The structure of social revolutions, part 1

As I see it, atheism as a movement is about two things.  First, it’s about skepticism and the advancement of knowledge free of dogma.  Second, it’s about achieving social change.  We want to remove the stigma of atheism, allowing atheists to be open and honest about their non-belief while minimizing fear of prejudice and hostility against them.

Speaking as someone actively involved with atheist visibility, I know that it can be really frustrating when it seems like progress is not happening.  In fact, people commonly write us to ask, “Why do you bother?  It’s not like you’re going to turn Christians into atheists.”

Social progress always happens slowly, but there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of long term change, and even reasons to believe that you might have a small part to play as an instrument of that change.  In this post and the planned follow-up, I want to talk a bit about taking a big picture perspective on social change.

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You say you want a revolution

In the 1950′s and 60′s, a philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn wrote a couple of books that gained widespread attention.  The first was called The Copernican Revolution; the second, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

In The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn outlined the history of public acceptance of the notion of a heliocentric solar system.  Prior to the publication of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, the western world commonly believed that the earth was the center of the universe. Changing this opinion over the course of the next century and a half (give or take) was a slow and arduous process.  It was made slower and more arduous by the strong resistance of both Catholic and Protestant churches, with many religious leaders asserting that Earth must occupy a special place in the universe or the Bible could not be true.  In the scientific community as well, there was an uphill battle to change mainstream thinking.

What happened in order to get us to where we are now, when even the most hardcore fundamentalists do not dispute heliocentrism? Did the priests receive divine revelation telling them that Copernicus was right?  Was a new book of the Bible discovered, or an old one reinterpreted, to convince everyone that this was what God “really” meant to say?  Did the old school followers of Ptolemy’s epicycles come around and publish corrections?

No.  What happened, Kuhn argues, is that the opponents of Copernicus died.  I mean, not all at once.  Those who accepted the heliocentric model were at first iconoclasts; but when the model held up to scrutiny, it began catching on with younger scientists, bolstered by contributions from Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.  Over time, people who stuck to the old ways aged and died, and they were not replaced by new Ptolemaists.

Nearly a hundred years later, when Galileo was jailed for defending the heliocentric system, you could consider it to be the last gasp of an institution losing their control over the terms of discussion. They had mostly lost scientific support, popular opinion was lagging behind but still beginning to catch up, and the only way the Catholics could assert the relevance of their position was by a show of brute force.

As you’ll notice, it didn’t work.  Before much longer, geocentrism was a dead issue for scholars. And in 1992, Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology to Galileo on behalf of the church.

No, seriously!  That totally happened, a mere two decades ago. And you might say that three hundred years is a ridiculous amount of time for the church to openly acknowledge that they were wrong, but hey — better late than never, right?

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