Darrick Taylor on Galileo and Robert Bellarmine….

Years ago, the philosopher Paul Feyerabend wrote about the Galileo affair as an example of a conflict between two types of experts. On the one hand, there was the hero of Enlightenment history, Galileo Galilei, who championed the use of reason to understand the universe by dividing the physical world up into primary qualities—basically, anything that could be determined by mathematics—from everything else, and treating only those as properly being the subject of scientific knowledge. 

This is the great trade-off of modern science: precise, virtually unassailable knowledge about one limited aspect of the world, in exchange for the whole. As the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell put it, “physics is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.” For the rest our knowledge is negative.

Bellarmine

The other type of expertise was represented in the Galileo affair by Robert Bellarmine. This type of expert, according to Feyerabend, was concerned with the whole of our knowledge, not merely bits and pieces of it. In this instance, he took Bellarmine’s caution with regard to modifying the Church’s stance on the Bible in light of Galileo’s findings to be an effort to safeguard the whole of the Church’s understanding about the role of humanity in the universe. In Feyerabend’s telling, Bellarmine was right to consider the impact Galileo’s findings might have on society and how his new findings might relate to the faith of the Church, since it represented a “wider point of view” about the world than the merely mathematical. 

Similar conflicts bedevil modern society. Take, for example, the very sensitive topic of human intelligence. There is a large and growing body of evidence that indicates that human intelligence is the result of genetic inheritance. To say the least, these findings are at odds with the notion of human equality which has dominated Western life since the 18th century. The response to these findings is often one of dismissal, as if they cannot be true; but, of course, one might reasonably ask whether mathematically measurable intelligence is the sole measure of human worth (it isn’t).

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