My 2003 review of Kevin MacDonald’s book The Culture of Critique is still generating a dribble of emails. I just got a rather good one from a Talmudic scholar. It touches on some of the things we talk about here. I’ve appended it to my review here.
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Meta
Interesting post. Let’s hope the discussion doesn’t attract the usual barnacles.
Too late.
I’ll skip over the provocative phrase “in the world of men.” I don’t mind if we ignore life in traditional Jewish communities over the last two millennia, which was directly governed by the Talmud, since that’s not the real world.
Even looking at it from Mr. Derbyshire’s correspondent’s viewpoint, the Talmud example was mildly interesting but not all that enlightening. Isn’t it already known that scientists are often more open to heresies than are priests? (Social scientists excluded, of course.)
A couple points, then. Since Judaism does not and did not have an official hierarchy, the Rash’s beliefs were of limited effect. Lots of heretical Jewish thought has made it into the mainstream, Maimonides probably being the canonical example.
Even religious hierarchies can be surprisingly open to contrary beliefs. Here’s Cardinal Bellarmine writing about Galileo:
Bellarmine will never be confused with Voltaire, but he sounds pretty reasonable. He’s requiring a higher threshold of evidence for claims which go against the Church’s reading of Scripture. The heliocentric theory was eventually demonstrated to the satisfaction of the Church, and they did just as Bellarmine said: they effectively admitted that they had misunderstood the Scriptures. The Church did the same when it gave its permission and support to biblical source criticism in 1942.
My point is simply that the popular antithesis of free, open science against authoritarian, closed religion is a bit over-stated. The example of one particular Talmudic scholar doesn’t give a very full picture.
Ploni,
You are not who I meant when I mentioned “barnacles.” Mentioning MacDonald’s book almost always tends to attract an annoying crowd of Jew-haters.
I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun was in the center of the universe and the earth in the third sphere, and that the sun did not travel around the earth but the earth circled the sun, then it would be necessary to proceed with great caution in explaining the passages of Scripture which seemed contrary, and we would rather have to say that we did not understand them than to say that something was false which has been demonstrated.
The problem, Ploni, is that Bellarmine has undermined the basis of his faith. If you don’t have an inspired source of knowledge–which is the inevitable implication of Bellarmine’s workaround–then you have no meaningful communication with God. You can try to patch this up with God’s inscrutability, the interpretive magesterium of the church, or God’s speaking to men of the time in their language, or other clever dodges, but at bottom, empirical experience and reasoning are acknowledged to be of higher quality than “revelation”.
I agree with both of you. (Must be losing my touch). Polichinello is correct — pretty much anything you write about Jews or Jewishness is guaranteed to draw (a) antisemitic nutsos, and (b) hypersensitive Jews who think that anything anyone writes about Jews/Jewishness is ipso facto antisemitic — even if the writer is himself Jewish (I’m not). I should say, though, that the majority of comments on that review were from non-crazy people. There aren’t as many nutsos as you might think.
Ploni Almoni is also correct. And, as has been pointed out many times, Galileo’s case was highly arguable at the time. It was essentially an appeal to elegance, to Occam’s Razor; and that’s always thin stuff to put up against cherished belief and the evidence of one’s own lying eyes.
The point of interest in my correspondent’s post was the rabbi’s preference for the authority of his scriptures over his lying eyes. That’s all — plus the reminder that this sort of thing is by no means restricted to Christians.
And, as has been pointed out many times, Galileo’s case was highly arguable at the time. It was essentially an appeal to elegance, to Occam’s Razor;
Galileo’s explanations weren’t always very Occamish, either, if that is what you’re saying. Despite having sailors tell him otherwise, he persisted in arguing that tides synched with the sun’s movement (forgive the geocentric language). He also stumbled on the issue of comets, insisting they were atmospheric. One of his weirder excursions was trying to create a navigational system based on the moons of Jupiter. None of this should take away from his genius, of course. It just that high powered minds can often go far down dead ends. It’s a rare man who, like Kepler, tears up a cherished system and starts anew.
The point of interest in my correspondent’s post was the rabbi’s preference for the authority of his scriptures over his lying eyes. That’s all — plus the reminder that this sort of thing is by no means restricted to Christians.
To this point, I’d repeat what I said about Bellarmine in relief. Unlike the good cardinal, the rabbi is being true to his beliefs. If the scriptures are sacred and accurate, as any endowment from God should be, then what are mere human eyes? The rabbi sees that he can either favor his faith or his senses, but not both.
“and we would rather have to say that we did not understand them than to say that something was false which has been demonstrated”
And there — right there — is where the Cardinal fails.
Being unwilling to say that the Scriptures are wrong, regardless of the circumstances, is a failure of reason. And on certain things, the Scriptures are clearly wrong, in ways that even unmodified human senses can detect.
We understand them just fine. They are incorrect.
Derb,
Did MacDonald ever post his review of your review? I can’t find it on his website.
-O
Being unwilling to say that the Scriptures are wrong, regardless of the circumstances, is a failure of reason.
Well, what are you reasoning towards? The Cardinal isn’t necessarily reasoning towards the triumph of the senses.
Also, in fairness to Bellarmine, Gallileo was trying to do what the Cardinal proposed, reconcile Scripture to his heliocentrism. Doing so gave his enemies a means of attacking him the first time around for theologizing without any authority.
ossicle: He did indeed post my review, with many comments of his own. I recall the tone of them being a bit sour, but my memory may be faulty. I’ve never met the guy.
If the review is not there now, I suppose he must have taken it down. A charitable interpretation would be that he just tidies up his website every so often & thought the review no longer of interest.
However, from things I’ve heard and read, his books about the Jews and their "group evolutionary strategy" got him in more trouble than he wanted, so he’s dropped the whole issue. Perhaps he’s accordingly minimized it on his website. I really don’t know.
Jon Entine’s book Abraham’s Children includes an interview with KM which he took strong exception to. I do know Jon quite well & am inclined to take his side on this … but I don’t really know.
First of all allow me to state what I consider to be a fact, that some of the most brilliant writing and “logic” that a person is likely to come across is contained in the creolic hebrew of talmudic commentators throughout the ages. It’s an astonishing fact that such acuity is to be found in a field of study pursued by so few but I believe that it’s true nonetheless.
And I regard this as almost incomparably pernicious to the interests of truth (at least among those intimately and emotionally familiar with the literature, particularly if they were immersed in it through the years of their earliest youth).
The faults with the logic of the commentators essentially come down to that of the faults of any inherently irrational mechanism of thought (primarily the belief in the infallibility of an ever growing host of sages) but the general effect of this intellectual body of work is to protect the system from it’s questioners with the ever ready retort, “are you smarter than Rabbi Akiva? and Rabbeinu Tam? and the Rambam? and the shav shmaytzeh? and Rav yoshe ber?” etc, etc.
Of course there are rational, dispassionate ways to respond to such questions when they actually come to be phrased (which is often enough, though rarely dispassionately) but the unstated and ever-present question does its fair share of keeping believers within the fold. To the best of my knowledge, there is no comparable body of work to the generations worth of intellectual commentary on the Talmudic literature, the vast majority of which is engaged with reconciling seeming-contradictions within the exceedingly vast literature, and thus the temptation towards tribalistic chauvinism is fierce and requires a whole hell of a lot of intellectual fortitude to overcome.
Bradlaugh
If the review is not there now, I suppose he must have taken it down. A charitable interpretation would be that he just tidies up his website every so often & thought the review no longer of interest.
It is still hosted on his website: The Conservatism of Fools: A Response to John Derbyshire.
“Well, what are you reasoning towards?”
And there — right there — is where *you* fail.
Care to expand?
What would be the point? If you can’t recognize the error, explaining it is unlikely to be useful. Those who can have almost certainly already done so.
I spend a lot of time casting pearls, but even I have my limits.
What would be the point? A discussion, but if you don’t feel like it, that’s fine.
Caledonian,
Reviewing the thread, I see your point. The cardinal is engaged in special pleading (if that’s the right fallacy) for the Bible, and arranging everything else around that. My first response to you was meant to be flip, but I did take the everyday definition too seriously and should have been more careful.
That’s why Galileo was persecuted by the Church.
I’ve heard Catholic apologists claim it was because he didn’t provide enough evidence, or that he insulted specific individuals, or that he didn’t meet rigorous scientific standards (which hadn’t been established yet!), or that he was wrong about the tides.
When the real reason was explicitly mentioned: Galileo claimed that Scripture was wrong, and the people who would rather say that they didn’t understand Scripture than admit it could be in error could never tolerate that claim being made openly.
Once Scripture becomes something that *can* have errors, than you can consider even potentially being wrong, the notion of authority that the entire Church is built on begins to crumble.
@B.B.
Thanks!
Caledonian,
Do you have a source for that claim, that Galileo said Scripture was wrong? I tried looking. Wikipedia backs you up (quote below), but it’s not footnoted, and I’d like to have a source to go back to. I’m not saying you’re wrong, obviously someone else says the same thing, it’s just that I’ve read that he didn’t, and I’d a like a solid piece of evidence beyond the web to back that up if I’m going to change my mind.
If you don’t have it at hand, please, don’t bother, though.
Galileo defended heliocentrism, and claimed it was not contrary to those Scripture passages. He took Augustine’s position on Scripture: not to take every passage literally, particularly when the scripture in question is a book of poetry and songs, not a book of instructions or history. The writers of the Scripture wrote from the perspective of the terrestrial world, and from that vantage point the sun does rise and set. Galileo did, however, openly question the veracity of the Book of Joshua (10:13) wherein the sun and moon were said to have remained unmoved for three days to allow a victory to the Israelites.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Church_controversy
Along the same lines, here’s some passages from Gallieo’s letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, where G says the same thing Bellarmine says:
http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/B/Peter.Barker-1/HSCI3013/lgc2.htm
With regard to this argument, I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth-whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might; fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies. Thus it would be necessary to assign to God feet, hands ans eyes, as well as corporeal and human affections, such as anger, repentance, hatred, and sometimes even the forgetting of` things past and ignorance of those to come. These propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities, Of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. For the sake of those who deserve to be separated from the herd, it is necessary that wise expositors should produce the true senses of such passages, together with the special reasons for which they were set down in these words. This doctrine is so widespread and so definite with all theologians that it would be superfluous to adduce evidence for it….
Now let us consider the extent to which the famous passage in Joshua can be accepted without altering the literal meaning of its words, and under what conditions the day might be greatly lengthened by the Sun’s obedience to Joshua’s command that it stand still.
If the celestial motions are understood according to the Ptolemaic system, this could never happen at all. For the movement of the Sun through the ecliptic is from West to East, and hence it is opposite to the movement of the sphere of fixed stars, which in that system causes night and day. Therefore it is obvious that if the Sun should cease its own proper motion the day would become shorter not longer. The way to lengthen the day would be to speed up the Sun’s motion … until it was equal to that of the sphere of fixed stars. This would require accelerating the usual speed of the Suns by a factor of about three hundred and sixty.
… But I wish to consider next whether this very event may not be understood more consistently …in terms of the Copernican system, adding a further observation that I have recently made about the body of the Sun…. In order that [the whole system of celestial rotations] should not be disturbed by stopping only a single celestial body, introducing great disorder throughout nature, I shall next assume that the Sun, though fixed in one place, rotates on its own axis making a complete revolution in about a month, as I believe is conclusively proved in my Letters on Sunspots. … And just as if the motion of the heart should cease in an animal, so all motions of its limbs would also cease, thus if the rotation of the Sun were to stop, the rotations of the planets would stop too. … The Sun then being the origin of light and the source of motoin, when God willed that at Joshua’s command the whole system of the world should rest and remain in the same state for many hours, it sufficed to make the Sun stand still. When it stopped, all other revolutions ceased. The Earth, Moon and Sun remained in the same pattern as before, as did all the planets. In all that time day did not dwindle towards night, for day was miraculously prolonged. And in this manner, by the stopping of the Sun, without in the least disturbing the other features or configurations of the stars, the day could be lengthened on Earth — and this agrees exactly with the literal sense of the sacred text.”
Again, I’m not saying you’re wrong, C. I just want to show there’s some reason for the confusion if you are right.
Take a look at http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/galileo.html
Not a site that is obviously Catholic-friendly, but that page doesn’t contain content vehemently opposed to it. If you have specific complaints of bias, feel free to make them.
Given the position the Church had in fact taken at the time, even saying that the Scriptures had to be interpreted differently constituted a challenge to its authority. Galileo unquestionably made such a claim.
More to the point, Galileo was unwilling to constraint his claims about the truth of the heliocentricity of the known universe, as other astronomers did, he insisted that observation required that the new model be adopted and geocentrism abandoned. And he was quite right on that regard, even though many of his tide-related points were incorrect.
Given the position the Church had in fact taken at the time, even saying that the Scriptures had to be interpreted differently constituted a challenge to its authority. Galileo unquestionably made such a claim.
First, I have no bias complaints with the source. Also, I’m an atheist, just so we’re clear. I hold no brief for the Catholic church.
To the point you make above, I don’t disagree with it at all. That is what got him in trouble the first time around in the 1610s, which would later lead to the 1633 debacle.
I just found the claim that Galileo said the Scriptures were wrong surprising. (Again, it’s not just your claim, but one that’s repeated on Wiki.) In the letter your source references, Galileo says exactly the opposite. He says the Scriptures are right, it’s just that our interpretation of them needs to be adjusted, and Bellarmine said the same thing–only, he insisted G. prove his heliocentrism first. And that was something Galileo really couldn’t do at that point.
More to the point, Galileo was unwilling to constraint his claims about the truth of the heliocentricity of the known universe, as other astronomers did, he insisted that observation required that the new model be adopted and geocentrism abandoned. And he was quite right on that regard, even though many of his tide-related points were incorrect.
In Bellarmine’s and the RC Church’s defense, I think they had a point when they told Galileo to prove his case or shut up. By our standards, there shouldn’t be any constraint on science or speech, but that POV was still centuries off. Bellarmine and the Church were a socio-political institution that was already under fire from the Protestants for being free with the Scriptures. Galileo held political office and he was associated with the Church through his teaching position. They were affected by his teachings and had an interest. So before allowing any more liberties to be taken with scriptural interpretation, especially when dealing with something of the magnitude of heliocentrism, Bellarmine wanted some serious justification.
In this, of course, I’m not trying to justify Catholicism, which was and is wrong. I’m just looking at the figures in their historical context.
“In the letter your source references, Galileo says exactly the opposite.”
He also signed a document recanting heliocentrism. His statement that “nevertheless, [the Earth] moves” while doing so is probably apocryphal, but even if it’s just a story it’s ultimately correct in the broadest sense.
Humans are not necessarily consistent in their views, either at one moment or across time, and it is noteworthy that regardless of what he actually believed, Galileo publically declared that he rejected his previous claims. Nevertheless, those arguments were (generally) valid / correct, although some of his lines of argument were wrong, and they were eventually vindicated.
It does move.
He also signed a document recanting heliocentrism.
I’m a bit confused here. The letter to the Grand Duchess was what got him in trouble. From your link:
In 1615 Galileo wrote a letter outlining his views to Madame Christina of Lorraine, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, “Concerning the Use of Biblical Quotations in Matters of Science.”[8] The tribunal used this letter against him in his first trial in 1616.
Why should that letter be treated on the same level as his recantation?
I’m not saying it shouldn’t. I just want to know what your reasoning is.