freeinfidel

Pope Benedict XVI has had to cancel a visit to Rome’s leading university over suggestions that he approved of the church’s treatment of Galileo. The truth, as always, is somewhat murkier, but perhaps it’s just as well. Popes and science are not a good mix.

The Pope should have been speaking at La Sapienza (’wisdom’), Rome’s largest university. But both faculty and students made it clear he wasn’t welcome, using the traditional higher education methods of protests and sit-ins. Some called for an ‘anti-clerical week’. In the end, the Vatican found it expedient to cancel the appearance.

The row has its origins in a speech made at the same university by the Pope - then still Cardinal Ratzinger - in 1990. He cited an Austrian philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, who had declared the Roman Catholic church’s treatment of Galileo to be “reasonable and fair”.

It may be astonishing to some that Galileo’s heresy trial of 1633, in which it was judged that his concept of the heliocentric solar system was “absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures”, still resonates today. But in many ways the Catholic church has developed very little since then.

They are those who feel that religion need not be antithetical to science. There is a small minority of scientists who are believers. There are believers who embrace the discoveries of science and who continue to find god in the gaps left over. This has a tendency to move such faiths further and further towards deism. The more we discover about the universe, the less we need god to explain it. Bit by bit, god is removed from the artefacts and phenomena we encounter, becoming an increasingly shadowy presence.

Except, that is, with the more dogmatic faiths. They are deeply resistant to new discoveries. They may be forced to give way eventually, by the sheer force of evidence and the fact that their dogmatic stance may result in them looking silly and irrelevant. If the Roman Catholic church still insisted that the sun goes round the Earth, it would have been reduced to a small cult barricaded inside the Vatican a long time ago. (It may still come to that, the way it is shrinking.) But they always put up a fight, and are happy for knowledge to suffer and for discoverers to be punished for the sin of discovery.

For the more extreme faiths (and I’d firmly place Roman Catholicism in that category), the primacy of scripture is everything. Some argue that all the knowledge we need is to be found in the Bible. Fundamentalists are particularly fond of saying this. Those of us who actually value the discovery of things like antibiotics, electricity and the microchip (none mentioned in the scriptures as far as I’m aware) find this position to be willfully ignorant, even cretinous. However, what it highlights, through an extreme form, is that religious belief actually is incompatible with the pursuit of knowledge. Any religion based on revealed texts operates from a narrowly constricted viewpoint in which everything - every new discovery or idea - must be manipulated, distorted or mangled in an attempt to force it into this worldview.

This is in stark opposition to science in which new paradigms appear at frequent intervals, and in which the key ideas are cast as theories - a theory being something that is constantly tested and subject to revision or even abandonment in the face of new knowledge.

The dogmatism of religion also contrasts with many (if not all) other areas of secular knowledge - philosophy, economics, you name it - in which those who propose new ideas or radical approaches are lionised and rewarded. True, this may happen only after a period in which their ideas are subject to scrutiny, testing and even some degree of opposition or vilification. But new ideas in these disciplines are accepted when they are found to work, not because they conform to rigid and archaic dogma.

So maybe the Pope really has no business speaking at a university, because what he represents and what a university represents are inherently incompatible.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting about the Pope’s 1990 speech that he was not necessarily defending the view of that Austrian philosopher. But that’s typical of this Pope. For all that he has a reputation as an intellectual, he also has a somewhat disingenuous way of introducing ideas into debate - one that suggests he either does not have the courage of his convictions (at least on highly contentious subjects), or that he is slyly trying to sidestep any ensuing controversy. He did this before when he quoted a medieval Byzantine tract as a way of insulting muslims while at the same time being able to claim, “hey, it wasn’t me who said it, it was this guy”. For such a dangerously influential guy, it’s sad to see such intellectual dishonesty.

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