How to Be a Catholic Copernican in the Spanish Netherlands

The notion of Catholic Copernicanism in the aftermath of the Galileo affair remains something of an apparent oxymoron. It has been suggested that after the Galileo affair of 1633, cosmological truth went underground in the Catholic world for many decades, thus creating an asymmetry in the role played by Catholic and Protestant Europe in the so-called Scientific Revolution. Focusing on the case of the Spanish Netherlands, this chapter unearths a considerably different situation, where Roman directives were appropriated under local criteria for adequate cosmological truth-telling, and where the notion of public Catholic Copernicanism continued to be a tangible reality.

Philosopher Defying the Philosophers

Descartes’s life was marked by a series of remarkable innovations in mathematics, science, and philosophy, as much as by the philosopher’s frequent changes of environment. In 1628 he returned to the Netherlands, where he had begun his philosophical journey ten years earlier, and where he was soon to embark on writing a mechanistic system of the world. Shocked by the Galileo affair, he would initially publish only “samples” of his own way of thinking, but fierce engagement in philosophical controversy ultimately made him abandon the idea of trying to convince academics. Whereas his publications continued to follow an erratic pattern, Descartes increasingly focused on friendships with intellectuals in high places, and all the while stayed true to the idea of reforming the sciences on the basis of inborn intellectual capacities he deemed to be custom-made for uncovering the nature of reality.

The Role of Theology in the History and Philosophy of Science

After a bibliographic introduction highlighting various research trends in science and religion, this essay explores how the current academic and conceptual landscape of theology and science has been shaped by the history of science, even as theology has informed the philosophical foundations of science. The first part assesses the historical interactions of science and the Christian faith (looking at the cases of human dissection in the Middle Ages and the Galileo affair) in order to challenge the common notion that science and religion have always been at war. Part two investigates the nature of the interaction between science and Christian theology by exploring the role that metaphysical presuppositions and theological concepts have played—and continue to play—within the scientific process.