today many laymen feel, as I once felt, that spiritual faith is a frail blossom unable to survive in the harsh climate created by modern science.  Like the myth of Galileo's martyrdom, the idea that the universe's vast size and emptiness is a relatively recent scientific discovery turns up in many discussions among laymen about religious matters.  The acceptance of these two myths is so deeply entrenched in the popular mind that even many religious believers seldom question them.  Exactly such myths as these form the mental atmosphere in which the lay skeptic finds his disbelief so easy to come by.  He has heard them from childhood.  His teachers at school repeated them.  None of his peers question them.  In earlier ages, he would have had to work hard to achieve his disbelief;  the whole fabric of popular thought would have been against it.  In our time atheism and agnosticism are no longer the eccentric attitudes of an educated few; religious skepticism has acquired a popular tradition of myths.

Now, there is a curious thing about this popular idea that the vast size and desolation of the universe is somehow evidence against a Creator.  It isn't truly an argument at all but only a mood.  And that mood can be dispelled if we correct two errors, one a matter of poor reasoning, the other a matter of misinformation.

The skeptic may say (as I once said) that a universe devoid of all intelligence except our own casts serious doubut on the idea of a Creator. He could even fairly say that a universe thinly populated with intelligent races -- say, no more than one or two to a galaxy -- would be no more than we could reasonably expect from chance.  But not all skeptics hold the view that the cosmos are desolate.

When we come to the question of extraterrestrial intelligence, we find vigorous debate in the scientific community.  Even if we ignore the obvious sensationalists and cranks, there still remains a wide range of expert opinion and speculation.   On one side of the spectrum we find scientists who consider the existence of any intelligent race besides our own to be virtually impossible.  On the other side we find scientists who maintain that sentient races either exist or once existed in any direction of the heavens that we look.  Still other scientists take every possible position between the two extremes.

And we find religious skeptics on both sides.  On one hand, some maintain tha cosmic desolation provides strong evidence against the existence of a Creator.  But on the other, some maintain that even a universe  bursting at the seams with races like ours would still not disprove their skepticism; if we find intelligence everywhere we look, they reason, then intelligence is simply a natural phenomenon occurring wherever conditions favor it.

The matter is argued both ways.  If the heavens are empty, no Creator exists.   If the heavens are full, no Creator exists.

That is where the argument breaks down.

If we know what kind of information will prove an idea correct, we also know what kind of information will prove an idea wrong.  If we speculate that Smith went to the movies last night, we know that reliable witnesses can confirm our speculation by reporting that they saw him there.  But if our witnesses say that they saw Smith at home playing cards all evening, our idea is disproven.

To be consistent, a skeptic who maintains that a particular cosmology supports his disbelief must also know what sort of cosmology will not. He may maintain that a universe almost devoid of intelligent life is strong evidence against a Creator, but he must then accept a universe teeming with creatures like ourselves as strong evidence in a Creator's favor. If his disbelief remains unshaken whether the cosmos are fruitful or barren, then the question of universal desolation is irrelevant to it.  Neither the widespread presence nor the near total absence of sentient races supports his view.

Skeptics often point to the sheer immensity of the heavens to support their case, though how this should support disbelief is unclear.  Somehow the vast gulfs of interstellar space are supposed to chill our faith.  But how?  We find the same problem with this line of reasoning as we did with the argument based on the universe's supposed desolation.   If an infinite universe supports disbelief, how would a finite universe, even one only a few miles across, undermine it?  Since skepticism can remain untouched in either case, the size of the heavenly vault can scarcely be used as an argument against a Creator.  And yet many believe it can.

Remember that we are speaking of laymen, not scientists and scholars.  This connection between infinite space and religious disbelief is not a matter of reason but of emotion.  We are tribal cratures.  We are easily persuaded that our nation, our race, our religion, our political party or even our ball team is the best of all or at least better than most.  And what applies to our nation or our ball team applies to our age as well.  If the skeptical men of our age know the universe to be infinite (or practically infinite), then religious men of earlier ages -- to whom we feel superior in all ways -- must have been ignorant of the fact.  And here the lay skeptic lapses into a complete non sequiter.  Associating modern science with spiritual disbelief, he assumes our knowledge of the heavens' immensity somehow overthrows spiritual faith without establishing a clear logical connection.  The attitude rests upon pride in the superior knowledge of our own age and contempt for the supposed ignorance of earlier times.

This weak link becomes even weaker in the light of sound history.

In the year A.D. 1595, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci wrote about the "absurdities" of the Chinese.  Among other things, he complained that Chinese astronomers considered the sky an infinite void witht he stars floating in the emptiness attached to nothing.  Matteo Ricci was writing about the "Hsuan Yeh" school of astronomical thought, a theory that had enjoyed greater and lesser degrees of influence since the second century. Of this school, Ko Hung, the fourth century Chinese alchemist, wrote:

". . . the original books of the Hsuan Yeh school were all lost . . .  they said the heavens were entirely empty and void of substance . . .  The sun, the moon, and the company of stars float freely in empty space . . .  all of them are nothing but condensed vapor . . ."

Doesn't this have a peculiarly modern ring?

The Hsuan Yeh shcool was hardly unique.  Scholars maintain that the theory shows the obvious influence of the Buddhists, who believed centuries before Christ that time and space were infinite.  (Interestingly, the Buddha is said to have refused to comment about the shape of the cosmos, holding such knowldeged to be useless for spiritual liberation.)  Going even farther back, Buddhism owes much of its cosomoligical thought to the Hindu tradtitions from which it sprang.  Hindu concepts of the cosmos are stupendously complex and involve not only immense realms of infinite space but cycles of time hundreds of billions of years long.

Nor was the notion of infinite space confined to the East.  In the West, Claudius Ptolemy, whose geocentric model of the solar system held sway over European thought for fourteen centuries, had correctly inferred the depths of the universe as early as the second century.  In THE ALMAGEST, his master work on astronomy, Ptolemy argues that the fact that the stars appear the same in all latitudes means that the earth's size relative to its distance from the stars must be little more than that of a point in a line.  Neither was Ptolemy the first Westerner to so reason.  The idea had been expressed by various Greek thinkers such as the Stoics long before Ptolemy.  In THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE,  the Roman poet Lucretius wrote,  "Learn, therefore, that the universe is not bounded in any direction."

Though not in all times and places, men have known of the vastness of the cosmos since the earliest days of civilization.  And yet it is only in the las two centuries that the size of the heavens has widely been used as evidence against religious faith.

That attitude rests largely upon the misconception about the ignorace of earlier ages concerning the structure of the universe.  So long as one believes that men of religious ages did not know the earth was an infinitely small speck, it is possible to believe that there is some connection between the universe's infinity and religious disbelief.  But once the myth is revealed to be a myth, that connection becomes hard to maintain.


* * *  


Another myth I might have used to justify my skepticism would have gone like this:

"Look at Galileo.  Here was a man who only wanted to report honestly the results of his observations of the heavens.  But the Church wouldn't let him.  His new ideas threatened the orthodoxy of brutal, superstitious men, and they threatened him with torture and imprisoned him for it.  If faith can find no better arguments than torture and execution, then I want no part of it."

One immediate answer to this is that men have always found reasons to torture and kill one another.  Wars, revolutions, pogroms and purges have been carried out in the name of nationalism, socialism, racial supremacy, racial equality, freedom, law and order, anarchy, monarchy and countless other causes.  That men sometimes persecute each other in the name of faith can no more be used as an argument against spiritual belief than it could be used as an argument against patriotism or socialism.

But again, the best rebuttal is simple historical fact.

Galileo was never burned at the stake.  He was never tortured.  The Inquisition threatened him with torture, but that was purely a formality and no one took it seriously.  He never spent a day in a dungeon.  During his hearings before the Inquisition, he was given a five-room apartment in the Vatican and assigned a valet.  As punishment, he was required only to recant and recite the penitential psalms once a week for three years.

In the layman's mind, Galileo was a noble martyr to the cause of science.  The sad truth is that Galileo was a vain, quarrelsome, ambitious man bent on making a name for himself, a man with a rare gift for making enemies unnecessarily.

Contrary to popular belief, the Church was not unanimously opposed to the new astronomy.  Many of the Church's intellectual elite were warming to Copernicus and cooling to Aristotle and Ptolemy.  While a great many mediocrities in the universities still clung stubbornly to the old ideas, many Jesuit astronomers enthusiastically welcomed Galileo's new discoveries made by telescope and confirmed them with telescopic observations of their own.  And while theology did present certain problems, those problems were not insurmountable.  The Church's position was that holy scripture could be reinterpreted or even be said not to be clearly understood at all if a literal interpretation conflicted too greatly with observable evidence.  In the face of new facts, biblical passages once taken literally could be taken metaphorically -- but only, in the words of Galileo's friend Cardinal Conti, "in the case of the greatest necessity."

What was needed was conclusive proof.

Which was exactly what Galileo did not have.  And he knew it.

The Copernican model on which Galileo had staked his career was not the only theory then being urged against the Ptolemaic system.  There was also the model advocated by Tycho de Brahe in which the sun circled the earth while the planets circled the sun.  The phases of the planet Venus disproved Ptolemy but left the Tychonic model unscathed.  The Copernican model explained the retrograde motion of the planets (i.e.,  their apparent reversal in their orbits) more simply than the Ptolemaic, but the absence of a parallax (i.e., an apparent shift in the positions of the stars) weighed heavily against Copernicus.  Neither of the would-be heirs to the throne could seem to get a decisive edge on the other.

Galileo had a good hypothesis but no conclusive proof. "Unfortunately," writes Jerome J. Langford in GALILEO, SCIENCE AND THE CHURCH,  "the kind of evidence with which he could have won the day simply was not available.  Such proof presupposed a new physics, the gravitational laws of Newton, the experiments of Foucault, the parallax observed in 1838 by Bessel."

But Galileo had committed himself to the Copernican system. In his eyes, his ambition to become the foremost authority on astronomy as well as his reputation as a scholar were at stake.  If Galileo resorted to extreme measures, it should be remembered that he believed his life's work was at risk.

There is no need to discuss the battle in detail.  Those interested in the complete story of the controversy may refer to the Langford book mentioned above and to Arthur Koetsler's THE SLEEPWALKERS.  Suffice it to say that Galileo's abrasive personality led him to make ill-advised and downright stupid attacks on some of the highest figures in the Church.  Interspersed throughout the brilliant rhetoric in Galileo's written defenses of his position are some of the most vitriolic personal attacks in the literature of science.  To be sure, much of the opposition came from the usual sort of cranks and fanatics such constroversies always attract.  But many of his opponents were among the best educated and most sophisticated minds that Christendom then had to offer.

As it does far too often, personal animosity won out over reason.  Galileo's opponents repeatedly challenged him to come forth with the irrefutable evidence of his views.  Galileo responded with more personal attacks and stubborn insistence on the truth of his ideas.  Tempers grew hot and minds fused shot.  Galileo even attacked the Pope -- about as stupid a move as he could have made, considering that the Pope had gone to considerable trouble to distance himself from the controversy.  After that, Galileo's friends and patrons could no longer help him.

Anxious to be done with the whole troublesome business, the Inquisition overreacted and produced one of the worst miscarriages of justice in history.  Galileo was convicted of defying Church censors (he had never been ordered not to publish) and suspicion of heresy (the heliocentric theory had never been officially declared heretical). And so Galileo became a martyr to the cause of science in the public mind.

Galileo was never tortured or executed.  Most of his troubles with the Church would never have taken place if only he had shown a decent respect for his peers.  And yet skeptics often cite his mythical martyrdom as proof of the religious mind's complete incompatibility with science.

Such myths abound.  They have a firm hold on the popular imagination and can probably never be completely uprooted.  The typical lay skeptic accepts them unthinkingly as hard historical fact, never suspecting that they are all gossamer and mist, and this web of mythical tradition is often all that holds his fragile faith together.  His ground is far less secure than he imagines, and it would be well if from time to time his myths were exposed as myths.

--End--