Like many people in the western culture, I had been under the false impression that Galileo was the victim of a repressive Catholic Church intent of stamping out any dissenting views regarding the immovability of the Earth. A common perception has been that Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church for discovering the truth that the Earth moves. This myth has been used to justify the incompatibility between science and religion. There’s a lot of myth about the Galileo Affair as author Maurice Finocchario titled his 1989 book about Galileo.
The reality is the Galileo story is much more complicated. It involves multiple complex personalities caught up in the religion and politics of the day.
- This story is not about an enlightened scientist being persecuted by a narrow-minded Catholic Church because that is mostly a myth. Galileo has often been portrayed as someone who exposed the Catholic faith as a fraud thereby disproving the Catholic faith. This is simply not true! Galileo was a man who cared deeply about his Catholic Faith. He was a devout Catholic his entire life. He believed that all scripture revealed truth about God to his dying breath. His beef was that the Church adhered to a literal interpretation of some scriptures which he believed could have been interpreted differently.
- It’s not a story about a great scientific genius either, though Galileo was a bright mathematician and experimenter. What I hope to show in this video presentation is that the Galileo Affair is the story of a brilliant but bull-headed proto-scientist whose telescopic discoveries convinced him that Copernicus’ Sun-centered model was correct: that the Earth moved and orbited around the Sun. Galileo was a true believer in Psalm 19, that the heavens declared the glory of God! But Galileo was not one to suffer fools lightly! Thus, he quickly started accruing enemies within the Church and Academia shortly after his spyglass discoveries. Galileo was frustrated for two decades that his less intelligent academic peers and the Church authorities didn’t see the beauty of the Copernican sun-centered system over the entrenched earth-centered model.
- Proverbs 16:18 tells us that “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” Galileo’s haughty spirit gets the best of him and is his downfall!
General Outline of the Video Presentation:
- The religious, political, Intellectual and Scientific climate of the era.
- Ptolemy’s geocentric model (Earth-centered).
- Copernicus’ heliocentric model (Sun-centered).
- Who was Galileo?
- The spyglass discoveries of Galileo.
- His First Inquisition 1616.
- The Intervening Years
- His Second Inquisition 1633.
- Summary of the Galileo Affair.
Psalm 19 Astronomy Society 