From: ripng@halls1.cc.monash.edu.au (PAUL NG)
Subject: God & Science
Organization: Halls of Residence, Monash University 
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1992 12:58:17 GMT

Andrew Peel (apeel@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU) writes: 
Subject: Re: God & Science
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 22:26:01 GMT
	Under today's secular regime anyone is free to propose, and canvas, 
any opinion, hypothesis, even religion, that they wish. Likewise, the rest of
society is free to believe or ignore these. Scrutiny of scientific work
by one's peers, whilest riddled with imperfections, does not persecute
anyone for having a contrary view. It just prvents them from being
published in credible journals.
	Back in the good old days, Galileo was threatened with torture, and 
several others were executed for advocating the 'Copernican Heresy'. The 
ignorance of the Inquisition can justify their mistaken beliefs, but not the 
excessive persicution. 
>So to all the anti-Church and anti-religionists out there, put up and shut 
>up.
So you thinks its OK for people to be killed because they don't happen to agree
with contempory philosophy.
****
Point of my first posting on this topic was -not- that it is OK to kill 
people who don't agree with contemporary philosophy.  Point was that 
contemporary culture determined Galileo's fate (and that of Bruno, 
Copernicus, etc. etc.) - the fault didn't lie with religion, it lay with a 
whole range of social factors, only one of which was the role of the 
Church as an arm of government.  And some of those factors still exist 
today.  Peer review is an instance - whoa, some people out there are going 
to get riled, notably Mark, but read on please - of those factors.
	Nobody is advocating a return to the "good old days".  Did anybody 
note the Pope's recent direction to his top brass to try to avoid a 
repetition of the Galileo situation in future?  It was on the news and in 
the papers.  
	To explain (again) - it is not OK to kill people you think are 
in the wrong - **with benefit of historical hindsight*** - but people of 
Galileo's time didn't quite think that way did they?  Otherwise they wouldn'
t have allowed the Church to take up the sort of position that it did, and 
they wouldn't have condoned or quite so meekly accepted his suppression, 
would they?  It's always very easy to say, with 20th century eyes, that so-
and-so was wrong - and indeed they were - but they were wrong because of 
their background and culture.  "Religion" - and the priests etc. - were 
but one part of a big picture.  Society suppressed Galileo, not the 
Church.  The Church was just the instrument through which suppression 
was effected.  The Church was wrong, but that's not the issue.  
	Or, to put it yet another way, if Church or Christianity was 
responsible and Galileo was proven correct then Church or Christianity 
should be thrown out the window and that hasn't happened, has it?  That is 
why I said (perhaps a little too emphatically) that the "Galileo 
problem" (call it that) had nothing to do with religion or church or 
God.  And if people want to do some Galileo-basher-bashing, they 
should criticise their medieval ancestors for not being as enlightened or 
as tolerant or as knowledgeable as themselves, instead of that institution 
called the Church or that religion called Christianity.   	    

***	
pope@physics.su.OZ.AU (Mick Pope - The Nightstalker) says:
Subject: Re: God & Science
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 23:21:36 GMT
I am not anti church, being a member of one, but I doubt that all the time
the church suppresed something was purely out of pious faith in God.  Read
some church history, and see how squeaky clean they were, NOT, at times.
Your last comment was perhaps a little hot tempered.
Oh, and as much as I am fond of Andrew Prentice, the Voyager findings don't
entirely prove his modern Laplacian theory, which still needs work.
Chill out!

***
	Yes you are right, I was hot-tempered and I apologise.  Hopefully I 
have "chilled out" enough to post a "cool" reply...
	Yes church history is full of black spots but I don't think that 
affects my point.  Killing Galileo was a bad idea but that wasn't my "bone 
of contention".  They may have misinterpreted God or they may simply have 
set out to protect their own turf (like Mark claims) - point is, if you or 
I were alive in Europe at that time we probably wouldn't have treated it as 
a bad idea at all.  God would not have come into the analysis *except* 
where it suited us.  

***
I now I come to somebody who may need to "chill out", like me after my 
first posting on God & Science: 
markc@hydra.maths.unsw.EDU.AU ()
Subject: Re: God & Science
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 06:51:28 GMT

What? Why do the intellectual freaks have to be sorted out? In a free
society a plurailty of ideas must be permissible. What do you mean by 
talking about intellectual freaks?
Peer review for scientific publications is not so simple as you are implying.
Anybody who has sent a paper off to a journal for review is well aware of 
this. It certainly is not a process for sorting out intellectual freaks.

***
Uh-huh.  Let's say I send a couple of papers off to Icarus.  Let's say I 
want to present those papers at a major scientific convention.  Let's say my 
papers make the claim that gravity does not exist and the earth was created 
yesterday.  Icarus sends them off minus my name to two, three or more 
(anonymous) experts on gravity and geology.  Or maybe the editor looks at 
them himself and rejects them outright because he is convinced the writer is 
definitely wrong.  The reviewers don't like it, they see lots wrong with the 
research methodology or the quality of the analysis and send it back 
saying my recommendation is it is not suitable, don't publish unless these 
corrections are made.  And the conference organisers refuse to give me a 
hearing because like Icarus they think I'm wrong.  So wrong as not to 
deserve speaking time at the convention, or even an invitation to attend.
	Now to me that looks more than just a little like suppression.  If I 
push it hard enough I might even lose my job as a geologist or a physicist 
at the University.  Sure, nobody will bother throwing me in jail or burning 
me at the stake; they'll just refuse to pay me or allow me to air my 
views where they matter most, which is preferable to death at the 
stake or incarceration, but it does imply, does it not, that I am an 
"intellectual freak"?  That's what I meant by the term.      
***
Mark continues:
The reason why this filtering mechanism is "secular" is that 
modern science deals with non religous issues by and large. If I were told 
that my papers were being reviewed by a priest i would be appalled. (Unless 
the priest happened to be a mathematician.)  The reason why the church 
acted as a filter mechanism in the past had nothing to do with science and 
everything to do with the exercise of power.  The inquisition was not 
interested in whether he was right or wrong. They were concerned only with 
what they percieved as a threat to their authority.

***
	That (preservation of authority) -may- have been a motivation to 
suppress Galileo; I reckon it was a lot more complicated than that.  
Allowing Galileo to claim what he claimed would not have been likely 
to cause the loss of the Papal States, the French Revolution, the 
secularization of Western society etc. etc. don't you think?  The major 
reason was a deep-seated fear that allowing those claims to succeed 
would somehow displace "Man" as numero uno in the Universe and was 
therefore contrary to deep-seated popular conceptions of the time.   

***

Mark: 
Galileo and Copernicus and a few others were success stories; those 
who >ultimately passed the filter mechanism - and everybody seems to love to 
bash >the Church for suppressing what later turned out to be correct.  Now 
why would that be do you think? The church, on no valid scientific grounds 
supresses a theory we know to be correct, and you wonder why people 
criticise it?>
	The Church suppressed the theory, correct.  Those who sent Galileo 
to his doom should be criticised - always remembering of course that 
it was a mistake anybody alive today could have made if he were just 
alive then - but there are (see above) **no valid grounds** to criticise 
the Church, as such.  Or religion, for that matter.

***
Mark:
NOBODY cares or hears about the million and one freako theories postulated >
by countless others - theories that were definitely wrong and were >
consequently rejected by the Church - BECAUSE they were rejected as wrong, >
and were ultimately wrong, and therefore they are not worth hearing about >
today.
What freako theories? 

***
Yep.
***

And what gives the church the right to supres 
any theory? Surely it is not for the church to do this. It must be for the 
greatest of all filters, time, to determine which theories deserve to 
be studied and which supported? 

***
Time is a wonderful filter, I agree.  However, would you like to wait say 
ten years while we determine if the earth was indeed created yesterday and 
gravity doesn't exist?  If mine is a "freako theory" then perhaps it will 
help from the practical point of view to reject it now and reject it 
clearly as wrong, don't you think?  
***

Mark:
>Now some hundred years down the line we are going to hear about some 
theory >that everybody thought was freako when it was first published, but 
was later >vindicated by research and evidence.  In fact, we are hearing 
about it >now.  There is a scientist at Monash whose astrophysical theories 
were >thought to be cracko by most of his contemporaries - until 
measurements made >using his theories turned out to be more accurate than 
any others.  Then >everybody shut their big mouths up.  He's made quite a 
few trips to NASA >to help the poor sods out.  

Your ignorance of the scientific process is astounding. The point of the 
Galileo affair is that the evidence at the time was on Galileo's side. As 
Bronowski remarked, the leaders of the inquistion refused to look through 
Galileo's telescope for fear of seeing something which contradicted what 
they wanted to believe. Rather than listen to the evidence they branded his 
theories as heresy. 

***
As I have said all along, religion and God and the Church, essentially, 
had nothing to do with it.  You're making a valid point - those poor 
mediaeval nitwits were so stupid they didn't want to believe their own 
eyes. OK.  So?  Blame their medieval frame of mind.  There are people like 
those around today, I can assure you.  In the recent past, I can name 
Adolf Hitler.  Remember the scientists he recruited to try and validate, in 
the face of overwhelming scientific and historical evidence to the contrary, 
his conception of a "pure" "superior" "Aryan" race and an "inferior" Jewish, 
Slavic and "all others" race?  What about the anti - oil palm campaign in 
the USA a few years back?  Some scientists pointed out from basic high 
school stuff that (tropical) oil palm is OK for health but that didn't cut 
any ice with the sunflower lobby in the States.  All they cared was 
that imports from Southeast Asia were destroying their market for sunflower-
based margarine.  Adolf Hitler wasn't Christian (or Catholic if you wish to 
confine the debate to that) and neither, I reckon, were many of the American 
businesspeople.

***
Mark: With the case of the mathematician you cite (his name escapes me at 
the moment), his theories were not thought to be "cracko". It was simplythe 
case that many astrophysicists believed them to be wrong. Not crazy,simply 
not correct. He was however never forced to recant on threat of torture. As 
is proper, the evidence decided the issue. This is a far cry from the 
attitude of the church to Galileo who would not even listen.

***
AS a matter of degree, perhaps.  Instead of being burnt he was simply 
ridiculed.  OK.  AS a matter of principle, I think there is plenty of room 
for debate.  The Church let "the evidence" decide the issue too - except 
they only saw what they wanted to see, which is something we all do today 
anyhow, atheists or otherwise.

***
>What I'm trying to say is this: Suppression of 
ideas subsequently proven >correct has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH 
RELIGION AND CERTAINLY NOTHING TO >DO WITH CHRISTIANITY OR THE CHURCH.  The 
Church was just doing its job as an >important element of government.  It 
tried to carry out its function as a >"filter" as best as it could, just 
like modern scientists function today as >checks on their colleagues' 
competency, via peer review.

This is utter rubbish. The church was doing what 
was necessary to protect its power and position. The church set itself up 
as the sole source of truth. People like galileo and Copernicus threatened 
that. That is why they were supressed. It has everything to do with religous 
persecution and nothing to do with an honest evaluation of Galileo's 
competnce as a scientist.

***
It wasn't religious prosecution, merely social prosecution using religion as 
an excuse.  In my opinion there's quite a difference.
***

>It seems to me to be the height of arrogance on the part of non-historians >
who don't know what they are talking about, to bash the Church and religion >
generally for suppressing Galileo (among others); if the Church wasn't >
there to do it somebody else would come along and do it - otherwise society >
would be flooded with useless ideas.

yeah well a lot of people who do know what they are talking about have 
savagely criticised the church for supressing ideas for centuries. To me it 
is the height of arrogance to even presume that the church has a role to 
play in deciding which ideas get heard and taught and which do not. 

***
First off, this part of my first posting wasn't exactly written in a 
polite tone.  Sorry.	
	Second, what do you think conglomerations of human 
beings do today?  Since Second Vatican this Church has been more open 
about the free flow of ideas, but there are Churches out there 
which border on cults in terms of approach to interpretation and 
application of scripture.  And then there are the cults themselves.  And 
then there are the communist and authoritarian governments, and then lots of 
minor institutions that regulate the flow of ideas.  Censorship, peer 
review - yes that regulates what gets taught and what doesn't - if you don't 
get published you don't get heard and if you don't get heard you don't get 
taught - various government departments, etc. 
***
Mark:
People should instead be thankful (partially) for the fact that some >
institution was around for the better part of European history after >.
Christ, to manage the flow of information in that society.  It wasn't >.
perfect but at least it was there.  So stop bashing religion for Galileo; 
if >you (whoever you are - atheists included) were alive then, you'd press 
for a >public examination of Galileo's ideas too.  And if you were alive 
then, >you'd look at Galileo's ideas through mediaeval eyes.  So you'd 
probably >reject Galileo's theories like the Church did.  

Now this is garbage. Do you even know what you are saying? At the TIME 
the evidence supported Galileo. That is what matters. Mediavel eyes is a 
complete furphy. The facts are what matter in any age.  Also what on earth 
leads you to believe there needs to be an instrument to manage the flow of 
ideas? That way lies totalitarianism and Auschwitz. The inquisition murdered 
millions in its attempt to manage the flow of ideas.  Do you seriously 
believe that this was a good thing?
***
Sorry, I stick by what I said earlier about "mediavel eyes".  The facts are 
what matter, but what are the facts?  Instruments to control the flow of 
ideas are and always have been necessary.  Only controversy (unless you 
happen to be of the Anarchist school of thought) is to what degree should 
the flow be controlled.  Notice, that's the -only- controversy, the 
issue whether religion is good or bad for the flow of ideas is only 
incidental.

***
>So to all the anti-Church and anti-religionists out 
there, put up and shut >up.
Put up what? Surely the onus is on people such as 
yourself to prove your claims? You have done a very poor job so far.
Yours in 
atheism,Mark.

***
Well, ball's in your court again pal.

Yours in -religionism???-
Paul.
 
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