I was watching a documentary today (documentaries are my guilty pleasure, I can spend all day going from one documentary to the next, assuming my automatic nag-to-go-practice button doesn't deploy) and it was about Galileo and his publication of his theory of a heliocentric universe. Galileo VS the Catholic Church is probably the most famous showdown of science VS religion. Many science advocates use this example to show that things that religious leaders say is rubbish, or at least not completely believable and their belief in their religion is often groundless. Of course, if you look at the Catholic Church today, everyone is able to see that they are very open about science. The Vatican has its own observatory and the Church even holds the view of theological evolution (there's a link to the wikipedia article on one of my older posts, but I'm sure you'd rather just look for it yourself) instead of creationism.
It seems that the Church has done an abrupt about-face when it comes to science, and some people have even said that this was a sign that, after bowing to the pressures of society to accept the truth of science, the Church would slowly come to accept other things that are socially acceptable but not necessarily theologically acceptable, for example homosexual relations. In my opinion, that is highly unlikely.
Long before Galileo (1564-1642), St Thomas Acquinas (1225-1274) was already teaching about the nature of truth... Truth is truth, and truths that we find cannot possibly contradict other truths. If you have two ideas that you think are truths but yet one obviously contradicts the other, then evidently, one or both of them must be wrong, i.e. not the truth. Up to here, commonsensical enough. The dicey part comes when you are trying to decide if the 'truths' that we already know are really truths or not. In the case of the Galilean saga, the Church believed strongly in the geocentric universe because it had always (alright, for 1500+ years) been the scientific truth that was taught by the Greek masters, Aristotle and Ptolemy. Compare those venerable masters to Galileo, and the poor guy must have seemed like a real upstart at the time. If that doesn't move you, try comparing any memorable composers of today to the music masters like Bach and Beethoven. No comparison. The Church took the science of the Greek masters, compared them to theology about how "Man was created only less than the angels", and felt that the geocentric model made sense because, how could we have been put on an Earth that orbits the Sun (thus making it 'inferior' to the Sun) if we humans were so exalted, so to speak.
The geocentric model was so common during Galileo's time that it is important to note that when Galileo wrote his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the two systems he wrote about was the heliocentric and the geocentric. Galileo saw the geocentric model as important enough to give evidence for both sides, though he was clearly in favour of the heliocentric model. The Church saw this, and they knew all the 'evidence' for the geocentric model of course, and so to them it was completely unthinkable that this joker is trying to advocate something so different. In their eyes, because they saw the geocentric model as truth (they definitely had the 'evidence' to back it up), they saw Galileo as not only trying to undermine the authority of the Church (I have always seen this as a possibility, the Church was kinda corrupt back then) but also advocating bad science. The idea being that the Church saw geocentricism as conformant to Scripture, the 'truth' of science being confirmed by the 'truth' of Scripture (recall St Thomas Aquinas), and heliocentricism as not having the 'endorsement' of Scripture, so to speak. In other words, they saw Galileo's 'truth' about the heliocentric model as being contradictory to the 'truth' of Scripture, or at least what they thought Scripture was about. The Church, seeing itself as the moral authority, thus saw fit to step in and force Galileo to recant under multiple threats. The Church was wrong of course, but what it did at the time was not completely irrational nor based solely on Scripture, but rather grounded on scientific 'truths' that had held 'true' since the time of the Greeks.
As people, we are all on the search for truth, and almost nobody is ever completely sure that their version of 'truth' is indeed, the truth. Though we may find something that seems to be the truth, we owe it ourselves to still constantly search for the true truth. After all, if we just stubbornly hold on to our own version of 'truth' without exploring what others have to offer, can we really say that what our version of 'truth' is really the truth? If our 'truth' is untested, how do we know that it is true then? At the same time, if we find more evidence for our version of 'truth', will we not then be more convinced that we are on the right path in life?
On a side note... Galileo was also wrong. The universe is definitely not heliocentric. Two sides arguing vehemently about who is right... when both are wrong. Funny.
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About today... As a rule I don't really like to go out because travelling tends to tire me out. I do however enjoy taking the chance to observe other people's behaviour, especially kids, because they have the most uninhibited and unadulterated behaviour. I was going towards the Serangoon MRT when I saw a man giving out flyers. Two sisters, maybe around age 8 and 6, were walking in front of me and the younger took a flyer and the flyer guy said 'Thank you". I was trying to figure out why he had thanked the two girls in particular, especially because he was so black faced towards the other people who had reluctantly taken his flyers. I understood when I saw the content of the flyer... It was selling some condominium development. (Though why a condominium developer would advertise in an MRT station, I can't really figure, it's not exactly the right target group) When the two girls saw what was on the flyer, the younger exclaimed, "What do we need this for??" The older girl said, "Throw it away." The younger girl scolded the older by saying, "We can give it to mom! She buys houses, duh...." while pointing at her own temple to denote her own intelligence and imply her older sister's according lack of it. I couldn't help but smile. Aiyo, their mom is quite poor thing. She not only gets irritating flyers from those that she meets on the street, but now her kids are bringing home flyers too! Hahaha.
On a different side... though what the older girl said makes more sense to adults, they would probably think of the more articulate, if rude, younger sister as being the more intelligent. Mainly because she speaks more. When I used to go to primary schools for various purposes, like giving tuition to kids who can't afford tuition, or organising other activities like an educational talk, the more articulate children did indeed make me feel that they are more intelligent. This makes me think about the common fault that Jon, C and I all have, that is, we tend to talk too much unnecessarily and end up shooting our mouth off sometimes. Might it be that since young we were taught by experience that talking more gets us more comments from strangers or relatives saying we are smart, so when we get an idea we want to say it out straight away, in a display of intelligence, not knowing that true knowledge comes not in constantly speaking, but rather in listening to what others have to say and then learning from them?
Yet, a lack of expression is clearly not a lack of intelligence. Yuezhi would be the best proof of that. She's actually pretty quiet most of the time, and was definitely very quiet when she was in secondary school, because we have a classmate in the conservatory whose boyfriend used to be in the same class as Yuezhi and apparently in those 2 years, she was so quiet that the guy wasn't even completely sure that he was really in the same class as her. But she's definitely highly intelligent, something that we could tell, long before we even knew that she used to be from the gifted program.
I had a discussion about the gifted program on the Italy trip with a lady whose niece used to be from the gifted program. She said that looking at her niece, the gifted program kids tend to be more articulate, and the niece once confronted (yes confronted) the school principal about the behaviour of a pregnant teacher who was having hormonal imbalances, shall we say. Though the principal tried to explain, the girl wasn't mollified and in the end the principal had to get her mom to come take her home because she refused to leave until she got a valid answer. There is the implied meaning that the intelligent kids, especially those in the gifted program, are more articulate. But maybe being articulate, sometimes to the point of being irritating (my little cousin is like that), is a kind of learned behaviour that kids do because they learned at a young age that it earns them smiles and approval from the adults. When we look at Yuezhi, how we know that she is intelligent is from the way she responds to situations as well as questions posed by other people. But maybe kids don't have so many opportunities to exhibit their intelligence in that way and get approval from adults, so they learnt to speak non-stop instead, to show to others what they know. Hmm.
Whatever it is, I hope my little cousin grows out of it soon, for the sake of my other cousins who have to live with him. It really gets irritating. But his behaviour is kinda useful though... whenever I start to talk too much about rather commonsensical things to people, I use the image of my little cousin to remind myself not to be irritating :P
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In case you were wondering why I went out, it was to meet my junior Penelope (if you read the archives from way back you can see her being mentioned) who put all her eggs into one basket, "albeit one that I like very much" and after not getting what she wanted, she's now bereft. I thought about it myself and realised that we all do that sometimes. For me it was being with my first love. I thought that I would spend the rest of my life with him and for two years I planned every aspect of my future life around him, being around him and sometimes choosing not to go for options that would have been better for me. When the breakup came, I just felt as if my future (in a way) was ruined. My dreams were gone, because he had featured so prominently in them it seemed difficult to be able to dream again. I didn't know what to do with my life, I was lost because he gave my life meaning. The words of love that one speaks into a beloved's ears is not always just mushy fluff, as I found out the hard way. Looking at our couple blog from those days (it's private with a password, so don't bother trying to look for it) I felt the pain all over again and I couldn't take it in the end and I had to close the window. This was really someone whom I loved with all my heart. In some way I'm still scarred a little by it, but luckily for me I've always been able to be easily distracted, and I just pile on the ideas in my head until the things I don't want to think about are stuffed right in the very back of my head.
Anyway for Penelope I suggested a ton of ideas. Privately I was glad that I had gone to university so that I knew more about the system and could do more to help her. She didn't get the scholarship to go to France, so I suggested writing to French companies operating in Singapore (the only one I can think of offhand is Carrefour, but that'd hardly qualify?) or the Association Francais de Singapour to ask for financial assistance. The truth is, there are rich people out there who don't know what to do with their money because actually the vast majority of the self-made rich are hardworking people and not materialistic, so they often have excess and are really looking for a good place to put it in, and if you can convince them that you have a purpose and a passion... She was also worried because she had missed the application deadline for accomodation in France. I told her that even if the deadline is over she can still try her luck. It's just a letter or phone call away and if it works, then good, if it doesn't, you don't lose much anyway. Sometimes a deadline is just a matter of administration and well, if you get lucky, it's great. She mentioned getting a student loan but as a person I'm really not for the whole student loan thing. Getting into debt even before you enter the workforce doesn't sound like the most prudent action to me, but.... oh well, if you need it, you need it. Then she examined her dream of working as a French teacher/translator, and wondered if it might be possible to be something else. I told her that since she has both the passion and the ability, she should go for it as far down the road as she can. Well, she has the blessing of her parents for her dream, which I think is truly a great blessing. So many people have a passion that their parents didn't support, so they ended up going into careers that they didn't really want... and only being able to pursue their passion decades later. At this age if we can we should be chasing our dreams, because we have many more years to go and really if it doesn't work out, we just try another route.
Rambles again. Well it's late so here I go to bed.
P.S. I added some dividers so that the ideas are clearer. Hope that helps.
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