Galileo's defense of heliocentrism against theological opposition

Galileo and Religion

From a theological perspective, it matters not at all whether the earth moves around the sun or vice versa, since the Bible hardly deals with any of these scientific questions at all. Galileo was correct that the purpose of the Bible was to teach certain religious and spiritual truths, not to provide scientific information on chemistry, physics or biology. Even if its authors had been aware of these subjects, they were basically irrelevant to the stories they intended to tell. In Genesis, for example, the Bible asserts that God created the universe out of nothing in the very distant past, but never mentions whether the earth or other planets are moving. Among those few people in the ancient world who gave any thought to these matters, the views of Aristotle and Ptolemy had been officially accepted by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, and therefore it had difficulty in changing its views when Galileo disproved these two philosophers. Even in the ancient world, though, other scientists had concluded that the sun was stationary, so Galileo and Copernicus deserve credit for rediscovering and proving their views. The fact that one or another ancient Greek philosopher was disproven on some issue is of no religious significance at all, although the Catholic Church condemned Galileo's work as heretical and the Inquisition threatened to burn him. They later apologized for this, of course, but as Galileo wrote at the time they would have done better to simply leave these scientific questions to the scientists.

Section 2: Galileo's Primary Contribution to Scientific Knowledge

In Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany in 1615, he defended the New Science against is conservative critics in the universities and Catholic Church, who were claiming that he had simply falsified his results. They had also sprinkled their arguments with "passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly, and which were ill-suited to their purposes."[footnoteRef:1] These narrow-minded critics were using the Bible to defend the false and outdated theories of Ptolemy and Aristotle, and claiming that he was a heretic. All the opponents of Nicholas Copernicus had attacked him on the same grounds, no matter that he was a Catholic priest whose book On the Celestial Revolutions was dedicated to Pope Paul III. If the Church had accepted this book, then as Galileo pointed out his own views were based on it and should also be accepted. Neither he nor Copernicus had ever had any intention of discussing the Bible or religious matters in their scientific work, although their opponents "would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage, though under the surface meaning of its words this passage may contain a different sense."[footnoteRef:2] Galileo also claimed to be a devout Catholic who had no desire at all to publish any doctrines that ran contrary to the Church of the Bible. Even so, he insisted that facts were facts, and the observation proved all the planets were moving around the sun. Even its opponents usually conceded this point once the observations had been repeatedly verified. God had placed these planets in motion and they followed regular, predictable natural laws in their movements. [1: Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615. Modern History Sourcebook.] [2: Galileo 1615]

Section 4: Galileo's Ideas are Completely Compatible with Religion and Christianity

Nothing that Galileo discovered was even remotely incompatible with Christianity or the Bible, and at this late date it is very difficult to comprehend how the Catholic Church could have condemned his work or threatened him with the Inquisition. Indeed, in recent times even Pope John Paul II publicly regretted this condemnation of Galileo and apologized for it. As Galileo pointed out, the Bible is not a science textbook and no one turns to it for information about physics, chemistry or biology. It mentions that God created the universe out of nothing at some time in the remote past, but moves on quickly to the story of Adam and Eve, their fall into sin and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Even in the 17th Century, the Catholic Church understood these stories as being allegorical and metaphorical rather than being literally true, but in any case the Bible says nothing about the laws of gravity, the movements of the planets or whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. Galileo was correct in his views that information about the physical universe was not a question of faith or theology, but mainly left to reason and sense experience, although he did believe that God had set the universe in motion and also put certain physical and natural laws in place. If anything, he thought that his theories lent even greater weight to the idea that a Creator or Designer had made the universe, but in any case the ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Ptolemy had incorrect ideas. There is no sacred or religious connotation at all in disproving them: they simply got it wrong and now we know better. Of course, other political and economic interests found Galileo's New Science threatening to the old order, and in those times "ideological struggle in the pre-capitalist world was conducted primarily at the level of religious and theological discourse" by the educated elites.[footnoteRef:4] None of this really had anything to do with the theological or spiritual truths of the Bible, either, since it is really all part of the sphere of politics, especially in an era when the Church had real political power and was threatened by all change. [4: Luke Ferrerter, Louis Althusser (Routledge, 2006), p. 85.]

Section 5: Conclusion

Galileo was correct that his theories about the planets moving around the sun were not in contradiction with the Bible of religion in any way. To be sure, he had contradicted Aristotle, Ptolemy and other ancient philosophers, whose views on science and cosmology were simply erroneous. There is hardly any mention of science in the Bible, anyway, and it certainly could not be consulted for facts about relativity theory, evolution, nuclear physics, gravity or planetary motion. Even if its authors had been aware of these subjects at all, they were irrelevant to the stories they had to tell, such as the fall into original sin and divine intervention in history. Even among those few people in the ancient world who gave any thought to these matters, there were those who actually agreed with Galileo and Copernicus, who actually revived the idea that that planets were moving around the sun rather than the earth.