GALILEO AND
THE CHURCH
Galileo,
born in 1564, was an Italian astronomer and physicist. He has been called the
founder of modern experimental science. Galileo’s first important
observations in astronomy concerned the moon, and opposed the teachings of
Aristotle. With his telescopes, Galileo discovered that the moon was not a
smooth sphere, that it had valleys and mountains and that it showed only the
light it reflected, not shining by its own light.
Galileo
firmly upheld the theory of Copernicus, that the earth
moves around the sun. This caused a dispute between Pope Paul V, Head of the
Catholic Church, other high-church officials and scientists. The Church also
bitterly opposed Galileo’s reports on sunspots. In 1632, Galileo published his
masterpiece, A dialogue on the Two
Principal Systems of the World. The Holy Office or Inquisition
immediately called Galileo to appear before it. After a long trial in 1633, the
Church forced Galileo to say that he gave up his belief in the Copernican
theory, and sentenced him to an indefinite prison term. He was confined to his
villa in Arcetri,
where he died on
John
Shelby Spong, an Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New
Jersey supports the World Book Encyclopedia regarding Galileo and the Church.
In his book Liberating the Gospels, the Bishop wrote that the Catholic
Church interpreted the Bible as:
“The
God who dominated the biblical narrative was a God who was conceived of inside
a worldview that Copernicus and Galileo had rendered all but meaningless. It is
no wonder that the leaders of the Church reacted with such vehemence to the
publication of Galileo’s ideas, for they struck at the very heart of the
Church’s authority.
The
entire biblical frame of reference was challenged by Galileo’s concepts. So the
church condemned Galileo and forced him to choose between recanting and death.
The text used to challenge the work of Galileo was found in the book of Joshua,
where Joshua ordered the sun to stand still in the sky (Joshua
Therefore,
anything contrary to the Bible was, by definition, false. Galileo did recant in
order to save his life, and the Church presumed that a great victory had been
won. However, no external authority can ultimately repress the truth, and in
1991, the
“This
confession of error on the part of the Church was 350 years too late. The
credibility of the Church was as poorly served by that arrogant confession as
it had been by its original closed-minded ignorance. Besides that, the Church,
even in its admission of guilt, hardly dealt with the major threat to its
power: namely, that if Galileo was correct, what happens to the whole context
in which was written?“
“Perhaps
the religious hierarchy assumed that no one would raise this question,” so
wrote Bishop Spong.
SOURCES:
The World book Encyclopedia – Galileo, page
11-12
Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong – Liberating
the Gospels, page 7