The Galileo case is often seen starkly as science’s first decisive blow against not only faith but also the power of the Roman Catholic Church. It has never been quite that simple, though. Galileo was a believer, devastated at being convicted, in 1633, of heresy for upending the biblical view of the universe.
Now a particularly enduring Catholic practice is on prominent display in, of all places, Florence’s history of science museum, recently renovated and renamed to honor Galileo: Modern-day supporters of the famous heretic are exhibiting newly recovered bits of his body ”” three fingers and a gnarly molar sliced from his corpse nearly a century after he died ”” as if they were the relics of an actual saint.
“He’s a secular saint, and relics are an important symbol of his fight for freedom of thought,” said Paolo Galluzzi, the director of the Galileo Museum, which put the tooth, thumb and index finger on view last month, uniting them with another of the scientist’s digits already in its collection.
[blockquote]the director of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, referred without blinking to “the errors committed by both sides†— indicating both the church and Galileo.[/blockquote]
But the good Monsignor is correct, as is the statement that Galileo was wrong to insist that his heliocentric model should have been accepted without proper empirical evidence (he erroneously believed that the tides provided proof). The enduring legend of mythic proportions here is that Galileo’s condemnation represents an early episode in the “science vs religion” struggle of the last three centuries.
In point of fact, what it represented was the struggle between two opposing scientific paradigms, Galileo’s heliocentrism and the Church’s Ptolemaic geocentrism. (Admittedly, Ptolemy had the backing of the Inquisition in the Galileo case.) The Church’s scientific/philosophical position was [i]not[/i] particularly scriptural, though there are of course scattered texts in the Bible that can be adduced to support a geocentric model – but this simply reflects the same sort of [i]observational[/i] (I mean the full force of that world) worldview that produced Ptolemy’s work.
Ptolemy developed a geocentric model because it matched the observational findings of the Hellenistic science of his day. His theories became regnant, and so the Church inherited (and enshrined) them. Galileo developed a heliocentric model because his observations with superior technology (the telescope) demonstrated inconsistencies with the geocentric model and seeming confirmation of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory. That is the way the science develops and changes, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his ground-breaking book in the 1960s ([i]The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[/i]). The Church’s resistance to the newer, better paradigm is by no means unique in the annals of science. Ask (or read the memoirs of) any scientist who’s gone up against the regnant scientific paradigm. Journal review committees can be as censorial as the Holy Office of the Inquisition any day.
Of course, my comment ignores the whole “secular saint” hagiology (hagiolatry?) that is going on here. Isn’t it odd how such practices will reappear when they’ve been banished?
As a great North African theologian once wrote, [i]Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.[/i]
A number of the more egregiously erroneous statements in this piece are corrected in this [url=http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/7/23/review-essay-rescuing-galileo-from-scientism]propitiously timed TLC essay[/url] by yours truly.