The Infinite, the Void and Christianity

Everyone’s heard of Galileo and how the Church persecuted him. But what I didn’t know was why. Sure, Christianity considered the earth to be the center of the universe, but was that such a central belief of Christianity that they’d kill a guy over it? I always felt like there was something more to it.

Like everything else in the Western world, the story starts in ancient Greece. Pythagoras believed the earth was at the center of the universe. The sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around the earth, with each pinned inside a sphere. How far did these spheres within spheres extend? To infinity? Or did they stop at some point? If they stopped, what lay beyond the last sphere?

Aristotle denied the existence of both the void and the infinite. As far he was concerned, both the void and the infinite were just constructs of the mind: and he felt there’s nothing in the real world (universe) that was infinite. So Aristotle’s answer was that there were only a finite number of spheres and that God lay beyond the last sphere.

But what’s any of this got to do with the Church? Well, the Church loved the Aristotelian model because it “proved” the existence of God (as the being beyond the last sphere). So now you see why Copernicus and Galileo were so “dangerous”. When they said that the earth was not the center of the universe, they were disproving the Aristotelian model. And thus attacking the proof of the existence of God!

Copernicus, being a priest, knew how his heliocentric (sun-centric) model was inevitably an attack on the Church. And so he didn’t publish his findings until he was dead. Galileo, not being a priest, didn’t know what hell he was unleashing. And that is why the Church went after Galileo with their guns blazing.

On a related note, the Church having adopted the Aristotelian model had to deny the existence of the void (because Aristotle denied it). Not only that, they considered the void as evil! Why? Because it was tied to their answer to the question as to why evil exists. God, they said, is omnipotent, so there’s nothing He can’t do. But God wouldn’t do evil. Combine the two statements and what do you get: evil is nothing. From there, it’s only a short journey (inversion, actually) to decide that void is evil. And that dislike of the void is the root of the phrase “Nature abhors a vacuum”.

Comments

  1. KumarAugust 1, 2011 at 10:03 AM

    The point of this blog I thought was fairly well known.

    Anyway, it is true that the church came down heavily on the point because there was yet no fight between the church and some earlier philosophies ideas coming from Greece, even if they had nothing at all to do with the Christian faith and its ideas. In that sense the church feared new thinking in anything that the church tolerated or accepted might undermine its strong hold on the faithful who cling to the church. While Jesus the Christ was aligned with the principle of God, the church, like all religious institutions anywhere in the world, was (and is)after might and power; God is an instrument to serve that purpose!! Faithfuls will resist hearing this but truth is truth.

    There is one other thing. Not only the church. Many common people, educated or otherwise, also were uneasy about challenging the ancient Greek ideas. Apart from science, later European philosophers also know that they had to stand up against the ancient Greek influence and they did it. Even Descartes, who merged geometry and algebra with ingenious simplicity, disliked zero, which was so badly in his own proposal! After all, Europe is the bowl of the Hellenic culture and ideas.

    Fortunately for science, the common man did not have the social power to gather and speak against science. As to, "What about truth, logic and verification" the answer would always be the same, "What about it! Is that supposed to weigh in our thinking? Unless of course, I specifically choose to orient myself in that direction. This may sometimes be needed."

    By the way this is the way we orient ourselves towards law and justice too very often.

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