Happy Birthday Galileo!

On this day in 1564, Galileo Galilei was born at Pisa.

Galileo and the so-called "Galileo Affair" have been favourite soap-boxes of mine for quite some time. People who know me well generally know not to get me started. People who don't know me well and make the mistake of commenting on how badly the Church treated Galileo generally regret it. I'm not exactly sure when this interest of mine began, however. The earliest exposure I had to the name of Galileo, as far as I can remember, would have been a song by the Christian pop singer Amy Grant. This would have been back when I was in primary school, when I was about 10 years old. I remember going to a concert of hers - she was touring after the release of her album Heart in Motion. One of my favourite songs on the album (I still enjoy it!) is called "Galileo." It has cute lyrics:

In the year of fourteen ninety-two
When Columbus sailed the ocean blue
Had he landed on India's shore
You might never have come to knock on my door.

Who needs a rhyme or a reason?
Some dreams were made to find
So I know that I must follow

Ask me just how much I love you
You are starlight, I'm Galileo
Even on the darkest night oh
I will find the shining light of our love.

I'm not sure if I found out much more about Galileo during primary school. The next time I encountered his story, as far as I can remember, was in my first year at university. I was enrolled in a Bachelor of Medical Science, but I decided to take some Science and Technology Studies subjects as electives. (It sounded more interesting than physics, psychology or computer science, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made!) The first subject I took was called Cosmos and Culture, and it was an overview of the history of science from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century. It was all very new to me, but I was loving it. We got to the Copernican Revolution and Galileo the week before our major essay was due, but I was fascinated enough to abandon my research on Aristotle in order to write about whether the Copernican Revolution was indeed a revolution. I'm still amused that I relied heavily on Thomas Kuhn's 1957 classic The Copernican Revolution without knowing anything of its significance or that of the follow-up, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But that's another story.

The main thing I remember hearing about Galileo is this class was how the Church had condemned him as a heretic on the basis of just one short passage from Scripture:

Joshua 10:12-14 - At that time Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, "Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon." And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD obeyed the voice of a man, for the LORD fought for Israel.

The message I received from this class was the Galileo was condemned as a heretic because the Church insisted on a literal interpretation of this passage. Of course the sun moves! Joshua wouldn't have told the sun to stop moving if it had actually been the earth that was moving - he would have told the earth to stop spinning! And because of this, science and religion became mortal enemies, as they still are. I remember thinking how stupid the Church was, and how it was responsible for the conflict between science and religion, just because they insisted on a literal interpretation of a verse that was obviously not meant to be taken as a scientific statement.

Such was my initial understanding of the "Galileo Affair." I was 18 years old, a first-year university student who had not yet even embarked on my career as an aspiring historian of science. I was still planning to study medicine to become an anaesthesiologist at that stage! But just as my continuing studies convinced me that I should head down a different path, so they also showed me that the "Galileo Affair" was not as straightforward as it first seemed.

While Galileo is often referred to as the "father of modern science," it is difficult to classify him as a scientist, or even a natural philosopher, as the people who studied the natural world were known at that time. Galileo was primarily a mathematician, although he sought the title of "philosopher" as they were more highly paid.

Galileo excelled at cultivating favour with the aristocracy, through his performances in debates, dedications of important works, and gifts of instruments such as the telescope. Contrary to popular belief, Galileo did not invent the telescope, nor was he the first person to use it in looking at the heavens - just perhaps the most outspoken! However good Galileo was at increasing his public profile, he was also very good at making enemies. His performances in debates often left his opponents looking stupid - a good thing for his patrons, but not when he needed crucial support from the academic community.

In his short book, Galileo, Stillman Drake argued that Galileo's condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633 was not a result of his defiance of the Church, but was rather caused by the hostility of contemporary philosophers. We are so conditioned to view the "Galileo Affair" as the result of an inevitable conflict between science and religion that this may come as a shock, but this is not a new perspective. Drake's book was first released in 1980, though the 2001 "Very Short Introduction" edition still labelled this as "a startling reinterpretation of the evidence."

If I go into too much detail here, this post will become far too long. I suspect that many people have already stopped reading! But here's a few points, just to whet your appetite.

We need to remember that this was a troubled time for the Church. The Reformation had challenged the authority of the Catholic Church, particularly with regard to the interpretation of Scripture. However, Pope Urban VIII, the one who eventually unleashed the Inquisition on to Galileo, was initially a huge fan. He even wrote a poem about Galileo, and gave him permission to write the Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems which eventually landed Galileo in hot water. Galileo made the mistake of putting the Pope's favourite argument into the mouth of Simplicio - the character in the dialogue who is indeed shown to be a simpleton. Urged on by Galileo's philosophical enemies, the Pope was not pleased. Even Cardinal Bellarmine - arch-Counter-Reformationist - who was intimately involved in the early years of the "Galileo Affair" but who had passed away before the 1633 trial, was prepared to at least consider reinterpreting certain passages of the Bible, so long as there was good reason... but Galileo had no real evidence.

Wait a minute! No evidence? Didn't Galileo have his telescope? Common sense? The scientific method?? Well... that's going to take too long to explain thoroughly. Stay tuned for details on where you can find out more!

So there was a context of religious upheaval, and the Church was anxious to retain its authority. But what is "the Church"? There was no such monolithic institution. For starters, there were the Protestant and Catholic churches (emphasis on the plural), and even within each of these, there were differing viewpoints. And the idea of "the Church" suppressing science? What is this "science" you speak of? There was "natural philosophy" - a mode of natural inquiry much broader than what we view science as - and there were many varieties of this as well. And there were the mechanical sciences (again, emphasis on the plural) which weren't considered to be on the same explanatory level as natural philosophy. A conflict between science and religion? Which science? Which religion? You can see how it gets complicated.

It's probably more accurate to view the Galileo Affair as a conflict between "old science" and "new science" than between "science" and "religion." The academic establishment of the day, which happened to be closely aligned with the Catholic Church, but by no means homogeneous theologically, resisted Galileo's attempts to change the accepted view of how the universe worked. And since Galileo's evidence was rather less than compelling, perhaps they were the really "scientific" or "rational" ones after all.

But still, Galileo was a great thinker, and I am a big fan. I particularly like his way of looking at nature as the work of God, and seeking to understand it better in this context. And the "Galileo Affair" and his work and ideas are important for striving to understand how religious belief and scientific understanding of the natural world relate to each other.

Some key quotes:

Take note, theologians, that in your desire to makes matters of faith out of propositions relating to the fixity of the sun and earth you run the risk of eventually having to condemn as heretics those who would declare the earth to stand still and the sun to change position - eventually, I say, at such a time as it might be physically or logically proved that the earth moves and the sun stands still.
- Note added by Galileo in the preliminary leaves of his copy of Dialogue on the Great World Systems (1632)

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.
- The Assayer (1623)

But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them
- Letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (1615)

That's all for now, folks, but if you should wish to hear more, I will be "Revisiting the Galileo Affair" on Tuesday, April 17, as part of the CASE Christianity and Contemporary Thought lecture series. I hope to see you all there (although those who live in a different hemisphere will, of course, be excused).