Galileo and the struggle between religion and science

AS PROTESTS over the killing of George Floyd (and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor) continue, many parents wonder how to talk about race and racism with their children.

You can start having conversations about race in preschool, said Jacqueline Dougé, a paediatrician and child health advocate in Maryland, US – children can internalise racial bias between the ages of 2 and 4, according to an American Academy of Pediatrics article Dougé co-wrote.

In addition to keeping an open dialogue about racism, a way to raise children to be anti-racist is by making sure your home library has books with black people at the centre of stories.

Christine Taylor-butler, the prolific children’s author and writer of The Lost Tribes Series, said she got into children’s literature because she wanted to see more stories of black joy. “I want stories about kids in a pumpkin patch, and kids in an art museum,” she said. “Not only do we want our kids to read, but we want white kids to see we’re not the people you’re afraid of.”

I asked several authors and editors to offer suggestions of books to read to children. They are broken down roughly by age range:

Ages 0-3

Ezra Jack Keats’ books about Peter (The Snowy Day, A Letter to Amy, Hi, Cat!, Whistle for Willie)

“I love all of Ezra Jack Keats’ books about Peter, because they show a black boy in the city and the stories are just about his curiosity, his bravery and his being a kid.” – Kaitlyn Greenidge

Ages 3-5

written and illustrated by

Oge Mora

“This book is pure joy. A mom and her daughter, Ava, always look forward to Saturdays because it’s the one day of the week they get to spend together without school or work. A quiet yet profound picture book.” – Matt de la Peña

by Matthew A Cherry

“Written by a former NFL wide receiver and now a short film, it tells the story of a black father learning to do his daughter’s hair and the special bond they share.” – Meena Harris

Ages 5-8

by Jacqueline Woodson Illustrated by EB Lewis.

“A new girl, Maya, shows up at school, and the whole class, including Chloe, our main character, shuns her because she’s shabbily dressed and seems different. This goes on for a while, and then Maya is suddenly gone, and Chloe realises she’s missed her chance to be kind.” – Matt de la Peña

by Cynthia

Levinson

“In 1963, the city of Birmingham jailed hundreds of kids for joining the Children’s March. Among them was 9-year-old Audrey Faye Hendricks, taken from her family to spend a week behind bars.” – Maria Russo

Ages 9-12

by Veronica Chambers. “Thirty-five inspiring stories from the past 500 years of history, each with a lesson for our kids about how to fight injustice in their own lives.” – Jessica Grose

by Anastasia Higginbotham

“An honest explanation about how power and privilege factor into the lives of white children, at the expense of other groups, and how they can help seek justice.” – Meena Harris

Ages 12+

by Jason Reynolds

and Brendan Kiely

“This is a brilliant look at the effects of police brutality from the perspective of two teen boys: one white and one black.” – Matt de la Peña

by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X Kendi

“Reynolds and Kendi have created a book that slyly draws attention to the page itself. ‘Uh-oh. The R-word,’ they write. The word that ‘for many of us still feels Rated R’.”– Kaitlyn Greenidge | The New York Times

STEPHEN M BARR

THE “Galileo affair” continues to fascinate and provoke after 400 years. It was, in a way, both simple and very complicated. What was simple was its upshot: the great founder of modern science was tried, convicted and sentenced in 1633 to perpetual house arrest by the Catholic Church for defending the idea that the Earth goes around the sun, and was forced to recant under oath. This offence against freedom of thought, research and conscience can never cease to shock.

The complicated question is how and why it happened. It was not inevitable. Saint Augustine had warned eloquently in the 4th century against interpreting scripture contrary to what is known with certainty by reason and experience. This was a well-established principle, accepted by Cardinal Bellarmine, the church’s top theologian, who admitted in a letter to one of Galileo’s friends that “if there were a true demonstration that… the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them, than that what is demonstrated is false”.

The Galileo affair involved a complex interplay of ancient and novel scientific ideas, scriptural exegesis, entrenched theological and philosophical positions, intellectual turf battles, academic rivalries, flawed characters, personality clashes, and ecclesiastical and secular politics, all unfolding over two decades in the fevered atmosphere of the struggle between Reformation and Counter-reformation and the Thirty Years War. Few historical episodes are more fraught with subtleties, ironies and ambiguities.

To tell it properly requires an unusual breadth of knowledge and the gifts of a great storyteller.

Fortunately, Mario Livio is fully equipped for the task. In Galileo: And the Science Deniers, his mastery not only of the science, which is to be expected of a highly accomplished astrophysicist, but of the cultural and historical context is impressive. Even more impressive perhaps, given that he is not Catholic, is his relatively sophisticated grasp of some of the theological arguments and issues.

Galileo did have proof, from his telescopic discoveries, that the 15-century-old geocentric theory of Ptolemy was wrong.

Those discoveries were quickly confirmed by the Jesuit astronomers of the Collegio Romano and others, and the Ptolemaic theory was just as quickly abandoned.

But Galileo’s findings were not enough to prove the

Copernican theory correct or that the Earth moved, for there was a perfectly respectable third theory on the market, proposed years earlier by the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.

In Tycho’s model, the planets orbited the sun, but the sun orbited a stationary Earth. This model was completely consistent with all the observations of that time.

It avoided not only any scriptural issues but also a significant scientific objection to the Copernican theory, namely the failure to see “stellar parallax” (the slight apparent motions of distant stars that would be caused by the Earth’s shifting vantage point as it orbits the sun). This effect was not observed until 1838.

The scientific debate between the advocates of the Copernican and Tychonic models continued long after Galileo’s death and involved sophisticated scientific arguments on both sides. A definite scientific consensus that the Earth moves came only when Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and motion in the late 17th century.

Near the end of his book and in many interpolated paragraphs throughout it, Livio draws parallels between Galileo’s opponents and the contemporary “science deniers” of the book’s subtitle, by which he means fundamentalist antievolutionists and global warming sceptics. But those parallels are rather strained. Nobody today has been tried and punished for defending the ideas of evolution or global warming, or coerced into recanting them.

And, in contrast to the antievolutionists of today, who are tightly closing their eyes to overwhelming scientific evidence, the advocates of the Ptolemaic theory abandoned it immediately when faced with Galileo’s discoveries, adopting instead Tycho’s theory, which was quite viable and scientifically respectable until Newton came along, at which point it, too, was abandoned.

Livio’s occasional straying into the didactic, not to say homiletic, will be distracting or irritating for some readers.

But they do not diminish the value of the rest of his book, which tells the story of Galileo in a perceptive, illuminating and balanced way. | The Washington Post