Galileo's Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation Between Galileo and the Church Book

Galileo's Mistake is essentially two books spliced into one. These books alternate back and forth between each other throughout the book. The first book is a sometimes intriguing exploration of the philosophical issues that were at stake in Galileo's heresy trial. This book is serviceable. The second book is a series of fictional dialogues between the author, an atheist, and a Catholic nun. This book is awful.

The first book's virtues can be addressed briefly. There are some fascinating discussions of the Medieval theology on the intersection of reason and faith that provides a background for fully understanding the stakes involved in Galileo's trial. The author covers them ably and accessibly, providing ample quotes from the primary sources to back up his interpretation. My compliments to the author for his ability to read lots of books and summarize them.

This brings us to the second book involving a fictional dialogue between a nun, an atheist, and the author. The author's goal to fight the scientific method's demands for evidence-based reasoning and defending a "spirituality" which he never quite gets around to defining. In these dialogues he and the nun easily win every round. They win because they are fighting a straw-man atheist. In a surreal moment of unintended irony the atheist grumbles "You've given me all the crummy lines." This is unfair, the author gives his side crummy lines too, though he doesn't seem to be aware that they are crummy. Dealing with all of them would make a small book so I'll stick to two of the particularly bad ones.

One argument from the author and his fictional nun is that Galileo overstated the certainty we can derive from scientific models, and that science are only partial explanations about the natural world. Therefore, God must exist. What God must exist is unclear; the author vacillates between "God", "something very much like [God]", "the spiritual", or "a higher truth" without getting into any details. In any case, this line of argument assumes that an argument against one position the same as an argument in favor another position. It's an argument from ignorance. Also known as a logical fallacy. Also known as a thing you should have learned is not a valid argument in freshman philosophy class.

Another major argument is that the scientific process is based on faith just like religion. Therefore, religion and science are on exactly the same playing field and therefore faith is just as valid as science as a means for arriving at truth. In fact, says the author, we use faith all of the time! After all, he observes, our money doesn't have anything backing it up but our faith in the government issuing the currency.

This argument fails because it attempts to conflate faith with trust. To stick with the author's money example, institutional finance does not have the same sort of faith about money that institutional religions have about their gods. Recent political history illustrates this. Faced with evidence that the United States government might not be able to pay off their debts during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, Standard and Poor's downgraded the credit score of the United States government from an A to an A-. They changed their level of trust (or "faith", if you insist) based on evidence to the contrary. It is impossible to imagine a religious person downgrading God's "credibility score" when a natural disaster occurs, or when their child dies of cancer, or any other type of tragedy that life hands us.

In contrast to institutional religion, the scientific community behaves much more like Standard and Poor's did when faced with the dysfunction of the American federal government. The story of the development of relativity in physics provides a solid example. Like Standard and Poor's, physics had a similar crisis of confidence in their investment in Newtonian mechanics after scientists made empirical observations that Newtonian mechanics couldn't account for. Keeping with the financial analogy, the physics community diversified their portfolio by investing in Einstein's theory of relativity because of its ability to provide stable predictions that Newton's framework couldn't explain. Unless we're talking about polytheism (which the author never advocates for), one does not generally see believers worshipping a new gods when another god fails to deliver all the goods.

These very obvious objections are not mentioned once by the atheist character. Rather, when faced with these half-baked arguments, the atheist character pouts, slouches, and complains that Stephen Hawking's popular science writing is "incomprehensible" (because, if there is one thing atheists hate, it is books about science). In contrast, the author fawns over the fictional nun character mentioning her perfect Italian-inflected English, noting her impeccable table manners, and praising her ability to quote Augustine from memory (you might say it's almost as if someone outside the book is dictating it to her). The nun returns the favor to the author by telling the author how super impressed she is by his (mis)understanding of quantum mechanics. The author might have been better served by running his argument by a real physicist rather than a fictional nun, but the response from a real physicist would not have been as warm.

In the part of the book dedicated to historical analysis, the author praises Galileo for not only fairly presenting his opponents' arguments, but presenting them better than his opponents did. It is a shame this author did not extend the same courtesy to his opponents. No amount of historical insight can compensate for such slovenly, uncharitable, and ill-reasoned philosophical argument. This book was a disappointment.