It was widely reported last week that Pope Benedict cancelled a visit to Rome's oldest university, La Sapienza, after a number of academics and students accused him of despising science and defending the Inquisition's condemnation of Galileo.
The Vatican said it was considered opportune to postpone the visit due to a lack of the "prerequisites for a dignified and tranquil welcome" following a sit-in by 50 students and a letter signed by 67 professors, including several allegedly eminent scientists.
The signatories said Benedict's presence would be "incongruous" because of a speech he made at La Sapienza in 1990, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in which he quoted the judgment of an Austrian philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, that the church's trial of Galileo was "reasonable and fair". The letter declared: "These words offend and humiliate us." This episode is emblematic of our latter-day blogosphere culture in embracing both ideological spite and indifference to truth, manifesting the classic symptoms of a whirlwind created on the internet by neurotics exchanging bites of information by way of stoking each other's narcissistic obsession with expressing their democratic right to make fools of themselves.
Let us look at the source of the complaint. Ratzinger/Pope Benedict is a philosopher and in his 1990 speech outlined a thesis concerning the centrality of the human species to creation. This, notwithstanding our developing knowledge of cosmology, remains a core doctrine of Christianity and the centrepiece of ethical philosophy.
His title was The Crisis of Faith in Science, referring not to declining belief among scientists but a wider loss of confidence in the capacity of science to address the core questions of existence.
Far from attacking science, he was highlighting instances in which scientists have questioned the basis of secularism in the modern world. Among his points was that there are implications, other than cosmological ones, arising from Galileo's discoveries.
Ratzinger cited the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch's view that the Theory of Relativity altered mankind's sense of where the centrality of creation might reside, because the measurement of movement depends on the choice of body serving as reference-point.
Bloch held that Einstein's revolution meant it was possible to perceive the Earth as fixed and the Sun as mobile. Ratzinger quoted Bloch's surprising conclusion: "Once the relativity of movement is taken for granted, an ancient human and Christian system of reference has no right to interference in astronomic calculations and their heliocentric simplification; however, it has the right to remain faithful to its method of preserving the Earth in relation to human dignity, and to order the world with regard to what will happen and what has happened in the world." In other words, once you accept Einstein's theory, you could reasonably conclude that the Christian worldview should be kept out of astronomy, but Christianity is right to continue seeing the Earth as the moral centre of the cosmos, and placing human dignity at the centre of the creation equation.
It was here, somewhat agape, that Ratzinger cited Feyerabend, an agnostic and sceptical Austrian/American philosopher (1924-94).
Ratzinger said: "If both the spheres of conscience are once again clearly distinguished among themselves under their respective methodological profiles, recognising both their limits and their respective rights, then the synthetic judgment of the agnostic-skeptic philosopher P Feyerabend appears much more drastic. He writes: 'The church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and revisionism can be legitimised solely for motives of political opportunism.'"
From here, Ratzinger moved to the failure of the church to deal correctly with the ethical implications of the Galilean perspective, which, in its wider interpretation, he noted, CF Von Weizsacker had identified as creating a "very direct path" to the atomic bomb. Ratzinger concluded: "It would be absurd, on the basis of these affirmations, to construct a hurried apologetics. The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation and from being inscribed in a still greater form of reason."
No effort was made by the media to uncover what Ratzinger actually said in 1990, but the protesters received universal publicity for their obscurantism, not because of the intellectual content of their criticisms, which were specious, but because of the status of their chosen target as an object of ideological spite. The stupidity of the protest was obligingly fudged by journalists with similar agendas, and another lie added to the Ratzinger file.
The theme of the pope's planned address at La Sapienza, incidentally, was: "There is a danger in modern times that man may stop seeking the truth".