5. Goldish

As a scientist that is also of the Christian faith, this talk was very comforting learning that science and religion can go hand and hand. Before this lecture, I honestly did not know that scholars like Copernicus were asked by the church to further their understanding. Nowadays it feels that people in Christianity have some confusion with how evolution and the teachings from the Bible can coexist. In my personal experience, the fear and/or ignorance of science by some members of my community has lead to apprehension when it comes to expanding capacity for knowledge. I have been recently been discouraged from studying and embracing the teachings of evolution, the creation of the universe and even the age of the Earth. The fact that people still assume there is a conflict between Church and science has really hindered progress and the relationship between the two. I think that if that current mindset continues into the future, the rate of paradigm shifts will decrease or not be as high as it could be.

I sincerely hope that this mindset that the fields of science and church are not compatible can be dispelled in the future. This could potentially lead to another boom in innovations and ideas.

In all of my science classes prior to this, the role of the church has only been discussed in the context of how it has hindered science. I was intrigued when Dr. Goldish presented the full picture. From the Age of Enlightenment to modern fictional works like Angels and Demons, the intersection of science and theology has been misconstrued. Dr. Goldish began his discussion with Copernicus, a priest in the Catholic church, who performed his research because the Pope was considering a calendar reform. By putting the sun in the center of the solar system, rather than the Earth, Copernicus was able to eliminate these problems. The Catholic church encouraged him to publish this theory, but due to coinciding timing with the split of the church, people were especially sensitive towards new ideas. This could be misinterpreted as the first “rift” between science and religion. Kepler was also deeply religious. He believed he was working with the tools God gave him to translate “divine presence” through mathematical models. His major contribution was theorizing the elliptical orbit. While this did away with God’s perfectly circular orbits, it did reveal the mathematical exactness in nature. It seems like most scientists of this period (Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton) were religious. This makes sense because the most literate people were often monks and priests.

My favorite part of Dr. Goldish’s lecture was the drama of Galileo. When Galileo, a deeply religious Catholic, proved the Copernican system, the future Pope replied that his math was inferior and God’s logic was different from his. In retaliation, Galileo put the Pope’s side of the argument into the simpleton character of a book he then dedicated to the Pope. Overall, I was happy to hear Dr. Goldish say that the warfare between science and religion does not exist. Most of history actually shows scientific work and religion working together, since both theology and science have always been considered areas of knowledge and wisdom.

I really appreciated Dr.Goldish’s lecture because of how he set out to clarify the misunderstanding of how science and religion have been at war throughout all of history. I believed that the church was always against science from hearing pieces of scientific history like how Galileo was committed of heresy and sentenced to basically house arrest for the rest of his life. But looking more into it after Dr.Goldish’s lecture, I read how after Galileo was proven to be correct and the church resultantly cleared his name. This showed how the church was willing to accept science, even when it did not perfectly fit the church’s teachings. In the lecture, Dr.Goldish exemplified this through talking about the events that occurred between Copernicus and the church. I was intrigued to learn how it was a myth that the church loathed Copernicus from the beginning but rather utilized him. This occurred when the current Pope specifically asked Copernicus to research more about how the planets and stars move in the sky so as to create a better calendar system. As shown in this case, the church wanted to involve science in this new decision rather than cast it out. Additionally, the rejection of his findings about the orbit of the Earth with respect to the Sun was mainly from a few colleges rather than the entire church. Overall, this lecture gave me a new understanding of how science and religion have interacted throughout time and helped clear discrepancies I have had about it all. Moreover, it also proved how important it is to hear all of the details of a story before forming an opinion, as without all of the details it is very easy to misconstrue what truly happened, just as I have about the relationship between science and religion.

Professor Goldish created an interesting conversation between him and the class discussing the religion and science. I enjoyed the way Goldfish started the conversation asking our opinions and thoughts about the typical ideas we think of when picturing the correlation between science and religion. All of the things stated seemed to pin the two against one another. After addressing this fact, we moved on to discussing how in history that science and religion often intertwined and helped one another. This is especially in the case of Copernicus. I did not know before this presentation that Copernicus was actually a priest and was encouraged by the pope to do more research on the study of planets to recreate a calendar. In addition, I had no idea that both Newton and Kepler were religious and thanked God for allowing them to make their discoveries. I appreciated Professor Goldish’s take because he addresses this topic from a purely historical view and not in the typical view of exaggerating the hostility between science and religion.

Matt Goldish spoke with us about history in science, scientists, and their connection with the church. This was interesting to hear because it gave us a different perspective that started with the church being behind some of the scientist’s research. At least this was the case for Nicolaus Copernicus, who discovered that the world revolved around the sun, not the Earth. Even though the church had Copernicus research the calendar, the theories he discovered did not revolt as much against previous ideas with god, whereas Darwin’s theory of evolution, went completely against the church in two ways. Not only was the church not behind the research to begin with, but it also changed what the church was preaching and most of the church’s views. It’s interesting how the different approaches changed how scientists were view and treated.

Tuesday’s lecture by Matt Goldish focused on the ties between religion and science. Goldish began the lecture by mentioning the author Dan Brown and his book, Angels and Demons. One of the quotes Goldish provided talked about how religion has always had it out for science dating back to Galileo. However, as Goldish argues, the fabrication of this war of religion and science has been concocted since the 19th century by writers and the like. Goldish supported his argument by providing details about Nicolaus Copernicus and his discoveries in the field of astronomy. Copernicus was a priest in the church who was enlisted by the Pope to figure out a new calendar system that would correct issues associated with the Julian calendar. While Copernicus’s work was considered the first event of the scientific revolution, there were still holes into the explanation of why the planets moved the way Copernicus proposed. This ideology is due to the ideology of trying to save the phenomenon as mentioned in Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which talks heavily about paradigm shifts in the scientific community.

Goldish also mentioned the work of Johannes Kepler and how he was involved with religion and science. Kepler was a Lutheran who was the first person to discover mathematical facts that were always correct in relation to astronomy. Kepler talked heavily about how God had given him the tools and is revealing the truth to him. However, Kepler also had issues giving up the ideology that the world was surrounded by spheres and explaining retrograde motion of the planets. He decided that the path must be elliptical, not spherical and that the relationship is between the geometric solids. Goldish continued his lecture with examples from Galileo and Newton that show that they too were deeply religious scientists.

Overall, it is clear, based on Goldish’s lecture that religion and science are indeed not at war. Many of the great scientific names we all know were involved with the church in one form or another. It would be absurd to say that the church was not the center of scientific knowledge and achievement in the early years.

I was kind of surprised whenever Dr. Goldish introduced what he was going to talk about, as it seemed to go against what some other speakers have had to say. After thinking about it, however, it didn’t go against what anyone said, as it seems Darwin could possibly be an outlier in the whole debate of science vs. religion. I was excited to see what Dr. Goldish had so say from the beginning, as Angels & Demons is one of my favorite novels of all time, with Dan Brown being my second favorite author and somewhat of an idol for me since I want to be a writer.

My least favorite part of the presentation was the blame put onto Brown for trying to push a false narrative, as his books are in fact fiction writing, so any “fact” presented in a fiction novel  must be further researched to determine whether the “fact” is fiction or not as well.  I feel that Brown was not trying to intentionally misinform his readers of history, but create a fictional world that is the best to tell his story in. This did not mean that much to me, however, as it was a very minimal part of the presentation and mostly just used as a lead up to the main point.

Overall, I thought this was one of the best presentations and discussions we have had. Dr. Goldish was incredibly knowledgeable about all of the scientists we discussed, and was great at getting across his points. His points were so compelling that they made me want to go home and do more research into the subject myself. Also, it was impossible to look away as he was talking, as he speaks with so much confidence. I really enjoyed this presentation, and would gladly listen to him talk every week.

I really liked how enthusiastic Dr. Goldfish was when discussing to us the different scientists, such as Galileo and Copernicus, and how they actually worked with the churches to come up with these scientific revelations. His side stories kept me interested along the way, and provided more details about each scientist and what was going on in the rest of the world during their research and findings. I also did not know that there was actually never really a “war” between science and religion at the time. It was interesting that these scientists actually had the idea that God himself was revealing his creations to them, and that they were actually doing a good thing for the people and their religion by sharing this knowledge with the world. I wonder if this method would have worked with Darwin, although it is unlikely since the Bible, and other religious texts, clearly describe how humans were created. Whereas these texts are less specific or clear for topics that other scientists such as Newton had studied, making it easier for them to state that God had revealed the truth behind his creation to them.

There was a lot to process in this talk. Before this lecture I also held the idea that science and religion were never together and constantly, as it was put, at war. But the examples that were given show that the church actually encouraged scientific advancement in the early years as the only people who were “scientists” were priests or people very involved with the church. I was surprised to hear how Copernicus and Kepler were encouraged to publish the ideas that were discovered / created. The most interesting one that I heard was Galileo. From what we are taught in elementary school, Galileo was arrested and put under house arrest because of how his ideas opposed the catholic church. I was surprised that was not the whole story. It was fun to hear that he just had a massive ego and just disrespected the Pope to earn his house arrest. All of this being said, there might not have been a divide between church and science when science first started becoming a real term, but in this day I do still believe that the two are in conflict. Not at war, but there are definitely problems, in the most vaguest term, between the two ideas.