God was perfect as was the Sun
and to see spots on the sun was to see blemishes on
the face of the divine.
This fact, if real, would imply many things,
including that God was imperfect, which was
theologically impossible—since God's perfection is a revealed truth!
Anyway, for the esteemed Cardinal, if he did look and if he
did see sun spots, he would know that it was the work of the Devil.
Bellarmine lived in a world
of fear where demonic temptation to sin was
of greater weight than the data capture of the then faddish
scientific experiment. The Cardinal tapped into the Abrahamic Big
Story’s
deeply embedded emotions of dread and fear.
Cardinal Bellarmine would not eschew
the scientific method. Rather he would judge it irrelevant based
upon his understanding, derived from the account of Creation in Genesis,
that “God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it
was very good.” (Genesis 1:31) For him, the study
of Nature could not and does not contradict the Abrahamic Big Story.
For the Cardinal, only human ignorance
and pride prevents people from seeing God’s handiwork in
everything natural.
Continue—Sacred Scientism
