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"The reason produced for condemning the opinion that the earth moves and the sun stands still is that in many places in the Bible one may read that the sun moves and the earth stands still. Since the Bible cannot err, it follows as a necessary consequence that anyone takes an erroneous and heretical position who maintains that the sun in inherently motionless and the earth movable.
With regard to this argument, I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the Holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe that nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies. Thus it would be necessary to assign to God feet, hands and eyes, as well as corporeal and human affections, such as anger, repentance, hatred and sometimes even the forgetting of things past and ignorance of those to come. These propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. For the sake of those who deserve to be separated from the herd, it is necessary that wise expositors should produce the true senses of such passages, together with the special reasons for which they were set down in these words. This doctrine is so widespread and so definite with all theologians that it would be superfluous to adduce evidence for it.
THE BIBLE’S AUDIENCE
Hence I think that I may reasonably conclude that whenever
the Bible has occasion to speak of any, physical conclusion
(especially those which are very abstruse and hard to understand),
the rule has been observed of avoiding confusion in the minds
of the common people which would render them contumacious
toward the higher mysteries. Now the Bible, merely to condescend
to popular capacity, has not hesitated to obscure some very important
pronouncements, attributing to God himself some qualities
extremely remote from (and even contrary to) His essence. Who,
then, would positively declare that this principle has been set
aside, and the Bible has confined itself rigorously to the bare and
restricted sense of its words, when speaking but casually of the
earth, of water, of the sun, or of any other created thing? Especially
in view of the fact that these things in no way concern the primary
purpose of the sacred writings, which is the service of God and
the salvation of souls—matters infinitely beyond the comprehension
of the common people.
This being granted, I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations; for the Holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word, the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost and the latter as the observant executrix of God’s commands. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as those which govern all physical effects; nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in sacred statements of the Bible. Perhaps this is what Tertullian meant by these words. ‘We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine; by Nature in His words, and by doctrine in His revealed word.
From this I do not mean to infer that we need not have an extraordinary esteem for the passages of holy Scripture. On the contrary, having arrived at any certainties in physics, we ought to utilize these as the most appropriate aids in the true exposition of the Bible and in the investigation of those meanings which are necessarily contained therein, for these must be concordant with demonstrated truths. I should judge that the authority of the Bible was designed to persuade men of those articles and propositions which, surpassing all human reasoning: could not be made credible by science: or by any other means than through the very mouth of the Holy Spirit.
THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE
Yet even in those propositions which are not matters of faith:
this authority ought to be preferred over that of all human writings
which are supported only by bare assertions or probable
arguments, and not set forth in a demonstrative way. This I hold
to be necessary and proper to the same extent that divine wisdom
surpasses all human judgement and conjecture.
But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has
endowed us with senses, reason: and intellect has intended to forgo
their use and by some other means to give us a knowledge which
we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense
and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and
minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations. This
must be especially true in those sciences of which but the faintest
trace (and that consisting of conclusions) is to be found in the Bible.
Of astronomy: for instance: so little is found that none of the
planets except Venus are so much as mentioned: and this only once
or twice under the name of Lucifer. If the sacred scribes had
any intention of teaching people certain arrangements and motions
of the heavenly bodies: or had they wished us to derive such
knowledge from the Bible: then in my opinion they would not
have spoken of these matters so sparingly in comparison with the
infinite number of admirable conclusions which are demonstrated
in that science. Far from pretending to teach us the constitution
and motions of the heavens and the stars, with their shapes:
magnitudes: and distances, the authors of the Bible intentionally
forebore to speak of these things: though all were quite well known
to them....
HOW ONE GOES TO HEAVEN
From these things it follows as a necessary consequence that:
since the Holy Ghost did not intend to teach us whether heaven
moves or stands still: whether its shape is spherical or like a discus
or extended in a plane: nor whether the earth is located at its center
or off to one side, then so much the less was it intended to settle
for us any other conclusion of the same kind. And the motion or
rest of the earth and the sun is so closely linked with the things
just named, that without a determination of the one, neither side
can be taken in the other matters. Now if the Holy Spirit has purposely
neglected to teach us propositions of this sort as irrelevant
to the highest goal (that is, to our salvation), how can anyone affirm
that it is obligatory to take sides on them, and that one belief
is required by faith, while the other side is erroneous? Can an opinion
be heretical and yet have no concern with the salvation of
souls? Can the Holy Ghost be asserted not to have intended
teaching us something that does concern our salvation? I would
say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most
eminent degree: ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach
us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.’
To command that the very professors of astronomy themselves see to the refutation of their own observations and proofs as mere fallacies and sophisms is to enjoin something that lies beyond any possibility of accomplishment. For this would amount to commanding that they must not see what they see and must not understand what they know, and that in searching they must find the opposite of what they actually encounter. Before this could be done they would have to be taught how to make one mental faculty command another, and the inferior powers the superior, so that the imagination and the will might be forced to believe the opposite of what the intellect understands. I am referring at all times to merely physical propositions, and not to supernatural things which are matters of faith....
SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH
If in order to banish the opinion [of Copernicus] in question from
the world it were sufficient to stop the mouth of a single man—as
perhaps those men persuade themselves who, measuring the
minds of others by their own, think it impossible that this doctrine
should be able to continue to find adherents — then that would
be very easily done. But things stand otherwise. To carry out such
a decision it would be necessary not only to prohibit the book of
Copernicus and the writings of other authors who follow the same
opinion, but to ban the whole science of astronomy. Furthermore,
it would be necessary to forbid men to look at the heavens, in
order that they might not see Mars and Venus sometimes quite
near the earth and sometimes very distant, the variation being
so great that Venus is forty times and Mars sixty times as large
at one time as another. And it would be necessary to prevent Venus
being seen round at one time and forked at another, with very
thin horns; as well as many other sensory observations which can
never be reconciled with the Ptolemaic system in any way, but
are very strong arguments for the Copernican. And to ban Copernicus
now that his doctrine is daily reinforced by many new observations
and by the learned applying themselves to the reading of
his book, after this opinion has been allowed and tolerated for
those many years during which it was less followed and less confirmed,
would seem in my judgement to be a contravention of
truth, and an attempt to hide and suppress her the more as she
revealed herself the more clearly and plainly. Not to abolish and
censure his whole book, but only to condemn as erroneous this
particular proposition, would (if I aip not mistaken) be a still
greater detriment to the minds of men, since it would afford them
occasion to see a proposition proved that it was heresy to believe.
And to prohibit the whole science would be but to censure a hundred
passages of holy Scripture which teach us that the glory and
greatness of Almighty God are marvelously discerned in all his
works and divinely read in the open book of heaven. For let no
one believe that reading the lofty concepts written in that book
leads to nothing further than the mere seeing of the splendor of
the sun and the stars and their rising and setting, which is as far
as the eyes of brutes and the vulgar can penetrate. Within its pages
are couched mysteries so profound and concepts so sublime that
the vigils, labors, and studies of hundreds upon hundreds of the
most acute minds have still not pierced them, even after continual
investigations for thousands of years.
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