No scientist, to our knowledge, ever lost his life because of his scientific views, though, … the Italian Inquisition did incinerate the sixteenth century Copernican Giordano Bruno for his heretical theological notions. (Emphasis in original)
Jason thinks that this claim is evasive because as he says:
It is absurd to pretend that Bruno’s theological views can be treated as completely separate from his scientific views. That the stated reasons for Bruno’s execution involved his heretical theology does not mean that he was not also killed because of his scientific views. One suspects that for Bruno, as for so many modern thinkers, his science and theology complemented each other, to the point where it is difficult to say which aspect of his thinking was scientific and which part was theological.
Now this is an interesting standpoint that Jason is defending because by his own standards Bruno didn’t have any scientific** views! A strong statement on my part but one that I think is fully justified when one actually examines Bruno’s work. Before doing so, let us first see how Jason defines science and scientific views. In his comments column in a direct answer on his understanding as to what constitutes science Jason writes:
I’m viewing science as an approach to inquiry. It’s (sic) main tenet is that assertions of fact about the natural world should be based on experimentation, evidence gathering, hypothesis testing, and all the other sorts of things scientists do.
You can look long and hard at Bruno’s writings but you will never find anything remotely similar to this. Having claimed this, how come Bruno came to be regarded as a scientific martyr at all? The reason is very simple Bruno was one of only ten people to subscribe to astronomical Copernican heliocentrism in the 16th century. But doesn’t this make him scientific? No, because Bruno’s defence of heliocentrism is purely philosophical he makes no attempt to provide any form of empirical, experimental or in any other way scientific justification for his adoption of this theory. Holding a theory to be true does not make the holder the possessor of a scientific viewpoint. Bruno also excites modern commentators because of his cosmological ideas of an infinite universe uniformly filled with an infinite number of inhabited worlds, interesting speculations but in no way scientific. Bruno’s cosmological speculations are just that, speculations without basis, the only way that one can bring them in connection with the word science is when one calls them science fiction but even this would be stretching a point as they are nearer to science fantasy than science fiction.
This however is not the worst. If one examines Bruno’s world of thought in the context of the emerging science of his age he reveals himself as a woo master. Between 1400 and 1750 the nature of science and scientific enquiry went through a major shift of emphasis from the scholastic Aristotelian* science, which is largely a priori, descriptive, and qualitative to the modern concept of science empirical, quantitative and a posteriori. The quantitative element of this new understanding is provided by mathematics. It is not a coincidence that the same period has been called the golden age of mathematics with the development of logarithms, trigonometry as a discipline in its own right and not part of astronomy, symbolic algebra, analytical geometry and the infinitesimal calculus. These developments have led to the so-called scientific revolution being described as the mathematisation of nature. Where did Bruno stand with regard to this absolutely central aspect of modern science, he categorically rejected it. For Bruno modern mathematics and the attempts to describe nature with it were anathema. Instead he proposed a system of multi-coloured mystical geometrical diagrams to describe nature that bear a strong resemblance to Vedic mandalas.
Jason is right when he describes Bruno as a modern thinker, he was indeed such with regard to theology where his views were way ahead of his time and the Catholic Church’s persecution and murder of Bruno for holding those views can only be condemned in the strongest terms. However to ascribe scientific views to Bruno is misuse of the term scientific as he was not a scientist or a scientific thinker and didn’t have a scientific view.
*Mediaeval Aristotelian science is, as Edward Grant always emphasises, not Aristotle’s science.
**I am well aware that the use of the term science when talking about the early modern period is anachronistic but using it is a useful form of shorthand and save complex explanations. If anyone objects please feel free to vent your spleen in the comments