Please excuse my posting on history of science here, but I wanted to get
this into some public archives somehow.
In several places I've run into the claim
'The Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who had no brief for
Catholicism, once examined the case and concluded that "the Church had the
best of it." '
[as it's expressed at
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0005.html]
No one, of course, ever gives citation or context, which makes it a trifle
difficult for pedants(*) to take a position on this. What evidence did
Huxley cite? What was his reasoning? What was the rest of the dialogue in
which he said it?
(What, actually, does he mean? That they got the best of him by having the
brute power to force a recantation? Probably not something so vulgar as
that, to be sure; but what?)
Well, I've finally found it; no thanks to anyone who quotes it. It's in
the Gutenberg item
Title: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2
Author: Leonard Huxley
Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5226]
about line 14,110.
The entire relevant text:
"In your paper about scientific freedom, which I read some time ago
with much interest, you alluded to a book or article by Father Roberts
on the Galileo business. Will you kindly send me a postcard to say
where and when it was published?
"I looked into the matter when I was in Italy, and I arrived at the
conclusion that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had rather the
best of it. It would complete the paradox if Father Roberts should
help me to see the error of my ways."
It's in a letter to St. George Mivart, a noted opponent of evolution, who
had sent Huxley a draft paper to review. You will note, by the way, that
the quotation given at the top is less than perfectly accurate; these
things happen when a favorite sound-bite is passed from hand to hand
without reference to the source.
So does it mean? Beats me. It's fairly clear that the material cited by
Mivart puts Galileo in a better light than Huxley had thought. But we
still don't really know _what_ Huxley had thought. Whatever it was, it was
based on a more or less casual examination of what was available to him in
Italy in (it seems) 1884. That is to say, for those who suspect that
intellectual progress and the development of new data are at least in
principle a possibility, 120+ years ago.
It is left to the reader to *****s the power of this popular argument from
authority about Galileo's wrongness.
(*) Pedant: A man who cares whether what he says is true.
--Bertrand Russell, _The Good Citizen's Alphabet_ [from memory]
--
Dan Drake
dd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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