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From: Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Top three reasons for optimism about the ID scam
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2024 19:39:13 +0000
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On Wed, 4 Dec 2024 21:24:48 +0000, Ernest Major
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>On 04/12/2024 19:05, Vincent Maycock wrote:
>>> They should never have been on it in the first place as there was
>>> nothing heretical about them
>> Except that the Bible says the earth does not move.
>
>The Bible also says that the earth is flat.
>
>The Catholic Church recognised that the Bible includes idiom, metaphor, 
>poetry and allegory, inter alia. Augustine, an early Church Father, 
>recognised that empirical data trumped Biblical interpretation, and 
>advised Christians not to bring the faith into disrepute by adopting 
>positions (such as flat earth) that were obvious nonsense.
>
>When I looked into the subject I found that the Catholic Church was 
>rather more literalist than I had expected. There is a presumption of 
>literalism in the absence of contrary data. 

A wee bit more nuanced than that in regard to what is meant by
'literal'.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: 

'The *literal sense* is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture
and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound
interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the
literal."' [CCC 116] 

In other words, 'literal' is whatever meaning was intended by the
authors, not what a plain reading of the words suggests. 

>I have read that Galileo had 
>a theological dispute with the Church - he argued that the Church should 
>not give hostages to fortune by unnecessarily nailing its mast to 
>interpretations that might be overturned by later discoveries.

The main initial issue was that Galileo did not have any proof to
support his conclusions and the *scientific community* were not
prepared to accept them as final until he resolved two specific issues
- how tides are caused and the absence of parallax. He made a
suggestion about tides being like liquid sloshed in a glass but his
fellow scientists dismissed that as risible which undoubtedly added to
his well know hubris. He simply didn't have the technology at that
time to identify the parallax; that wasn't achieved until the 1830s,
nearly 200 years after Galileo's death.

Theology came into it when he wrote his 'Letter to the Grand Duchess
Christina' essay in which he said that the Church was reading the
bible wrong and needed to change their understanding. Changing that
understanding wasn't a real issue - Cardinal Bellarmine had already
said they would have to do so *if Galileo' found conclusive proof for
his ideas* - but what did upset them greatly was a layman taking it
upon himself to lecture them on it, especially in the aftermath of the
Reformation.. 

That was the start of his real troubles with the Church. They became
worse when the Pope commissioned him to produce a work assessing
heliocentrism vs geocentrism in a neutral way [1] but including some
of the Pope's own thoughts on it; the Pope was understandably upset
when Galileo presented those thoughts as coming from a simpleton and
that contributed to the Pope allowing if not encouraging Galileo to be
put on trial.

[1] Those who have tried to argue here in the past that heliocentrism
was a heresy have never been able to offer any explanation as to why
the Pope would ask for a heresy to be evaluated in a *neutral* way.