In Defense of Pluralism

The church’s response to Copernicanism is often cited as a textbook example of the tyranny of faith over investigation and reason. Dogmatically committed to geocentrism, the church wanted to shut the door on alternative explanations. The truth, Owen Barfield argues, is very nearly the opposite: “When the ordinary man hears that the Church told Galileo that he might teach Copernicanism as a hypothesis which saved all the celestial phenomena satisfactorily, but ‘not as being the truth,’ he laughs. But this was really how the Ptolmaic astronomy had been taught! In its actual place in history it was not a casuistical quibble; it was the refusal (unjustified it may be) to allow the introduction of a new and momentous doctrine. It was not simply a new theory of the nature of the celestial movements that was feared, but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth.”

The church rose up in defense of the very traditional idea of the plurality of scientific theory.