Should Gmirkin be compared to Galileo?

[Peter Kirby]

Another remarkable set of posts. I wouldn't believe it unless I read it.

<<Nothing worth quoting>>

Stephen Goranson’s approach to my research is highly reminiscent, in my opinion, of contemporary responses to Galileo’s research in the early 1600s. You will recall, Galileo was a scientific innovator, a mathematicus who wrote a number of books regarding discoveries he made by means of telescopic observations: the mountains of the moon, the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus (which proved the orbit of Venus around the sun), and several others. He was an advocate of the heliocentric model of the solar system, a paradigm that ran counter to the Ptolemaic geocentric paradigm of the Catholic Church and contemporary university scholarship that held the earth to be the center of the universe. He famously had debates with his fellow scholars and with the Church, and was tried more than once by the Inquisition, who finally forced him in 1633 to renounce on pain of death his heretical scientific discoveries that ran counter to biblical teachings and Catholic doctrine, and to abstain from teaching his heliocentric views. He remained under house arrest from 1633 until his death in 1642.

His views quite obviously did not change the majority views of his contemporaries, but are now universally accepted. Why? Because they were right, and he had the evidence to prove it.

But who accepted the evidence during his lifetime? Basically, one could divide up his contemporary into two opposing camps: those who looked at his evidence, and those who did not. Kepler and other astronomers, of course, agreed with his conclusions. Jesuit astronomers, though initially skeptical and quite hostile to his scientific viewpoint, which ran counter to Church teachings, were won over, for a very simple reason: they obtained quality telescopes, they checked his observations, and confirmed that he was in fact correct.

The other group included prominent theologians, philosophers (that is, natural philosophers) and other scholars. These educated elites (or shall we say elitists) rejected his views because of their adherence to Aristotelian philosophy, Ptolemaic astronomy and Catholic doctrine. Quite famously, and not coincidentally, they adamantly refused to look through Galileo’s telescope to see for themselves the evidence he put forward in his books, despite given the opportunity. Galileo wrote about them as follows in a famous letter to Kepler:

My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.

One of Galileo’s contemporaries, the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini of the University of Padua, after hearing of Galileo’s claim to have seen mountains on the moon, refused to look at the moon through a telescope. Later sources quoted him as saying:

I do not wish to approve of claims about which I do not have any knowledge, and about things which I have not seen … and then to observe through those glasses gives me a headache. Enough! I do not want to hear anything more about this.

One can thus trace exactly how Galileo’s opponents, including prominent academics of his day, were able to maintain their opposition to his paradigm-changing views: by refusing to view the evidence. And rejecting his dangerous theories on that basis.

Although Stephen Goranson is nowhere remotely in the same league as the scholastics and intellectuals of Galileo’s day, he resorts to the same stratagem, staunchly refusing to read the books he arrogantly claims to refute. Evidently reading a book gives him the same headache Cremonini claimed he got from looking through a telescope. I suspect tracing an academic argument from evidence to conclusion (such as I carefully present in all my books and articles) would give him a splitting migraine.

He sees himself as a defender of scholastic orthodoxy and believes that truth is measured, not by evidence and argument, but by a show of hands.

Tell me, Stephen, exactly how that model applies to the time of Galileo.

Or do you believe the sun circles the earth, based on the majority opinion of those of Galileo’s day?

Recommended reading:
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Stephen Goranson’s approach to my research is highly reminiscent, in my opinion, of contemporary responses to Galileo’s research in the early 1600s.

It is impossible not to draw the comparison. Theologians, unfortunately, have inherited a privileged place in universities simply because of how universities originated. They have been left far behind other historians when it comes to approaches to historical inquiry.

What attracted me to certain writings of the "Copenhagen school" was that they uncompromisingly applied the same methods of historical inquiry to "biblical topics" as historians in "non-biblical" fields used. Those methods of the "secular" historians were clearly justifiable while the methods at the heart of the "biblical" historians were in general circular.

For a long time I hewed to the view that the Persian era was the most likely setting for the creation of the bulk of the OT literature and when I read Lemche's' attempts to point towards the Hellenistic era instead my instinctive reaction was: That's too extreme! Surely not!

But then other reading alerted me to the striking literary similarities between Herodotus's Histories and the Pentateuch, but even then I was imagining authors of the Pentateuch being exposed to Greek historiography in the Persian era.

I recall doubling down on doing as much in-depth and wide-ranging reading on the Documentary Hypothesis as I could.

What began to shake me into a critical approach there was the archaeological evidence cited -- and it soon became evident that archaeologists who embraced some sort of Documentary Hypothesis and origins of the biblical stories within the Iron Age "biblical" kingdoms of Israel and Judah were themselves sometimes adding theological or biblical narrative layers over the actual evidence they were identifying. They were attempting to force-fit the stones and clay artifacts into some version of the biblical narrative. They added layer upon layer of imaginative narrative that simply was not there in the archaeological finds.

Even in the recent conference that SG linked to, one of the keynote speakers spoke of local inhabitants in Jerusalem during the Persian era pining and longing for the day when the city and temple would all be rebuilt and Judah restored. Total fiction straight from the Psalms. No, I think it far more likely that they were preoccupied with getting good crops or other food, clothing and getting along with their neighbours and worrying about their children and fearing illness and attending markets and festivals and keeping their dwellings in reasonable condition.

I had to agree with one observation I read somewhere that if the Elephantine finds had been uncovered a few years earlier then Wellhausen' DH would scarcely ever have had the opportunity to fly.

There is no reason to gloss over the fact that the majority of Old Testament scholars of the present day will not readily accept new ideas like these concerning the date and ideological background of the Old Testament. A number of reasons may be found, not all of them based on the irrational, if understandable, disbelief and reluctance to accept what goes against the opinio communis of several generations of scholars. I hereby intend to say that exclamations like ‘This is nonsense!,’ ‘This cannot be true!’ or ‘This is impossible!’ are often heard, although the argument in favour of such ‘criticism’ will usually be of the circular kind: that is, it cannot be true, because it goes against the once generally accepted view, which is, in turn, based on the assumption that such things cannot be correct.

Lemche, Niels. “The Old Testament ‐a Hellenistic Book?” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 7 (January 1, 1993): 193

The current mainstream models of the origins of the biblical literature, I think, seem to appeal to some kind of "remarkable creativity" of the people of Israel and Judah. That is, to some sort of exceptional quality in their experiences or genius. There are certain religious and political-cultural forces at play here, I suspect.

The Hellenistic era origins demystify the process and everything coheres with common human experience -- and the literary and religious products of the Jews and Samaritans become the natural outgrowths of identifiable and understandable historical processes.

[neilgodfrey]

Peter, is your point that the history of Galileo has no relevance to changes in mainstream paradigms --- per Kuhn -- today? Are you saying Kuhn was wrong to refer to the reactions to Galileo's work?

[Peter Kirby]

Peter, is your point that the history of Galileo has no relevance to changes in mainstream paradigms --- per Kuhn -- today? Are you saying Kuhn was wrong to refer to the reactions to Galileo's work?

Nope. I guess my point is -- is everyone to be exalted to being a new Galileo just because they have a new and different idea?

[neilgodfrey]

Peter, is your point that the history of Galileo has no relevance to changes in mainstream paradigms --- per Kuhn -- today? Are you saying Kuhn was wrong to refer to the reactions to Galileo's work?

Nope. I guess my point is -- is everyone to be exalted to being a new Galileo just because they have a new and different idea?

Oh dear, PK, even you surely know that that is an indecent disrepresentation of the comparison by Kuhn just about anyone else who has made this common comparison.

I ask you to identify for us all actual evidence that ""exaltation" is the point of the comparison -- and not that it is the reaction to new ideas and theories. Surely even you have read Kuhn.

Or once again will you evade the challenge to support your assertions with evidence --- your mind-reading of attitudes and motives really doesn't cut it.

[Peter Kirby]

Peter, is your point that the history of Galileo has no relevance to changes in mainstream paradigms --- per Kuhn -- today? Are you saying Kuhn was wrong to refer to the reactions to Galileo's work?

Nope. I guess my point is -- is everyone to be exalted to being a new Galileo just because they have a new and different idea?

Oh dear, PK, even you surely know that that is an indecent disrepresentation fo the comparison by Kuhn just about anyone else who has made this common comparison.

I ask you to identify for us all actual evidence that ""exaltation" is the point of the comparison -- and not that it is the reaction to new ideas and theories. Surely even you have read Kuhn.

Or once again will you evade the challenge to support your assertions with evidence --- your mind-reading of attitudes and motives really doesn't cut it.

If there is no such point, then I have again misfired. Sorry.

[Secret Alias]

250 BCE Qumran Exodus

[Russell Gmirkin]

Thank you for creating this thread highlighting the issues surrounding paradigm shifts.

The thread title poses the question, “Should Gmirkin be compared to Galileo?”

Just to be very clear, at no point in my original posting did I compare myself to Galileo. Rather, the comparison—which I consider quite apt—was that of Stephen Goranson to the opponents of Galileo:

“Stephen Goranson’s approach to my research is highly reminiscent, in my opinion, of contemporary responses to Galileo’s research in the early 1600s…

Stephen Goranson’s reaction to new ideas is by no means unique, but is fairly typical of academic responses to challenging new ideas, as extensively discussed in Thomas Kuhn’s 1996 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The majority of professionals who adhere to an old paradigm in any field of research very predictably resist considering new ideas requiring a new paradigm that upsets the beliefs they were indoctrinated in through their academic training. Kuhn gives many examples documenting this intellectual resistance to new ideas and the gradual process by which new paradigms are established, usually requiring at least a full generation, until the “old school” literally dies off.

Of all the examples of paradigm change, and resistance to paradigm shifts, Galileo is probably the best known and most vivid. As a writer I thought Galileo’s experience constituted the best possible illustration to the issues I wanted to raise. And it raises a very specific “test” for openness to new ideas: Are you the type of person who would look through the telescope? Or are you the type who refuses to look at the evidence?

I could have fun and compare this thread to the Inquisition, but I don’t take this forum that seriously. There are a number of people on this forum who are genuinely interested in ideas and evidence, and who are willing to look through the telescope, which is why I like to occasionally drop in. And there are others who never saw a new idea they didn’t want to kill, who often make this forum a miserable reading experience, but whom I choose mostly to ignore.

[Russell Gmirkin]

Paradigm Shifts

So what is all this talk about paradigm shifts?

To briefly explain:

From around 1993 to the present the field of biblical studies has been undergoing a paradigm shift, which is simply explained as follows. The old, Maximalist paradigm seeks to date the texts of the Hebrew Bible as early as possible, and mostly restricts literary comparisons to the world of the Ancient Near East. The new paradigm points out that objective evidence for the existence of biblical texts begins in the Hellenistic Era and that Greek and Hellenistic literary comparisons should also be taken into account. I happen to be one of the most extensively published researchers on Greek literary influences on the biblical text.

The question is simply: should we look at both Greek and Ancient Near Eastern possible literary and cultural influences on the biblical text, or only Ancient Near Eastern? What is the harm of looking at both, and seeing which is the most likely?

The major harm appears to the expenditure of intellectual effort. Most critics of the Hebrew Bible have some background in Ancient Near Eastern studies, but are abysmally ignorant of Greek literature and culture. Their academic training has told them that expertise in the latter is unnecessary, since the centuries-long scholarly supposition has been that the Pentateuch and most other books of the Hebrew Bible were written long before Alexander the Great and the arrival of the Greeks into the east. They have been trained that this is a reasonable position, so it is an intellectual economy to not have to consider the vast body of Greek literature that proliferated in the east, some old, some new, during the Hellenistic Era.

My reasonable position (like that of the Minimalists of the Copenhagen School) is simple: look at both Greek and Ancient Near Eastern comparative data and see which fits best. Basically, a competition of evidence and ideas.

And I would say that in many cases the evidence for Greek influences is clear, and I would encourage others to look at the data—look through the telescope—and decide for themselves.

Doing so might run the risk of learning something new and possibly having to change one’s entrenched beliefs and assumptions, but some people are brave enough to run the risk.

[Peter Kirby]

I could have fun and compare this thread to the Inquisition, but I don’t take this forum that seriously. There are a number of people on this forum who are genuinely interested in ideas and evidence, and who are willing to look through the telescope, which is why I like to occasionally drop in. And there are others who never saw a new idea they didn’t want to kill, who often make this forum a miserable reading experience, but whom I choose mostly to ignore.

This is a really healthy attitude.

I'm impressed and will volunteer here the fact that you earned my respect with this response.

[Secret Alias]

Obviously people don't share a sense of humor. Clearly the relationship between Plato and Moses has been the subject of much speculation. The appearance of Philo in the history of ideas was seminal, IMHO, for the development of Christianity. Jewish and Christian writers have speculated that Plato must have borrowed from the Jews. No one seriously posited that Jews raided the Alexandrian library until Gmirkin. It's an interesting theory. I can see it being the subject of one of those Biblical documentaries. Obviously he's written books and papers. People who write books and papers deserve to be taken seriously. But Austen has taken him very seriously and Gmirkin doesn't want to address his questions but has taken time instead to post in a mountainman thread and a thread about him being a modern Galileo. I know artists struggle with their creativity. Certain conditions have to be met for them to produce new material. Many of these issues are related to confidence. At some point you have to face the music. I think he should respond to Austen's questions. But I am not his manager.