Ha! You and I must be about the same age. How well I remember Sagan and that "Starship Enterprise" television set.
You know, the whole Galileo incident has taken quite a beating on this thread. One interesting thing to note is that nothing of that sort ever happened, as far as I know, in the Eastern Church.
But on the other hand, while the Byzantine Empire saw great advances in practical technology, it was not particularly prominent in anything we would call experimental or theoretical science.
Of course, there was something about Western Christendom that produced a Galileo. Nothing has been so consistent as the ability of Western Christendom to make continual leaps in scientific knowledge and technology. Many explanations have been given for this, and the favorite of those who dislike Christianity is the explanation that it was all an accident of history.
But I don't think so. At the root of the rise of Western science was precisely the fact that Western religion promoted an analytical and systematizing mindset and involved the idea of an orderly universe where phenomena could be observed and predicted. If one's religion doesn't involve a faith in an orderly universe, scientific and technological progress is not terrilby likely.
What is interesting and (to me) incontrovertable is that this process accelerated exponentially after the Protestant Reformation, and the further cutting free of the independent analytical mind from the guidance of tradition. The modern industrial and technological world is in no small part the child of Protestantism. Whether that world is a spiritually healthy one is quite another question.
But getting back to Galileo, I think that it is helpful to think of this not so much as a conflict between religious dogma and science, but between an older scientific dogma and a newer scientific construct.
Anyone who has spent any time around the scientific world will know that some of the fiercest and most brutal bloodlettings are between supposedly objective scientists who are discussing supposedly hard facts and purportedly logical theoretical constructs. In my own little field of expertise, I have seen tremendous advances -- and yet every single time, the scientific establishment has resisted those advances. I've seen virulent public disputes at scientific meetings that make our theological discussions on FR seem like child's play.
At the root of those virulent disputes is the fact, as I have pointed out repeatedly on this thread, that even the hardest of sciences are not nearly as hard as the credulous modern man believes them to be. The "hard facts," are rarely as incontrovertible and hard as the average laymen, with his essentially religious faith in modern science, supposes them to be.
Scientists know this -- thus the bloodlettings involved in their internecine disputes.
In fairness to the keepers of the old guard, the other side of things is that for every truly revolutionary advance in science and technology, there are 10 more that claim to be advances but which are quite simply errors. If one immediately embraces every supposed "advance," this can be dangerous, because of the consequences of embracing an "advance" that turns out, upon closer examination or with the passage of time and experience, to be wrong.
Very true. Both the condemnations of geocentrism and the notion of Galileo's persecution come from popularizers of science, and from scientists trying to be theologians, rather than from science itself.
I disagree on one thing. The scientific culture was well underway in the West centuries before Protestantism emerged on the theological scene. Variously, it can be traced to the medieval scholasticism, -- an organic Catholic phenomenon, -- or to St. Augustine. Protestantism, along with absolute monarchies and the Plague contributed much to the spiritual vaccuum we now endure, of which scientism is a side effect, but it did not contribute to science in any direct way.
That's funny, given that religious wars were the reason for some many millions of deaths and endless conquests. Scientific controversies exist until proven otherwise. The Apostolic Church has been in schism for almost one thousand years.
It's neither the science nor religion but human nature that is at the heart of that. More often than not, the crux is personal preference.
The "hard facts," are rarely as incontrovertible and hard as the average laymen, with his essentially religious faith in modern science, supposes them to be
Well, the arrangement of planets in our solar system is what I would call a "hard fact." What is not agreed upon is the convention that would make Pluto and other "captured" objects, a "hard" planet.
I mean, the cause of tuberculosis is pretty much a "hard fact" barring any unusual mutation. And optical formulations based on pure mathematics faithfully reproduce and predict the behavior of light although we can't really define light in simple terms.
I would say, that most of science, excluding the forefront, is a reliable source of knowledge and working models. The "faith" in science comes from the "hard" fact that it works. Disagreements come from personal differences, specific needs, etc.