Through a couple of episodes of the narrative, Michael Flynn has suggested in his recent novel, Eifelheim , that heresy trials are the aitia of academic peer review. In the first, a brilliant physicist is accused by the chair of her department of trying to use physics to justify young earth creationism whereas her ideas about slight variations in the speed of light and the quantization of the observed galactic red shifts stem from the desire for elegance and simplicity in an area of cosmological mathematics. But all the while she notes how much the encounter feels like a heresy trial. In the second, William of Occam indicates his disdain for Durandus of Mende and excoriates him especially for sitting on the tribunal that condemned some of his Commentary on the Sentences , to which a colleague replies, "Peer-review is the the fate of all philosophers worth reading."
Flynn's suggestion brings insight into Benedict XVI's disinvitation from Universita La Sapienza in Rome as mentioned in places such as Entangled States . I need to go off to work soon, but let me quickly sketch the tensions. The Pope is very much an academic, but his present office theoretically is unaccountable to earthly critique or authority and claims a potentially universal and perpetual jurisdiction over truth. Moreover, those who sought to disinvite him are clearly disturbed by his justification (through another philosopher, Paul Feyeraband) of Galileo's condemnation for heresy as supremely rational and just. Feyeraband, I should note, is chiefly known as a proponent of "scientific anarchism," in which science proceeds not by falsification or logical positivism but by ad hoc procedures that aim toward a particular consensus about the beautiful and the good (which is not necessarily beautiful or good.) Theology, I should add, might as well be a science in Feyeraband's critique. So as far as I can tell, Benedict XVI is being criticized by Italian physicists for viewing science as fallible on the same grounds on which theology might be considered fallible, yet suggests the theological community in the form of the Roman Catholic Church thus had the right in the 17th century as now to assess the fallibility of science without any consideration for the fallibility of theology and certainly without any peer review. Goose meet gander, I suppose.
Such a man must be allowed academic freedom so that his risibility may be exposed to the world entire. Shame on you, physicists of Italy.
3 comments:
Thanks for commenting on this, when I read this in the SF Chronicle, particularly the quote he uses from Feyerabend, I cringed:
But professors and students objected, citing specifically a speech that Benedict gave in 1990, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, on Galileo, condemned by the Inquisition in the early 1600s for arguing that Earth revolved around the sun.
In that speech, Ratzinger, who would become pope in 2005, quoted the Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend as saying: "The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just."
In the speech, Ratzinger did not argue against the validity of science generally or take the church's position from Galileo's time that heliocentrism was heretical. But he asserted, as he has often since elected pope, that science should not close off religion and that science has been used in destructive ways.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
I might add that as a maverick theologian, especially in his thinking on the bible and science, Galileo was ahead of his time.
You're so right about the academic freedom issue, though, Caelius. I don't know much of anything about this story; was it a cancellation by the Pope, or a "disinvitation" by the University? (And in the latter case, what do the physicists have to do with it? Wouldn't it just be typical Corporate Cowardice on the part of the Administration.
Anyway, if it had been only an argument, as I wrote at ES, the whole thing would have been forgotten by now. The Church always seems to conveniently forget, and gloss over, its Inquisitions and its destruction of real human lives. It can't seem to ever simply disagree; it has to engage in corporal punishment, which is a primary reason for the secular loathing aimed in its direction. It has not much moral authority on this account.
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