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Post by timoneill on Aug 28, 2013 0:01:25 GMT
I'm regularly coming across the claim Bruno was the first person since the Greeks to posit a plurality of worlds. But I dimly recall someone here (I think) giving a number of earlier examples, none of which ended with anyone burning at the stake. Is my memory correct?
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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 28, 2013 6:15:24 GMT
You are correct, Nicholas Cusanus speculated about the idea in the fifteenth century. His life and thoughts are discussed in God's Philosophers, pages 198 and 199.
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Post by fortigurn on Aug 28, 2013 10:04:24 GMT
Even Nicolas of Cusa wasn't the first since the Greeks. In 1277 Étienne Tempier (bishop of Paris), said Aristotle was wrong, that there could be more than one planet with life. Here's a list of others I know of, after Tempier.
* 15th century: Nicholas of Cusa (German cardinal), says that there could be life on the moon and even in the sun (De docta ignorantia, 1439-40)
* 1584: Giordano Bruno (Roman Catholic), proposed that given the size of the universe and the vast number of stars and planets, it was inevitable that life existed elsewhere (De l'Infinito, Universo e Mondi, 1584); he was burned at the stake, but not for this proposal, it was for his heretical religious system
* 17th century: Tommaso Campanella (Dominican priest), proposed that there was alien life on the sun (Civitas Solis, 1602)
* 17th century: Anton Maria Schyrleus of Rheita (Catholic astronomer), suggested that Jupiter had intelligent life analogous to human life on earth (Novem stellae circa Jovem visae, circa Saturnum sex, circa Martem nonnullae, 1643)
* 17th century: Henry More (Christian philosopher), proposes extraterrestrial life (Democritus Platonissans, or an Essay Upon the Infinity of Worlds, 1647)
* 17th century: Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (French Catholic), proposes extraterrestrial life (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 1686)
* 17th century: Christiaan Huygens (Dutch Christian and astronomer), proposes extraterrestrial life (Kosmotheoros, sive de terris coelestibus earumque ornatu conjecturae, 1698)
* 18th century: Richard Blackmore (English physician), proposes extraterrestrial life (The Creation: a Philosophical Poem in Seven Books, 1712)
* 18th-19th centuries: German astronomer William Herschel, English astronomer Richard Proctor (Other Worlds Than Ours: The Plurality of Worlds Studied under the Light of Recent Scientific Researches, 1871), French astronomer Camille Flammarion (La pluralité des mondes habités, 1862), Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, all propose extraterrestrial life
Ironically, it was shortly after Darwin's work on evolution (and partly because of it), that secular science started becoming skeptical of the idea of extraterrestrial life. Alfred Wallace (a supporter of Darwin), claimed that there couldn't be any life on other planets other than the human life on earth. He revived the Aristotilean claim that humans occupied a unique position in the universe, and that there were no other inhabited worlds ('Man’s Place in the Universe: A Study of the Results of Scientific Research in Relation to the Unity or Plurality of Worlds', 1903). Ooops.
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Post by timoneill on Aug 28, 2013 13:57:41 GMT
In 1277 Étienne Tempier (bishop of Paris), said Aristotle was wrong, that there could be more than one planet with life. Nicholas of Cusa was who I was thinking of (thanks ignorantianescia). But do you have any more details on Étienne Tempier in this regard? |
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Post by fortigurn on Aug 28, 2013 14:36:42 GMT
Tempier publicly condemned the belief that God cannot make many worlds, which was influential on Catholic theology; from that point on the idea became perfectly acceptable, theologically.
'So we find in 1277 AD, only three years after Aquinas died, the very blunt condemnation by the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, against a belief "that the First Cause cannot make many worlds.".', Corbally, 'What If There Were Other Inhabited Worlds?', in Gregersen, Görman, & Wassermann (eds.), 'The Interplay Between Scientific and Theological Worldviews, Part 1', Science & Theology 1997, number 5, p. 80 (1999).
'The assertion that God has at least theoretically the power to create many worlds was common in Scholastic literature, especially after Bishop Etienne Tempier's condemnation in 1277 of the Aristotelian thesis "that the first cause cannot make more than one world."', Harvey, 'Nicolas Oreseme and Hasdai Crescas on Many Worlds', in Fontain et al (eds.), 'Studies in the History of Culture and Science: A Tribute to Gad Freudenthal', p. 354 (2011).
'In 1277 there occurred an ironic event that Pierre Durhem and others have claimed to be a major cause of science. The bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, pressed by theologians concerned that philosophers of Aristotelian inclination were championing doctrines that could be construed as limiting God's power, issued a condemnation of 219 such propositions. Included in the condemnation was proposition 34: "that the First Cause cannot make many worlds." Abruptly after 1277 the milieu changed, with many authors formulating analyses aimed at showing God could create multiple worlds. Although few urged that God did in fact do so, this process led to a valuable reexamination and critique of Aristotle's antipluralist arguments.', Crowe, 'The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900', p. 5 (1999).
'Bruno's thinking was influenced by the many-worlds cosmology developed by the Greek atomists of the fourth century BCE. It also built on the systems of earlier European theological thinkers who either favoured, or left open, the possibility of an infinity of worlds in opposition to the Aristotelian view. Many highly prominent theologians considered that the principle of the infinity of divine power resonated with the possibility of a multiplicity of worlds. Such thinkers included: in the thirteenth century Etienee Tempier, Bishop of Paris; the Parisian theologians Godfrey of Fontaine, Henry of Ghent, and Richard of Middleton; in Oxford, the theologians William of Ware, Jean of Bassolos, and Thomas of Strausbourg; in the fourteenth century - both Jean Buridan (c. 1295-1358), rector of the University of Paris and William of Ockham (c. 1280-1347), of Oxford; and in the fifteenth century - the famous theologian-philosopher and cardinal Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464).
Nicolas advocated an infinite universe of worlds without a center and merits special note as the first Euroepan Christian thinker to advocate life on other worlds. His influence on Bruno was profound.', Harper, 'Beginning to Explore', in Herman (ed.), 'God, Science, and Humility: Ten Scientists Consider Humility Theology', p. 86 (2000).
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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 28, 2013 15:26:27 GMT
Nice quotes.
Lindberg also discusses belief in multiple worlds and the condemnations in The Beginnings of Western Science (Second Edition, 2007) on pages 256 and 257.
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jonkon
Master of the Arts
Posts: 111
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Post by jonkon on Aug 28, 2013 20:57:13 GMT
While a contemporary, rather than predecessor, of Bruno, Rev. John Wilkins's discourse "The Discovery of a New World (1640)," is of importance because, as the first secretary of the Royal Society, he was a colleague of Newton. The possibility of other worlds, in turn, brought into question Aristotle's basic concept of "up" vs. "down", thereby introducing the idea of gravitational attraction between heavenly bodies. Here is a clear example of the seminal role Christian doctrine has played in the advancement of science. In contradiction to Aristotle's concept of "necessity", we cannot dismiss the possibility of God creating multiple worlds had he chosen to do so.
Incidentally, Wilkins, in his theological defense of multiple worlds, addresses the case of Virgilius, who was cast out of his bishopric and excommunicated from the church around 748 AD for teaching the possibility of multiple worlds.
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Post by timoneill on Aug 28, 2013 21:39:40 GMT
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Post by fortigurn on Aug 28, 2013 22:25:28 GMT
I like the fact that you pointed out Bruno was not a scientist. Bruno was certainly not a scientist as the term is understood today, nor a ‘proto-scientist’ such as Galileo. Importantly, he was not even a proper astronomer like Copernicus.
‘In Bruno’s time, the word “science” was not yet common coin, and it would start to be used in the restricted sense we know today only by later figures such as Galileo. Bruno would still have thought of himself as a natural philosopher and of sciences as scienza, knowledge of any kind. Even so, natural philosophers of the period such as Paracelsus, Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, William Gilbert, William Harvey, and later Galileo and Francis Bacon, can be thought of as also practitioners of the new science, actively involved in more or less methodical research into natural causes and effects. Not everybody would agree that Bacon fits into that category. Certainly Bruno does not. He never made an astronomical observation of his own. His contribution to the rediscovery of ancient atomism was entirely theoretical, whereas only a few years later Kepler in Prague, Thomas Harriot in England, and Galileo in Italy would all be applying their understanding of the atomic theory to explanations of precisely observed phenomena such as the refraction of light and magnetic attraction.’ Gatti, ‘Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science’, pp. 2-3 (2002).
I also like the way you put down the 'Einstein was only a patent clerk' myth. When Einstein wrote his scientific proposals they were taken seriously because they were not being proposed by someone who was just a patent clerk. Einstein had obtained very high grades in maths and physics during his schooling at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic and Aargau Cantonal School, and also had a teaching diploma in mathematics and physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (one of the most prestigious universities in Europe). So when he first starting submitting his papers for academic review, he was taken seriously because he already had an excellent education in these fields and was fully qualified to teach them himself. The idea that he was just a patent clerk at the time is utterly ridiculous.
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Post by bjorn on Aug 29, 2013 6:15:20 GMT
Nice one... Here is another reference. One ot the natural subjects in the discussion about other worlds was whether they would need an atonement. William of Vorilong (1390-1443) maintained that "As to the question whether Christ by dying on this earth could redeem the inhabitants of another world, I answer that he is able to do this even if the worlds are infinite, but it would not be fitting for Him to go into another world that he must die again". |
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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 29, 2013 7:07:20 GMT
Good quora post, but it's too bad you keep running into these types. Despite his protestations, Hsieh seems like a DK headcase if you check his profile, he is just involved in discussion about the widest range of topics and he clearly has not much of a background in all of them. This is a gem: "There was a strain of "Intellectual Christians" which attempted to harmonize Hellenistic ideas and Christians ones. These were typified by the Nestorians in the 3rd century. However, the dominant version of Christianity was rejectionist of Hellenistic ideas in totality, and ejected the Nestorians from the Roman Empire." (Bolded.) And that comment by Billy Bob was just nuts. His pet theory is telling though: He completely mangled the idea that temporal lobe epilepsy could be the cause of religious and spiritual experiences, which is the hypothesis behind Michael Persinger's "God Helmet" experiment. The problem with the experiment is that its results were not replicated by Granqvist and there was clearly a lot of prior suggestion of an experience in Persinger's version. So his grand story is a butchered interpretation of what was likely poor science. |
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Post by unkleE on Aug 29, 2013 7:35:32 GMT
This is indeed an interesting hypothesis. My wife is a convert from an atheist mother and an agnostic father, so did the evolutionary degradation from her mum's highly evolved atheist brain occur at the instant of her conversion? That's fast evolution! But then her mother's parents were both christians, so there must have been a similarly amazing evolutionary growth in that generation. My parents were not christians until after I was, so the only reason my stone age brain can write this stuff now is that it takes more than 50 years to evolve back to that primitive state. But if I should stop posting, you'll know I no longer know how to switch on my computer and am spending all my time reinventing the stone age wheel!  Edit made to remove the possible inference that ignorantianescia was responsible for the quote. |
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