In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still ... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.
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"The machine should be able to carry out logical deductions."
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."
"The power of machines will one day be so great that they will be able to do anything we can do, and more."
"The human brain is a very complex machine, but it is still a machine."
"We are trying to make a brain."
From his paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', arguing against theological objections to machine thinking.
Date: 1950
PhilosophicalFound in 1 providers: gemini
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The quote highlights how biblical passages were once treated as conclusive scientific proof against heliocentrism — the idea that Earth, not the sun, moves. Turing uses this to expose a recurring error: invoking authoritative texts to shut down empirical inquiry. The lesson is that sacred or traditional arguments don't automatically refute new theories, and history often vindicates the scientist over the scripture-citer.
Turing wrote this in his 1950 paper proposing the Turing Test, using Galileo's persecution as an analogy for objections to machine intelligence. He was directly countering theological arguments that machines could never think or possess souls. Turing himself faced institutional persecution — the British government prosecuted him for homosexuality in 1952 — making him acutely aware of how authority weaponizes tradition to suppress inconvenient truths.
Written in 1950, as the first computers emerged and the Cold War reshaped science's role in society, Turing's era saw intense debate over what machines could do. Postwar Britain retained strong religious-cultural conservatism. Questions about artificial minds threatened conventional ideas about human uniqueness. By invoking Galileo, Turing reminded readers that science had won such battles before, legitimizing his radical claim that machines might one day think.
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