Old heresy used to make case for divine designer

I FOUND it gently amusing to read Fr Con McGillicuddy’s argument for a grand design based supposedly on a ‘commonsense’ view of the annual motion of planet earth and its supposed benefits for us lucky humans (Letters, September 17).

Even though it is almost 400 years since judgment was passed on Galileo by the Roman inquisition, I think Fr McGillicudy might find it instructive to read the critical parts of Galileo’s confession of guilt.

“I, Galileo … after having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the Earth is not the centre of the same and that it moves, and that I must not hold, defend, nor teach in any manner whatsoever, either orally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Writ … I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church.”

These words are taken from the book Galileo’s Daughter (Dava Sobel, Fourth Estate, 1999).

It is both interesting and remarkable that what was clearly heresy almost 400 years ago is now seen by a Catholic priest as a cogent argument for a benevolent divine designer.

Furthermore, Fr McGillicuddy should be aware that Isaac Newton, who was the first person to propose a detailed mathematical explanation of the solar system (still equated at that time to the cosmos) was troubled by its instability and proposed that God intervened every now and then to put the planetary orbits back on an even keel.

Newton’s great rival, Leibnitz, teased him by wondering why God could not have got it right the first time.

There was a time — with Newton’s clockwork universe and William Paley’s natural philosophy — when design arguments carried a lot of conviction, but alas we now know better. After Darwin’s theory of evolution and Big Bang cosmology we know with as much certainty as science can give us that design is an illusion — order in living things and cosmic order can be explained without resort to any designer.

Con Hayes

Tower

Blarney

Co Cork