In our generation the myth that faith and science are incompatible – meaning that no intelligent person should believe in God – has been pushed hard by atheists and secularists alike.
I don’t suppose secularists take kindly to the idea of having a patron saint, but if they did, they might well choose Galileo. He seems to have become the go-to scientific victim if you want to prove how mean, unreasonable and obscurantist the Catholic Church was, and to the present-day atheists, obviously is.
Unhappily the papers on Galileo’s trial by the Inquisition were first released just as the debate about Darwin and evolution was hotting up. This helped feed the misleading myth that faith and science were at odds. But as with so many things, scrape away the spin and the reality looks very different. Behind the rhetoric we find a number of discoveries that surprise the average 21st-century critic of the Church.
Galileo was to the end of his life a passionate Catholic believer who wanted to tell the truth about science and also help the Church avoid making mistakes by using the Bible for science instead of salvation. There were plenty of Catholic scientists who were convinced that Ptolemaic maps of the universe did not describe growing scientific awareness as well as Copernicus’s map did. Galileo only found himself before a committee of cardinals because Pope Urban VIII lost his temper.
“When His Holiness gets something into his head, that is the end of the matter,” wrote the Tuscan ambassador, Alessandro Niccolini, “especially if one is opposing, threatening or defying him, since then he hardens and shows no respect to anyone.” That was the main cause of Galileo becoming a cause-célèbre as a scientist victimised by the Church. Except that it was more accurate to describe him as a fall-guy for a bad-tempered and periodically paranoid pontiff.
It was all the more unnecessary because Urban – a youngish, rather dashing and reformist pope – had been a good friend of Galileo. But he had a host of issues on his mind. The Church was hypersensitive about who could interpret Scripture and in what way as the European Reformations got going; he had engaged in profligate spending and had doubled the Vatican’s debts; he mishandled the Holy See’s engagement with the Thirty Years War, was frightened by outbreaks of the plague and even more frightened of being poisoned.
Galileo had written a book called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which he had presented the views of the sun-or earth-centred universe in two opposing voices. This was the literary version of a personal conversation he and Pope Urban had enjoyed together. The subject matter wasn’t new. What was new was the name which Galileo gave to the Ptolemaic advocate, the position the Pope had taken in their conversations: Simplicio.
Urban was too busy to read it in the summer of 1632. But a crowd of anonymous advisers (mainly Jesuits) pestered him with warnings that it was intended to be a public act of papal humiliation. Already loudly accused of flagging Catholic zeal on the battlefronts of Europe, this felt like one public papal insult too many.
Simplicio could have meant “straightforward”; equally it could be taken for “fool”. The Pope convened a three-man commission to re-examine Dialogue. There were going to be two issues. The first was that in a meeting that took place in 1616, Galileo had been given permission to continue his explorations, but only on condition that he presented the evidence for heliocentrism as a hypothesis and not as a fact.
The second issue was to do with the interpretation of Scripture: when should it be literal and when allegorical or metaphorical? The commission decided that the arguments for heliocentrism were too strong in Dialogue and that Galileo had gone beyond presenting Copernicus as a hypothesis only.
The thrust of the arguments were not about mathematics or science; they were about the interpretation of Scripture. What was the 10th chapter of Joshua describing when the sun “stood still”? What did the psalmist mean when he wrote that “He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.” Was this theology or science?
Centuries before, in his work De Genesi ad Litteram, St Augustine of Hippo had begged the Church to allow itself to use allegory in biblical interpretation to avoid answering the “how” questions of science with the “why” observations of the Bible. When the Inquisition found against Galileo (by seven votes to three) the two real issues were how the Church was going to do its biblical interpretation, and how Urban VIII could soothe his wounded ego.
All Galileo wanted to be was a faithful Catholic and a faithful scientist. Faith and science have different jurisdictions, but to avoid making martyrs unnecessarily to secularism, all must beware popes losing their tempers, vengeful Jesuits and the misuse of the authority of the Bible. It is a lesson for every age.
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