The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion by Nathan Johnstone

Author:Nathan Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Published: 2018-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

Atomism , the Church and Galileo

We are still left with the issue of the attitude of the Church, and the lengths to which it was prepared to go to protect Christian orthodoxy from the threat of materialism . We should not downplay the reality and significance of clerical opposition to atomism . There surely were many churchmen who were disturbed by its implications. Some perhaps were even horrified. Atheist atomism was going to be a provocation to a Church willing to defend its orthodoxy by force, and so many of the tenets of the philosophy ran counter to official Christian teaching that believers who engaged with it always risked falling into heresy . Once the Eucharist had been anchored in the Aristotelian matter theory of essences and accidents, any sympathy towards the view that the properties of objects are defined only by the physical arrangement of the atoms within them was likely to appear suspect. Certainly, defensive responses could be institutionalised and individuals could suffer. Nicholas d’Autrecourt was censured by a Church that forced him to renounce and burn his own writings. Giordano Bruno was condemned to die in part for espousing heretical ideas that were directly influenced by his atomism . The increasing interest in atomism in the seventeenth century, and increasing willingness to challenge Aristotelianism , must be balanced against the continuing risks associated with the philosophy. 88

But under anti-religionism’s determination to find violent insecurity at the heart of the Church’s relations with the material world it despises, the temptation to myth-making appears to be acute. Just how far the preconclusion of clerical neurosis appears to cloud the very reading of historical accounts—prompting anti-religionists to find the diagnosis supported by historians who never wrote any such thing—is demonstrated by the case of the third of Onfray’s martyrs for atomism : Galileo . We all, Onfray notes, think we know the story of Galileo ’s condemnation for arguing that the earth moves around the sun. But the story is myth:In fact, things happened differently. What did the Vatican really hold against Galileo? No so much his defence of Cocan astronomy – although this was a thesis that contradicted the church’s Aristotelian position – as his adherence to the materialist camp…Before the courts of the day, heliocentrism was punishable by lifelong house arrest, a relatively mild sentence. Defence of atomism , on the other hand, led directly to the stake! That being so, why not confess to the less damaging charge? In other words, acknowledge the venial sin of heliocentrism rather than the deadly atomic error. 89

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