Three Historical Cases of Surrealism

These ideas loomed large in the Scientific Revolution. The Copernican idea that the earth moves around the sun, and not the sun around the earth, clashed with certain passages in the Bible.

For to say that assuming the earth moves and the sun stands still saves all the appearances... is to speak well. This has no danger in it, and it suffices for mathematicians. But to wish to affirm that the sun is really fixed in the centre of the heavens. and that the earth. revolves very swiftly about the sun, is a very dangerous thing, not only by irritating all the theologians and scholastic philosophers, but also by injuring our holy faith and making the sacred Scripture false... To demonstrate that the appearances are saved by assuming the sun at the centre and the earth in the heavens is not the same thing as to demonstrate that in fact the sun is in the centre and the earth in the heavens. I believe that the first demonstration may exist, but I have very grave doubts about the second; and in case of doubt one may not abandon the Holy Scriptures as expounded by the Holy Fathers.[Letter to Foscarine, April 1615.]

Following Bellarmine, Pope Urban VIII reinforced the point with what is now called the ‘argument from the unthought-of alternative'. In an audience with Galileo, he argued as follows:

Let Us grant you... that it is entirely possible for things to stand as you [Copernicans] say. But now tell Us, do you really maintain that God could not have wished or known how to move the heavens and the stars in some other way? We suppose you will say ‘Yes’, because We do not see how you could answer otherwise. Very well then, if you still want to save your contention, you would have to prove to Us that, if the heavenly movements took place in another manner than the one you suggest, it would imply a logical contradiction at some point, since God in His infinite power can do anything that does not imply a contradiction.

[G. Santillana, The Crime of Galileo, p. 166]

Notice how the Pope has upped the ante. It was not enough for Galileo to show that Copernican theory saved the phenomena. Galileo had to show that they could be saved in no other way, show that an omnipotent God could not have fixed things so that it was merely as if the earth moved, show that the earth must move. This was a big ask. Galileo tried to answer it by proposing his famously mistaken theory of the tides, describing them as “physical effects whose causes can perhaps be assigned no other way” than by supposing the earth to move. But at the end of his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems he gives up. Simplicio, who has so far only been made fun of in Galileo’s Dialogue as the spokesman for Aristotle, reiterates the Pope’s argument that God could produce tides in the oceans some other way and that “it would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit and restrict the Divine power and wisdom to some particular fancy of his own”.

Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with wings exceeding small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle.

Nowadays secular philosophers of science turn Urban VIII’s argument into the argument from the unthought-of alternative: we cannot infer the truth of any theory from the fact that it is the only empirically adequate theory we have, because there may be an alternative theory we have not thought of.

For a second example of surrealism with an apologetic purpose, let us jump forward to the middle of the nineteenth century. By then geologists had amassed much evidence of the great antiquity of the earth, and the fossils of extinct creatures in the rocks fuelled evolutionary speculations. Philip Gosse was a famous naturalist and explorer, author of 40 books, the David Attenborough of his age. He spe­cialized in marine biology and invented the aquarium without which no Victorian drawing room was complete. He was also a Biblical fundamentalist who thought that the earth and all the creatures on it were specially created in about 4004 B.C. He agonized for years about the clash between science and his religion. Then he hit upon a brilliant solution. In 1857, two years before Darwin’s Origin of Species, he published Omphalos—Untying the Geological Knot. ‘Omphalos’ is Greek for belly-button. Gosse’s Omphalos begins with an erudite discussion of whether Adam and Eve had belly-buttons. Think about it—this is a good question for a creationist! Gosse soberly concludes that they probably did have belly-buttons.

Gosse’s son Edmund, in his brilliant Father and Son, describes what happened:

Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations of success... My father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the tremendous issue. This ‘Omphalos’ of his, he thought, was to fling geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass with the lamb.... He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike.... But, alas! atheists ad Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away.

[Father and Son, 1907, p. 105.]

But why did the geologists laugh at Gosse’s hypothesis? They had not one scrap of geological evidence against it. “God created the earth in 4004 B.C. as if geology were true” is evidentially or empirically equivalent with geology. The geologists who laughed cannot have been strict empiricists, for whom only empirical evidence determines theory-choice. (By the way, when push comes to shove contemporary Creation Scientists also go Gossian, and say that God created the rocks a few thousand years ago as if theories of radio-carbon dating were true.)

For my third, and most radical example, I jump back in time to a great 18th century philosopher. George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, was the scourge of ‘materialism, scepticism and atheism'. He was a more radical thinker than Bellarmine or Gosse. He did not just dispute the truth of some particular scientific theory. He thought that all science was false. More radically still, he thought that our commonsensical belief in external or physical or material objects was also false.

Similarly with science. Science is all false. (More precisely, physical science— physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and so on—is all false. We have minds, so some psychology might be literally true.) But a scientific theory need not be true to be good. A good scientific theory is one that makes correct predictions, or ‘saves the phenomena', or is empirically adequate. But a good theory is not true. It is just that God plonks experiences directly into our minds as if it were true. Strict empiricists cannot reject this doctrine, for there is no experience or evidence against it. It is empirically equivalent with common sense and science.

So, Bellarmine said that God produced astronomical phenomena as if Coper­nican theory were true, and Gosse said that God produced geological phenomena as if geology were true, and Berkeley went the whole hog and said that God produced all phenomena as if common sense and science were true. There is no disputing that God could do all these things—after all, She can do anything, can't She? And, to repeat, there is no way of refuting these views by appeal to experience or experiment.

It is no accident that in all three of these cases, God gets into the picture.

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