David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

This is so very reasonable as to place in doubt the very idea of clerical intolerance. Bellarmine is arguing, after all, only that in matters of astronomy, judgment might be suspended and not that inquiry must be stopped.

But suppose, the cardinal continues, the conflict between astronomical fact and Holy Scripture should prove irremediable; suppose, in fact, that a demonstration—not a conjecture, not an assumption, not one of these, please forgive me, Your Reverence, amusing suppositions that are so prominently a feature of your letter—were made available that the sun is in fact immovable.

Yes, suppose just that.

The cardinal now contemplates this appalling possibility with all his intellectual sophistication. If it came to that, he writes—if the sun really does stand still—“it would be better to say that we do not understand Holy Scripture than to say that what has been demonstrated is false.”

But this is, of course, precisely what Galileo had urged—a grand, quite self-conscious project of avoiding conflict by feigning confusion.

The passionate drama played out four hundred years ago is playing out again. And why not? The characters that it involved are a part of the human comedy. If in the seventeenth century, the cardinal was willing to say that we might have misunderstood religion in order to uphold science, in the twenty-first, he is willing to say that we might have misunderstood science in order to uphold religion. It is Western science that is our church, the place in which we repose our confidence and our trust. I am among the faithful. And I am devoted to the church. I have, after all, spent my life studying its texts.

Far more than Isaac Newton—implacable, remote, incomprehensible in his genius—Galileo Galilei has entered contemporary life as the very soul and symbol of a way of thought. He is intensely human, and for this reason, sympathetic. He gave way before the Roman Inquisition but in the end he got his way. The Western world now thinks in his terms. We have for more than three hundred years occupied a Galilean universe.

Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen, the great German mathematician David Hilbert affirmed in an address given in 1930.

We must know, we will know.

The long Galilean moment in the history of thought is coming to an end. Shortly after Hilbert delivered his address, Kurt Gödel demonstrated that mathematics was inherently incomplete. If science in the twentieth century has demonstrated anything, it is that there are limits to what we can know. What we might wish and what we can have are not necessarily the same. A far older view of human life has entered a position of authority in our affairs.

At the very same moment that Hilbert grandly affirmed his program of intellectual conquest, Galileo’s other heirs were completing the last of the revolutions in physical thought. The Standard Model of particle physics is their monument. And thereafter there has been nothing. There has been nothing, that is, that could properly be expressed in Galilean terms.

Niccolò Lorini, so eager to denounce what he could not understand or did not wish to grasp, is also a familiar figure: He is destined now and forever to sound twittering notes of alarm with respect to doctrines that he finds alarming.

It hardly matters which doctrines have provoked his alarm; poor Niccolò is prepared to denounce them all. If in the seventeenth century they were scientific but not religious, in the twenty-first century they are religious but not scientific. Niccolò may today be found wherever the faith is under attack. Darwin’s theory of evolution is the obvious example, because Darwin’s theory is virtually the only part of church teaching commonly understood. It may be grasped by anyone in an afternoon, and often is. A week suffices to make a man a specialist. The great virtue of Darwin’s theory, Richard Dawkins has argued, is that it has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Dawkins’s claim, while it has been widely repeated, has not been widely believed. “Two-thirds of Americans,” the New York Times reported, “say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools.” But even among those quite persuaded of Darwin’s theory, “18 percent said that evolution was ‘guided by a supreme being.’”

Under these circumstances, freedom of thought very often appears as an inconvenience to those, like Niccolò Lorini, with a position to protect and enemies on all sides. A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington DC concluded that the so-called Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance of new life forms about 530 million years ago, could best be understood in terms of an intelligent design—hardly a position unknown in Western thought. The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists. Wise men attend to the publication of every one of the Proceedings ’ papers, but in the case of Stephen Meyer’s “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories,” the Board of Editors was at once given to understand that they had done a bad thing. Their indecent capitulation followed at once.

Publication of the paper, they confessed, was a mistake. It would never happen again. It had barely happened at all.

“If scientists do not oppose antievolutionism,” remarked Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, “it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak.” Scott’s understanding of “opposition” had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: “Avoid debates.”

There is nothing surprising in any of this. I myself believe that the world would be suitably improved if those with whom I disagree were to lapse into silence.

There is finally Cardinal Bellarmine; he is today where he was in the seventeenth century, and that is within the shadows, a man disposed to display his hand only when his hand is forced. If he is on those occasions useful in virtue of the sliver of pure steel running through his character, his usefulness is circumscribed by his quivering intelligence. Stern as a defender of the faith, he is, in his heart of hearts, a witness to its limitations.

The cardinal speaks today to those whose faith is sincere but whose doubts are significant. He speaks for me, and I suppose that in seeing something sympathetic in the cardinal, I have in return spoken for him.

No less than other men, the cardinal understands that in the twenty-first century, the symbol and the glory of faith is the cathedral that science has constructed from its great physical theories. The thing is immense. It can be seen from every vantage point, and even those ill at ease in its presence cannot escape its shadow.

But the cathedral is now some four hundred years old. The walls have aged into ocher and umber. Within, statues of all the saints stand on their pedestals. Newton is there, noble, uncorrupted, and aloof; and so, too, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, and Paul Dirac; Richard Feynman is the last. There are no others. There are no young saints and none have been proposed.

With a peasant smile of satisfaction creasing his narrow Italian face, the cardinal very much enjoys the grand spectacle that every day takes place within the cathedral and on the plaza on which it has been built. There are architects carrying rolled-up designs under their arms, masons stirring wet loads of cement, bricklayers, and carpenters; and hanging like monkeys from their scaffolds, stonecutters carving out gargoyles on all the high ledges.