At Scientific American John Horgan has provided a helpful reminder of Karl Popper’s skepticism of evolutionary theory and why it doesn’t matter. The great philosopher found evolution to be “almost a tautology” and “not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program.” He was browbeaten by evolutionists into a forced retraction but in fact he remained a skeptic as evidenced when Horgan interviewed him in 1992. “One ought to look for alternatives!” Popper exclaimed to Horgan, banging his kitchen table.

Popper’s call for alternatives may sound reminiscent of evolutionists themselves, but it is altogether different. One of the most common rebuttals evolutionists make when confronted with science is “so what’s your alternative?”

That question is the barcode on a long history of religious claims regarding origins. Open the box and you’ll find thinkers from Leibniz and Kant in the Enlightenment days to Jerry Coyne and Ken Miller these days pronouncing metaphysical truths that mandate a strictly naturalistic origins narrative. Darwin and his theory were, at bottom, all about what god would and wouldn’t do. And he wouldn’t create this world, that was for certain.

So when evolutionists ask “so what’s your alternative?” it is implicit that god must not be the answer. That answer is dismissed out of hand, for it has long since been falsified. The answer must be strictly naturalistic. Horgan makes this abundantly clear:

The philosopher Daniel Dennett once called the theory of evolution by natural selection "the single best idea anyone has ever had." I'm inclined to agree. But Darwinism sticks in the craw of some really smart people. I don't mean intelligent-designers (aka IDiots) and other religious ignorami but knowledgeable scientists and scholars.

If you think biology was designed, you’re one of the religious ignorami—an IDiot. And why is that? Because you have violated the religious mandates of evolutionary thought. Evolution is an anti intellectual, cowardly religious movement that propagates lies about science. Don’t expect intelligence to emerge from it.

The reason why the warfare myth is so enduring is because it is so useful. For the evolution camp it allows dismissal of skepticism as religiously motivated. Francis Collins continued this theme last year at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. His message is summarized by the Pew Forum report on the event as follows:

Francis S. Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project, discussed why he believes religion and science are compatible and why the current conflict over evolution vs. faith, particularly in the evangelical community, is unnecessary. Collins, an evangelical Christian, talked about his path from atheism to Christianity and his belief that science provides evidence of God. He cited the Big Bang theory and the fact that the universe had a beginning out of nothing. He added that the laws of physics have precisely the values needed for life to occur on earth and argued that would seem to point to a creator.

Conflict over evolution vs. faith? The perpetuation of this two-dimensional strawman (evolutionists are merely following the scientific data, skeptics are religiously-motivated fundamentalists) is unfortunate, but convenient for Collins. Here is a Collins' quote from the Pew Forum transcript of the event:

There are certainly voices out there arguing that you can't have both of those; you've got to take your pick. You either are going to approach questions from a purely scientific perspective or a purely spiritual perspective, and the two are locked in eternal combat. I don't happen to agree with that, so perhaps I should say a bit of a word about how I got there.

Voices out there arguing that you either are going to approach questions from a purely scientific perspective or a purely spiritual perspective, and the two are locked in eternal combat? Amazing. I suppose there are such voices, but dwelling on them conveniently misses the scientific absurdity of evolution.

And note that Collins disagrees with the straw man, not the use of the straw man. When a historian disagrees with the warfare thesis, it means he believes it is not an accurate description of the relationship between religion and science.

But when the evolutionist disagrees with the warfare thesis, it means he is using the contrived idea to argue for evolution.

In the early seventeenth century a courageous and brilliant scientist, Galileo Galileo, confirmed heliocentrism, the idea first proposed a century earlier by Nicolaus Copernicus that the sun was at the center of the universe. Heliocentrism challenged geocentrism, the religiously motivated idea that a stationary earth was at the center of the universe. Galileo explained why heliocentrism was true and not surprisingly the church strongly opposed and persecuted the scientist. Ultimately, however, the truth could not be denied and church was forced to, once again, reluctantly give in to the objective truths of science.

That was the false history of the Galileo Affair according to later revisionists who promoted the view that science and religion were in conflict. In fact while Galileo indeed was brilliant, he also made it difficult for friendly voices to support him. Furthermore he did not confirm heliocentrism, and heliocentrism was not the only viable alternative to geocentrism. And geocentrism was hardly religiously motivated. The church had little objection to heliocentrism when Copernicus wrote of the model in the sixteenth century, and Copernicus was not the first to consider the idea.

The Galileo Affair is far more complex than the simple-minded warfare thesis supposes. Yes Pope John Paul II issued a declaration in 1992 acknowledging the church's errors. And the church was no doubt mistaken. But the church's action in the Galileo Affair was far more complex than simply opposing a scientific finding out of religious conviction (Galileo's trial focused on his insubordination, not heliocentrism). In fact, there were at least four reasons why the church opposed Galileo's heliocentrism which confound the naive warfare thesis.

First, in Galileo's day internal church politics had made it less receptive to new ideas such as heliocentrism. Second, Galileo's disobedience and style--such as satirizing his friend Pope Urban VIII who had been a supporter--fomented opposition. Third, it was understood that science could devise models that, on the one hand fit the data but on the other hand were not true or approximately so. In fact, geocentrism modeled the celestial motions quite accurately. And finally, in some cases where geocentrism did fail, another alternative--Tycho Brahe's hybrid model--succeeded.

An important failure of geocentrism were the phases of Venus which indicated it circled the sun, not Earth. Galileo expounded upon this point, but what he failed to mention was that the Tychonic system, in which the sun circles the earth and the inner planets in turn circle the sun, handled the phases of Venus just fine.

In fact new research reported on this week indicates another problem with Galileo's firmly held views. When observing stars through a telescope, as Galileo did, they do not appear as points of light, as they should, but as a small extended area, or disk, as did the planets. This disk appearance is due to the diffraction of light which was unknown at the time.

Of course the stars were assumed to be like the sun, and therefore much larger than the planets. Given their larger size the observed small disk meant they must have been much farther away than the planets. But the calculated distances to the stars were thousands of times less than what we now calculate. Yes the stars were far away, but those small disks were misleading. The diffracting light made the stars appear closer than they actually are.

Galileo was therefore assuming the stars were much closer than they actually are. Why is this important? Consider objects you observe out the window as you sit in a moving train. A nearby tree may be behind a closer tree, but as the train moves you will see the farther tree emerge as your angle changes. Two stars in the sky, on the other hand, do not move in relation to each other as you move along, because they are so far away.

Because Galileo calculated the stars to be much closer than they actually are, he would necessarily expect to see some change in their relative positions as the earth circled the sun in his heliocentric model. But no such relative change was observed. It was an important failure of Galileo's model which, again, he did not mention. And again, it was an observation that the Tychonic system handled just fine.

What the new research points out is that a contemporary of Galileo, the German astronomer Simon Marius, famous for naming the moons of Jupiter, was aware of these implications and followed them to their logical conclusion.

While Galileo was making high claims for heliocentrism, Marius had made clear in his 1614 book Mundus Iovialis (The Jovian World), that the observations confirmed the earth-centered Tychonic system.

The new paper, aptly entitled "How Marius Was Right and Galileo Was Wrong Even Though Galileo Was Right and Marius Was Wrong," is another example of how not just science, but the history of science, is more complicated than self-serving black-white renditions would have it.