Creationists have no room for doubt

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Alan Linda

Copernicus himself escaped the condemnation of religious authority in the 1500’s due to the sole fact that he died the year his book—De revolutionibus—was published. In that book, he had the arrogance to suggest that the planets revolved around the sun.

All the planets. Even us. To those folks who thought that since God had created us in his image—both in looks and arrogance, apparently—He would certainly not have omitted to put us at the center of the action. Never mind that models to support the church’s thinking actually had planets backing up, so badly did they fit those models.

Then along came Galileo in the 1600’s, and the telescope, which, although he did not invent it, he did improve upon lens-making so radically that one must almost give him the credit. With that telescope, and with one of the few copies of some of Copernicus’s work which the papacy had not destroyed as heresy, he came to the inescapable conclusion that indeed, we did all revolve around the sun. Even better, the “we” included several new planets which he found.

This discovery, and some friends in high papal places, led him to believe that he could sway the current religious thinking.

Which leads us to the point. We now live in a country where a substantial percentage of the public believe that men have one more rib than women; that Eden happened about 10,000 years before Christ; that everything can and must be explained by creationism; and finally, that there is no room for doubt. Even Einstein, arguable the greatest scientist yet known to man, replied when asked what he was looking for in the apparent quantum chaos of the atom: “I am looking for the hand of God.”

Creationists have no room for doubt. Neither was there room for doubt in the 1600’s. Galileo accepted his sentence dressed in the white robe of the penitent, and lived out the rest of his brilliant life under arrest, both in self and creativity, and there is a lesson of some sort in all this.

Perhaps one should not so decisively point to religion as the worst resistance to change. Maybe that honor should go to mankind in general. Nonetheless, here is what the religious inquisitors had to say about Galileo: (It is edited for brevity.)

“We sentence you, Galileo, by details in this trial, that you have rendered yourself vehemently of heresy, of having believed doctrine which is contrary to the Scriptures—that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west. This opinion has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. Consequently, due to this heretical depravity, you have incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined by the sacred Canons.

“So that this grievous and pernicious error and transgression of yours may not go unpunished, and for an example to others to abstain from delinquencies of this sort, we order your book prohibited from public edict.

“We condemn you to formal imprisonment at our pleasure. This we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, order and reserve by this or any other better manner or form that we reasonably can or shall think of. (In other words, we aren’t sure we’re done with you yet.)

Only seven of the ten Cardinals on the tribunal signed the document, and two of the nonsigners were believed to have done so out of political spite toward the Pope, not because of their lack of belief that the sun must revolve around the earth.

Galileo was 70 years old when he knelt and heard his life’s work condemned. His work to further his already stunning mathematics of planetary movement came to a halt.

We just finished the 15th Great American Think-Off’s annual question: Which should you follow — the head or the heart.

The heart won, but by a very close decision, in a very closely matched debate, one where everyone was wonderfully erudite and charming, and the voting by the audience was very close.

It is perhaps pertinent to finish this topic off by noting that the actual vote counts at the Think-Off were not themselves all that different from the ratio of creationists — whom one might conclude are following their heart — to evolutionists — whom one might conclude are following their head — in this great country.

It is nearly as arrogant as were those fifteenth-century religious clerics to conclude that the voting here in a small American town holds in any proportion to the greater creationist-evolutionist divide that now exists in our society.

But than again, perhaps not.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills