Yesterday I wrote a post about whether Christianity is the enemy of science, and spoke about Copernicus. I mentioned in that post that Galileo is another issue, and today want to address that issue. However, I could do no better myself than to post a copy of James Kiefer’s excellent article (written in the early 1990s) on the Crime of Galileo.
This article is also available (in a plain text format) in the soc.religion.christian archives.
James wrote:
Since the subject of Galileo has come up, I should like to try to
clear up some misunderstandings.
My chief reference here is THE CRIME OF GALILEO, by Giorgio
Santillana, Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, available in paperback from Midway Reprint
Service, University of Chicago Press, for 14 dollars. Since I have lost my
own copy in the usual way (lent it to someone who did not return
it), I write from memory.
In Galileo’s day, almost every government required a permit to
print a book, and the Papal States (central Italy, ruled directly by
the Pope as temporal sovereign) were no exception. When Galileo
finished his book, A DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE TWO GREAT WORLD SYSTEMS
(meaning the earth-centered system of Ptolemy and the sun-centered
system of Copernicus) he applied directly to Pope Urban VIII, with
whom he was personally acquainted, for the necessary permit. The
Pope granted the permission, on condition that the book give a
balanced presentation, and in particular that it contain his own
favorite argument against Copernicus, one that he had invented
himself and was particularly proud of. Galileo agreed and got the
permit. When the book came out, the Pope was chagrined to find that
his argument was indeed presented, but not as he had expected. The
book was written in the form of a conversation among friends, and
the Pope’s argument had been put into the mouth of a character
called Simplicio (=the idiot). Moreover, the other speakers then
covered the argument with ridicule.
The Pope responded (or so it appears) by giving the Inquisition
orders to get Galileo for something or other. He was accordingly
brought up on charges, but could properly plead that he had sought
and obtained a permit for the book. The prosecution replied that
about sixteen years earlier he had received a private admonition
from Cardinal Bellarmine that his views were of questionable
orthodoxy, and that if the Pope had known of this, he would have
been more cautious about giving the permit, and therefore Galileo’s
failure to mention the Cardinal’s admonition amounted to obtaining a
permit by fraud, which invalidated the permit, etc. Galileo said
that he could not remember receiving any such admonition, but under
pressure admitted that he could not swear he had not.
The upshot was that Galileo signed his famous “recantation” and was
condemned to life imprisonment. This was a blatant injustice, but
not as harsh as it sounds. The prison was one of the Pope’s summer
palaces, which was turned over to him for life, and he continued to
conduct experiments, to receive visitors without restriction, and to
publish on any subject except astronomy. He here developed and
perfected his works on terrestial physics, works which undermined
the theoretical basis of Ptolemaic astronomy.
The wording of the “recantation” is of some interest. The key
sentence reads pretty much as follows:
I, the undersigned, Galileo Galilei, renounce and condemn the
belief that the sun is at the center of the world, and that the
earth rotates on its axis, and also has a daily motion.
Now the word “world” (=mundus) is ambiguous. It can refer to the
universe, or to the earth. Similarly, the daily motion of the
earth, according to Copernicus, is precisely its rotation once a day
on its axis. It is therefore false (according to Copernicus) to say
that the earth has two motions, one rotation and the other a daily
motion. It is also false to say that the sun is at the center of
the earth. Thus Galileo should have had no difficulty about signing
the document.
Is there any evidence that this is not just ingenious twisting of
words? Four considerations come to mind.
(1) Torricelli, Galileo’s friend and pupil, best known as the
inventor of the barometer, when he heard that Galileo had repudiated
Copernicanism under oath, said, “Alas, he is damned. He has sworn
falsely.” But when he saw the text of the recantation, he said, “Oh
joy, he is not damned.”
(2) When the tribunal presented Galileo with their draft of a
recantation, he flatly refused to sign it. He then negotiated a
revised text, which he did sign.
(3) Both Galileo and the members of the tribunal were men who
chose their words carefully, and who knew the art, essential in
politics whether ecclesiastical or otherwise, of wording a document
to as to convey the impression of saying more, or less, than is
actually said.
(4) At least some of the tribunal members (Santillana argues a
majority of them) were themselves of the Copernican persuasion, and
would be sympathetic to a resolution of the matter that gave the
Pope his personal revenge but without forcing Galileo to repudiate
what he and they believed to be the truth.
The Galileo episode has often been cited as evidence that Science
and Religion (some prefer to say, Science and Theology) are by their
very nature irreconcilable enemies. In fact, a close look at the
Galileo episode seems to me to yield two morals both quite different
from this.
One moral, of course, is that if you need a permit from a board in
order to do something, whether publish a book or have your property
rezoned, it is unwise to pull the nose of the chairman of the board
in public.
Another moral is that if you establish a government committee to
safeguard public morals, the committee members will assume as
self-evident that nothing could be more subversive of public morals,
and therefore of the very foundations of society, than a deed that
strikes at the guardians of morality by making the members of said
committee look personally ridiculous.
Example: The Watergate scandal began because the press was
obtaining confidential reports out of the Nixon Administration, and
high officials were determined to learn who was responsible. In the
process of trying to learn, they cut corners. One might have
expected the investigating committee to be keenly aware that there
are things more important than stopping leaks to the press.
However, some stories appeared in the press about the committee,
including, for example, a statement by one committee member that
another member was apparently incapable of answering any question,
including, “What time is it?” without first frowning and staring at
the ceiling for several seconds. (A perfectly correct observation,
by the way, which is precisely why it caused such a commotion.) The
committee responded by taking off a full week from the job of saving
the country to conduct a full-time investigation into the question
of who had been betraying his sacred trust by reporting confidential
information to the press, information that, by making the committee,
the guardians of the Constitution, look silly, amounted to an attack
on the Constitution itself. (My source here is an article in the
WASHINGTON MONTHLY at the time.)
The over-all theological atmosphere of Galileo’s time and just
before was far from a rigid commitment to the idea of a fixed earth.
Nicolas of Cusa, who died a century before Galileo was born, wrote,
“When we say that the earth does not move, we mean simply this, that
the earth is the point from which man makes his observations of
celestial phenomena.” A modern physicist discussing relativity
theory could not improve on that. During Galileo’s lifetime, the
Inquisition was officially asked whether someone who revealed in the
confessional that he held the Copernican view and was not about to
give it up should be denied absolution as an impenitent heretic.
The official answer was “no”. I conclude that the punishment of
Galileo was based, not on any conflict between his view and Church
doctrine, but on the Pope’s regrettable but unsurprising conviction
that anyone who publicly makes a laughing-stock of the Pope is
striking at the foundations of all that is good and decent and must
not be permitted to get away with it. Urban VIII is by no means the
only public figure to reason like this. I feel the urge to give
several more examples, but this post is already too long.
James Kiefer
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In