Galileo's Heresy (2)

 It may be objected that based on the Decree of Infallibility from Vatican I -- which declares papal infallibility only when "he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church" [D18391 -- the Church could not or did not pronounce definitively or infallibly upon a teaching of Holy Scripture that concerned matters of physical science. However, it seems to me that this is precisely what we are to learn from the Galileo case -- that the Church, by reason of Her appointment as supreme guardian and interpreter of Holy Scripture and the entire deposit of faith, can and must tell us the true meaning of Scripture, and this infallibly, whether the Scripture speaks in that instance of natural or of supernatural things. This is exactly what the Church did in the Galileo case, and many say, with good reason, that the Church's decisions and pronouncements in the Galileo case were indeed infallible. And so it would seem from the words of Vatican I especially regarding the Church's "right and duty of proscribing false science." The Fathers of Vatican I may have had in mind the evolution gaining such strength as "science" during those latter years of the 19th century, but they may also have had in mind the Galileo case, as will appear in the third paper of this series on the subject.

Contrary to what most modern commentators on the Galileo case maintain, Cardinal Bellarmine did not make any mistake except to believe (#2) what the Lutheran theologian Osiander said in his Preface to the book of Copernicus -- that Copernicus himself did not believe his theory to be fact but took it only as a convenient hypothesis. After four centuries of experiments and mathematical demonstrations, there is still nothing remotely resembling an irrefutable, demonstratively necessary proof of the heliocentric theory.

One of the most touted of the so-called proofs of the heliocentric theory is the Foucault Pendulum. Here is what a very competent engineer and long-time student of heliocentrism says about this famous gadget:

There are some interesting things about these Foucault Pendulum (FP) displays that I never thought about before. They are centerpieces in some of the most influential places in the world. And they are built like altars, marble railings, floor stars and all. It shows how much the geocentricity-heliocentricity controversy means to those in power and just how important it is to them to prove that the Bible is wrong. The longest one is I think in the cathedral in Leningrad which the communists put up when they took over that church. ... The UN building has one, too. There they are, mesmerizing millions. Many, many shorter ones are put up in schools and colleges to brainwash the students. These are the ones with the most hidden gadgets to make them do what they do. There is a reason for all the emphasis on a physical demonstration of the earth's rotation, so if we can poke a few holes in the FP image, it will do some good. And it's loaded with philosophical and religious aspects, in the guise of physics. ...(21) (Emphases added)

Equally impressive are the words of Jewish columnist A. Goldberg:
Now today everybody "just knows" that the earth goes round the sun (heliocentrism). Yet all attempts to show that the earth is moving have failed: "We cannot feel our motion through space; nor has any experiment ever proved that the earth actually is in motion." Invoked "proofs" such as the phenomenon of the earth's obliqueness (slight flattening at the poles), the Doppler effect (the apparent change in frequency of light as it moves towards or away from the observer), the Sagnac effect (stellar aberration and parallax), nutation, Herschel's star streaming, the Coriolis forces (the cause of water tending to drain clockwise in the northern hemisphere, anti-clockwise in the southern), and Foucault's pendulum ... are in fact more easily explained by the entire universe rotating about the earth once a day. And the toil of thousands of exasperated researchers ... all conclusively failed to show any rotational movement whatsoever. The result showed that the earth is absolutely stationary, and that it is the rest of the universe that is doing the moving. "Unthinkable!" to the bamboozled modern mind, "with undesirable philosophical implications"; evolution is more unthinkable, yet most of mankind hold by it -- "proclaim a lie again and again and in due course all people will believe you" (the late unlamented Goebbels).

All the research confirms or favours the Biblical Tychonic schema, with all the planets of the solar system (except the earth, which is not a planet) in epicycular retinue about the sun ... with the whole array, moon and stars, centered on the earth ... the discovery that quasars (powerful radio sources ) are distributed in vast concentric shells equally distributed about the earth, with the earth at dead centre, confuting the atheistic Cosmological Principle (that any point in the universe is the same as any other: a-centrism), and that the earth does indeed reside at the centre of a spherical universe, bounded by a shell of stars and galaxies -- the "stellatum" of the ancients, and surrounding them, the mysterious ... border of this physical universe. Gravity is a complete mystery, science being unable to ascertain its nature, source, propagation, or even just what it is. Gravity alone cannot account for the constant centrifugal equilibrium and military precision of the celestial orbs, which by nature should quickly degenerate into awesome instability, were it not for the sustaining word of God ...

The Copernican heresy so thoroughly reversed man's view of the cosmos, the social order and hierarchy of moral values, that it was as if a new species of being had arisen; no doctrine has had a more pernicious influence on the human spirit. The English, French and American revolutions stemmed from it, and it paved the way for Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche, atheistic existentialism and Einstein. 

Many wax lyrical of the "beauty and elegance" of the latter's Theory of Relativity, and all motion is relative, and that there are no absolute terms of reference. But it is now being shown to be inconsistent, contradictory, riddled with anomalies, and as formulated cannot be correct, violating the laws of thermodynamics. The more honest savants summarise thus: "The earth is indeed the centre of the universe. The arrangement of quasars on spherical shells is only with respect to the earth. These shells would disappear if viewed from anywhere else. This means that the Cosmological Principle will have to go. Also it implies that a coordinate system fixed to the earth is the preferred frame of reference in the universe; consequently both the Special and General Theory of Relativity must be abandoned for Cosmological purposes." (Astrophysics and Space Science, no. 43). But worse, it has led to the modern doctrine of moral relativism, that there are no moral absolutes, which results in anarchism, hedonism, despair and meaningless, mechanistic, impersonal materialism. ... 

Geocentrism, like Creationism, arouses much fear and ire, as it would mean millions of books will have to be rewritten, and most scientists would lose face, let alone the resulting Kultrkampf. This, despite the overwhelming evidence and the fact that Geocentrism is used as the truest possible model in all the applied sciences, eg. practical astronomy, navigation, rocketry, oceanography and gyroscopy. ... What we see in the sky, the evidence of the senses and common experience of all men, a diurnally (daily) rotating starry vault about the earth, is the true state of affairs, not a deplorable illusion. The real world is as it is perceived to be.(22) (Emphases added)

No, Cardinal Bellarmine did not make a mistake.

In the latter part of his "Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina" Galileo undertakes to explain the miracle of Joshua's Long Day (Joshua 10) according to the Copernican theory which, he says, is the only system that allows the day to be lengthened and thus uphold the literal Scripture. On the face of it, one is surely entitled to wonder how it can be that the sun is commanded to stand still in a cosmos wherein the sun is fixed at the center of the universe. But Galileo has proven, to his satisfaction, by his discoveries of the sun spots with his telescope, that the sun revolves on its own axis. So let's grant him that much in this attempt of his to twist the Scriptures into the new cosmology.

Now let us consider the extent to which it is true that the famous passage in Joshua may be accepted without altering the literal meaning of its words, and under what conditions the day might be greatly lengthened by obedience of the sun to Joshua's command that it stand still.

If the celestial motions are taken according to the Ptolemaic system, this could never happen at all.(23)

In his earlier Letter to Castelli Galileo had emphasized the doubled motion of the sun, saying
... it is moved with two motions, that is, an annual motion from west to east and an opposite diurnal motion from east to west.

He then goes on to force his opponents to admit that only the annual motion is the sun's "proper motion" while the diurnal motion is not the sun's at all but that of the Primum Mobile which moves the sun and planets and all the stars "almost contrary to their natural and proper motions eastward."

From this he proceeds to assert that since day and night are the effects of the Primum Mobile in the Ptolemaic system, then if God had stopped the sun, as Holy Scripture says, the day would have been shortened instead of lengthened.

Whether this is a fair assessment of the Ptolemaic system or not, I leave to the experts to determine. What we can assert here is that in reality (a geocentric and geostatic system) there are not two contrary motions of the sun. Rather, there is but one composite motion that "ascends" toward the north in summer and "descends" toward the south in winter as it revolves around the earth from east to west. This movement is observable by all of us and can be diagrammed thus:

[diagram not available at this time]

The sun's path is thus a spiral one. As the sun first moves up and then down while going around the earth in the same direction.

Now it may be, as Galileo says, referring to Dionysius the Ateopagite, "that in this miracle it was the primum mobile that stood still, and that when this halted, all the celestial spheres stopped as a consequence -- an opinion held by St. Augustine himself, and confirmed by the Bishop of Avila. And indeed Joshua did intend the whole system of celestial spheres to stand still, as may be deduced from his simultaneous command to the moon, ..."(24) All this can be granted. But where Galileo distorts both Scripture and common sense is in his contention that "if we were to accept the Ptolemaic system it would be necessary to interpret the words [of Scripture] in some sense different from their strict meaning." (25)

For one thing, Galileo has bamboozled us all along into forgetting that in the Copernican system, the sun is not moving at all. Therefore, Joshua's command makes no sense. But he has assured us that the sun does revolve on its own axis. How would that cause day and night? How does Galileo get around these objections? He seizes upon the phrase: "in the midst of the heavens". So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hastened not to go down the space of one day. (Joshua 10:13)

To appreciate Galileo's skill at throwing verbal dust around, you must read the entire passage, but I will give only the concluding part:

But ... in agreement with the Copernican system, we place the sun in the "midst" -- that is, in the center -of the celestial orbs and planetary rotations, as it is most necessary to do. Then take any hour of the day, either noon, or any hour as close to evening as you please, and the day would be lengthened and all the celestial revolutions stopped by the sun's standing still in the midst of the heavens; that is, in the center, where it resides. This sense is much better accommodated to the words, quite apart from what has already been said; for if the desired statement was that the sun was stopped at midday, the proper expression would have been that it "stood still at noonday," or "in the meridian circle," and not "in the midst of the heavens." For the true and only "midst" of a spherical body such as the sky is its center.(26) (Emphasis added)

What a trickster! Not only does the sun never really move in order to stand still in this explanation, but Galileo will amend the Scriptures to fit Copernican/Galilean cosmology. Where, then, is the miracle? It has been explained away, or, the sun simply continued to do what it was doing -- nothing.

Let an expert have the final word. Arthur Koestler was as well aware as anyone of Galileo's rhetorical skills. Here is how he assesses the explanation of Joshua's Long Day according to Copernicus/Galileo:

The final section of the Letter to the Grand Duchess is devoted to the miracle of Joshua. Galileo first explains that the sun's rotation around its axis is the cause of all planetary motion. "And just as if the motion of the heart should cease in an animal, all other motions of its members would cease, so if the rotation of the sun were to stop, the rotations of all the planets would stop too," 

Thus he not only assumed, with Kepler, the annual revolutions of the planets to be caused by the sun, but also their daily rotation around their axes -- an ad hoc hypothesis with no more "rigorous proof" than the analogy with the animal's heart. He then concludes that when Joshua cried: "Sun, stand thou still," the sun stopped rotating, and the earth in consequence stopped both its annual and daily rotation. But Galileo, who came so close to discovering the law of inertia, knew better than anybody that if the earth suddenly stopped dead in its track, mountains and cities would collapse like match-boxes; and even the most ignorant monk, who knew nothing about impetus, knew what happened when the horses reared and the mail-coach came to a sudden halt, or when a ship ran against a rock. 

If the Bible was interpreted according to Ptolemy, the sudden stand-still of the sun would have no appreciable physical effect, and the miracle remained credible as miracles go; if it was interpreted according to Galileo, Joshua would have destroyed not only the Philistines, but the whole earth. That Galileo hoped to get away with this kind of painful nonsense, showed his contempt for the intelligence of his opponents.

In the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina the whole tragedy of Galileo is epitomized. Passages which are classics of didactic prose, superb formulations in defence of the freedom of thought, alternate with sophistry, evasion and plain dishonesty.(27)

The literature on Galileo is growing as the forces of this world move to consolidate their power structure. However, the Decree of the Holy Office against Galileo could not be more clear and definite with regard to the teaching of the Church. Here is the context of events and the decree of sentence as given by Fr. Jerome Langford:

... Wednesday, June 22, 1633, Galileo was escorted to the Dominican Convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva and the sentence was read to him. It began with a review of the whole case, starting with the first denunciation of his opinion to the Holy Office in 1615, then making public for the first time the verdict of the Theological Consultors in 1616, on the two propositions which had been given them to examine, then recalling the audience with Cardinal Bellarmine and the in junction given to Galileo by the Commissary-General in 1616, and the decree of the Index which had declared the opinion to be contrary to Holy Scripture. It cited the fact that Galileo had written the Dialogue in support of the forbidden position despite his protestations to the contrary. And even if he did not remember the personal injunctions, he had violated the admonition of Cardinal Bellarmine not to hold or defend the theory. Then it gave the sentence:

We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you, the said Galileo, by reasons of the matters brought forth in trial, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely, of having believed and held the doctrine which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the earth moves and is not the center of the world; and that an opinion may be held and defended as probable after it has been declared and defined as contrary to Holy Scripture, and that consequently you have incurred all the censures and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canon and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents. From which we are content that you be absolved, provided that, first, with a sincere and unfeigned faith, you abjure, curse, and detest before us the aforesaid errors and heresies and every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church in the form to be prescribed by us for you.
And, in order that your grave and pernicious error and transgression may not remain altogether unpunished and that you may be more cautious in the future and an example to others that they may abstain from similar delinquencies, we ordain that the book Dialogue of Galileo Galilei be prohibited by public edict.

We condemn you to the formal prison of the Holy Office subject to our judgment, and by way of salutary penance we prescribe that for three years to come, you repeat once a week the seven penitential psalms. Reserving to ourselves the right to moderate, commute, or take off, in whole or in part, the aforesaid penalties and penance.

And so we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, ordain, and reserve in this and in any other better way and form which we can and may rightfully employ.(28) (Emphases added)

Galileo's sentence was commuted; his daughter, a Carmelite nun, was allowed to recite the penitential psalms in his stead, and Galileo passed the remaining years of his life on his own country estate at Arcetri, near Florence, working on his final and probably favorite work, 

Discourses on Two New Sciences -- the work which has earned him the title of the Father of Modern Physics.

After giving the text of Galileo's abjuration, Fr. Langford says: "The condemnation of Galileo was now complete. The scientist had tried to batter down the old view of the universe and the traditional exegesis of Scripture by beating his head against a wall of conservatism and mocking those who felt that it should not be torn down ... "(29) Thus have the truths of faith, i.e., that the Scriptures are inerrant and that the Church can rule upon their meaning -- for all time -- these truths have been cast by Fr. Langford and most of his contemporaries, into the ephemerally temporal political category of a stiff-necked conservatism.

But the Decree of the Holy Office against Galileo has never been abrogated -- nor can it be. The wording is quite absolute. It is otherwise with the Index of Forbidden Books, as we shall see presently.

Living in the midst of triumphant modernism as we do today (in the 1990's), it is easy to recognize in the Decree against Galileo what is perhaps the first specific condemnation of a primary modernist tenet: "that any opinion may be held and defended as probable [even] after it has been declared and defined as contrary to Holy Scripture." 

The modernists of today do this all the time. Witness Fr. Anthony Zimmerman's defense of polygenism, condemned by Humani Generis in 1950; the questioning of the truths of faith concerning the Divinity of Our Lord, His knowledge of His Messiaship and His physical Resurrection by the likes of Fr. Raymond Brown, and the wide-spread defiance of all the Church's most sacred and authoritative moral teachings by a host of so-called moral theologians.

Truly, Galileo was the first modernist of note, and the current attempts to exonerate him only prove that "birds of a feather flock together."

What is not to be found in the standard defenses of Galileo is the list of subsequent condemnations issued in the course of the 17th century and the many defenses of the geocentric system set forth by learned men of science in the Church as far as into the late 19th century. I am told by a friend that St. Anthony Mary Claret (1807-1870) was a firm geocentrist. And would it not be surprising to find a single saint of the Church who was not? Evidences for the infallibility of the Church's decision in the Galileo case will form the matter of the last paper in this series.

The Church was slow to give way to heliocentrism but less so in the case of evolution, though Humani Generis (1950) still holds. That the modern papacy, albeit unofficially, has recognized both errors as compatible with Holy Scripture, can only be a sign of that apostasia -- that gradual slipping and falling away from the total Deposit of Faith spoken of by St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:3. 

We may not believe "that in these latter times there has been spread a general obscuring of the more important truths pertaining to religion, which are the basis of faith and of the moral teachings of Jesus Christ." (D 1501) This was an error of the Synod of Pistoia and was condemned by Pope Pius VI in 1794. The truths of Faith are never obscured -they are attacked and ignored and disbelieved. "The Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it." (John 1:5) It is the disbelief that constitutes the falling away from the Faith, and disbelief spreads when it is not vigorously combated.

Here is a brief summary of the gradual elimination of the Copernican heresy from the Index:

When the Index was revised under Pope Benedict XIV in 1757, largely through the influence of the Jesuit astronomer Boscovitch, ... the phrase prohibiting all books teaching the immobility of the sun, and the mobility of the earth was omitted from the decrees. But in 1820, the Master of the Sacred Palace refused to permit the publication in Rome of a textbook on astronomy by Canon Settele, who thereupon appealed to the Congregations. They granted his request in August and two years later, issued a decree [1822] approved by Pope Pius VII ordering the Master of the Sacred Palace in future "not to refuse license for publication of books dealing with the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun according to the common opinion of modern astronomers" on that ground alone. 

The next edition of the Index did not contain the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Foscarini, à Stunica and Kepler which had appeared in every edition up to that time since their condemnation in 1616, [Kepler's in 1619].(30)

Insofar as our faith is based on the authority of God revealing, and insofar as Holy Scripture is the written word of God infallibly interpreted for us by the Church, a decline in Faith is brought about by a Scientism that claims an authority higher than that of Divine Revelation. 

As Scientism pushes out the intellectual content of divine faith in people's minds, Divine Revelation is stripped of any relation to vast areas of knowledge. It is from Holy Scripture that we learn the true story of our origins and early history, not from an evolutionary scientism. It is from Holy Scripture that we learn the true structure of the universe, not from pagan and atheistic cosmologists.

But if heliocentrism, a-centrism, and evolutionism are accepted as true, there is introduced into the mind a real separation of science defined as reason and the truths of Faith. This separation was more or less complete in Galileo when he stated that in the natural sciences, Holy Scripture held the last place. (Letter to Castelli)

What must be emphasized is that Galileo's science was and remains what is basically a false science, a scientism. That such is the case is proved by the fact that the two great errors which define its ideology - heliocentrism and evolution -- stand in direct and defiant opposition to Holy Scripture as the Church has traditionally interpreted it.

Holy Scripture no longer holds any place at all amongst the sciences but is said to have nothing whatsoever to tell us about the universe of nature -- for the Creator of all things, while He is allowed by arrogant men to have revealed some vague spiritual truths, is deemed unable to communicate physical truths at all.

But that Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Church is the basis not only of our divine faith but also the guide and guarantee of attaining truth in the natural sciences is again brought home to us in the case of Georges Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). John C. Greene in his excellent survey of the rise of evolutionism in the natural sciences says of Buffon:

His views were sufficiently unsettling to provoke censure by the clergy. ...The first three volumes of the Natural History had slipped through the royal censorship in 1749, but Buffon was forced to preface the fourth volume, published in 1753, with a formal retraction of the heretical opinions expressed in the first, particularly those contained in his theory of the earth. In answer to the charges leveled against him by the theological faculty of Paris, Buffon made a solemn declaration: 

"That I have no intention of contradicting the text of Scripture; that I believe firmly everything related there concerning the creation, whether as to the order of time or as to the actual circumstances, and that I abandon whatever concerns the formation of the earth in my book, and in general everything which could be contrary to the narration of Moses, having presented my hypothesis concerning the formation of planets only as a pure supposition of philosophy." 

The Theologians were apparently satisfied with this, but they were to discover twenty-five years later, when Buffon published his Epochs of Nature, (1788) that the heretic never really abandoned his theory of the earth.(31)

The same has been said of Galileo by Dorothy Stimson and others, that "he plainly perjured himself" at his trial.

With scientists like Buffon and Galileo, not to mention many others of more recent vintage, Satan carries on his plans for disorder in the world to bring down the Church and destroy souls. A false science, condemned by Vatican I Council, continues to deceive many Catholics who strive to reconcile this false science with the truths of Faith. Unfortunately, they are aided and abetted by apostate theologians. But such an unnatural yoking of truth with error cannot hold for long, and Our Lady has promised that at the last, Her Immaculate Heart will triumph. The truth of God, Her Spouse the Holy Spirit, and Her unparalleled Purity are really the same.

NOTES
(1) CESHE, Rue de l'Eglise, 08310 Annelles, France [attn: Dominique Tassot].
(2) Also in Beyond Politics. Solange Hertz. Veritas Press, California. 1995. [refer to section titled "What's Up?"].
(3) Available from P. Ellwanger, 1834 E Peters Colony #903, Carrollton TX 75007, USA.
(4) Available from P. Ellwanger; refer to Note 3
(5) John-Paul II has made statements about the Galileo case before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on two occasions during his pontificate: the first in 1979 on the occasion of Einstein's birthday and the second on October 31, 1992. No information available to me in 1992 about the nature of these statements [i.e., their legal and/or authoritative status].
(6) Available from the author at 4527 Wetzel Ave, Cleveland OH 44109, USA. Same address for The Biblical Astronomer.
(7) Available from M. Hall at Fair Education Foundation, Inc., 211 Morningside Dr, Cornelia GA 30531, USA.
( Doubleday, 1960, p.88 note.
(9) Martin Gardner. Relativity for the Millions. Publisher and date not available at this time. Reference was sent to me by a friend who lost publisher, date and page.
(10) Jerome J. Langford, Galileo, Science and the Church. Foreword by Stillman Drake. New York: Desclee Co, 1966, pp.89-90.
(11) History of the Popes, Vol. 29, p.54.
(12) Dogmatic Canons and Decrees. New York: Devin-Adair, 1912, p.11.
(13) Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. Transl. and edited by Stillman Drake. New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1957, p.203.
(14) The Sources of Catholic Dogma, Transl. by Roy Deferrari. B. Herder, 1957.
(15) Idem
(16) Idem
(17) Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography. University of Chicago Press, 1978, p.225.
(18) Jerome Lejeune. The Concentration Can. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990, p.132.
(19) Jerome Langford, Galileo, Science and the Church. New York: Desclee, 1966, p. 59 about Fr. Foscarini and pp. 60-63 for Cardinal Bellarmine's Letter.
(20) Idem., pp.62-63
(21) R.G. Elmendorf, Glenshaw PA 15116. Letter of 15 April 1992. See also Marshall Hall's book (note 7). Hall has observed some of the "hidden gadgets" and describes them.
(22) Amnon Goldberg, The Earth is Established -- It Cannot be Moved, The Jewish Tribune, London, 11 January 1990.
(23) R.G. Elmendorf. Letter 9 Sept 1992. Contact Mr. Elmendorf [208 S Magnolia Dr, Glenshaw PA 15116, USA] for more info on geocentrist theories of the cosmos.
(24) Drake. Discoveries and Opinions, p.211-212.
(25) Idem.
(26) Idem., pp.214-215.
(27) Arthur Koestler. The Sleepwalkers. New York: Macmillan 1959, pp. 438-439.
(28) Same as Note 19, pp.153-154.
(29) Idem.
(30) Dorothy Stimson. The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican theory of the Universe. Peter Smith, 1972. Originally published 1917. pp. 69-70.
(31) John C. Greene. The Death of Adam. Ames, Iowa State University Press, 1955, pp.58-59