Re: RATE Vol. II

On 5/22/06, Ted Davis <tdavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
  G was
> therefore acting like a Protestant: telling the authorities of the ROman
> Church how they ought to interpret certain passages, contrary to the
> traditional interpretations. And quoting Augustine, a favorite father for
> the Protestants, in the process. Not the best strategy, but probably the
> only one available to him at the time.

Here's one such quote by Galileo of Augustine:

And in St. Augustine [in the seventh letter to Marcellinus] we read:
'If anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and
manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken;
for he opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible, which is
beyond his comprehension, but rather his own interpretation; not what
is in the Bible, but what he has found in himself and imagines to be
there'

Some more evidence that literalism is the core of the issue is the
following quote from Galileo's Daughter (pp. 64-5). Galileo affirms
the inerrancy of Scripture but eschews literalism as a source of
contradictions, blasphemies and heresies. Galileo saw his opponents
not as obsessive Aristotelians but as obsessive literalists.

The troubling news of Madama Cristina's displeasure inspired an
immediate response from Galileo. Even more than he regretted her
opposition, he dreaded the drawing of battle lines between science and
Scripture. Personally, he saw no conflict between the two. In the long
letter he wrote back to Castelli on December 21, 1613, he probed the
relationship of discovered truth in Nature to revealed truth in the
Bible.

"As to the first general question of Madama Cristina, it seems to me
that it was most prudently propounded to you by her, and conceded and
established by you, that Holy Scripture cannot err and the decrees
therein contained are absolutely true and inviolable. I should only
have added that, though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and
interpreters are liable to err in many ways … when they would base
themselves always on the literal meaning of the words. For in this
wise not only many contradictions would be apparent, but even grave
heresies and blasphemies, since then it would be necessary to give God
hands and feet and eyes, and human and bodily emotions such as anger,
regret, hatred, and sometimes forgetfulness of things past, and
ignorance of the future."

These literary devices had been inserted into the Bible for the sake
of the masses, Galileo insisted, to aid their understanding of matters
pertaining to their salvation. In the same way, biblical language had
also simplified certain physical effects in Nature, to conform to
common experience. "Holy Scripture and Nature," Galileo declared, "are
both emanations from the divine word: the former dictated by the Holy
Spirit, the latter the observant executrix of God's commands."
Received on Mon May 22 17:07:25 2006