Years ago our local public high school had a teacher who regularly told students that it was impossible for Christians to be scientists. Of course, the simplest way to show what nonsense that teacher was spouting was simply to point out all the scientists who had been serious Christians. I thought I would make a list for one of the students who was being tormented by this teacher, and since she was Catholic I included only the Catholics I found. This meant that I didn’t include Michael Faraday or Isaac Newton, for example, both serious believers, but non-Catholics. This wasn’t meant as a slam but simply a way to keep the list manageable. 

The project had two unexpected effects on me. Among other sources, I went through the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia to find a lot of names. This meant that I went through a sort of history of scientific ideas in various different fields, just by reading biographies. The 1908 Encyclopedia had a bias towards the idea that the medieval scientists mattered, and I acquired that bias, happily. I also read a lot about Galileo, a necessity for anyone trying to discuss Catholic scientists, not because Galileo is the most important Catholic scientist ever, but because everyone has heard of him, has opinions, and will bring him up. 

I’m remembering this experience because I’m reading a book about science and faith, and the way the author discusses Galileo and Newton is different from the way I would. To some extent that’s not surprising. Everyone I read years ago had a different take on Galileo and there have been so many books written about him with different ways of describing him that it’s clear he was a many-faceted character. 

In this case, Spencer Klavan, author of Light of the Mind, Light of the World gives Newton credit for two ideas that I think belongs to Galileo. If Newton came up with his three laws of motion without much prior input that’s a weight on one side of the debate about the importance of medieval science. However, if Newton’s First Law, that objects in motion remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force, was discussed by Jean Buridan in the 1300’s and again by Galileo forty or fifty years before Newton published in 1686, that’s a slightly different story. Galileo also discussed motion extensively in his final work, Discourse on Two New Sciences, and showed that motion could be described mathematically. To me therefore, Newton thus was expanding on someone else’s work when he proposed his laws. 

Klavan also then gives Newton the ‘credit’ for shattering “the imaginary barrier once thought to separate the region beneath the moon from the domain of the stars. … It was all one, governed everywhere by the same perfectly consistent laws…”  (p. 70) But it was this realization that made Galileo’s observations of the moon so devastating to people. He looked at the moon, which was supposed to be a perfect sphere, in the perfect heavens, and saw instead, mountains and valleys, just like the earth. And mountains crumble and valleys fill in. Change in the unchangeable heavens. Galileo saw tiny satellites orbiting Jupiter, clearly not orbiting either the earth or the sun. As above, so below. 

I’m not finished with the book so I won’t say too much more yet, but there’s a whole discussion about science showing us the future, as opposed to teaching us the best way to live in the present. I think Klavan is overstating the case for the first view but it’s a very complicated discussion.

To be continued….