The Galileo Syndrome
The trial of Galileo is known to the public almost entirely as a one-dimensional morality play, in which freedom of thought, embodied in science, is persecuted by dogmatic oppression, embodied in the Catholic Church. Recent retellings of the story, such as Wade Rowland’s Galileo’s Mistake, challenge modernist prejudice by portraying a more complex tangle in which the over-bearing Galileo bears part of the responsibility for forcing a showdown with Pope Leo VIII, who had been Galileo’s friend and supporter until the great scientist’s contempt for authority exhausted his patience.
The Church did not object to the Copernican theory, provided that Galileo advanced it only as a useful hypothesis and not as the literal truth. Perhaps astronomers were finding the hypothesis of Copernicus preferable to the geocentric tradition for such scientific tasks as navigation and the prediction of eclipses. The Church was willing to leave such scientific questions to the scientists, while recognizing that scientific convenience is not the only guide to truth.
It was otherwise when Galileo, writing for the public in Italian rather than solely for the scholars in Latin, employed his immense prestige and rhetorical skill to teach that a rotating and revolving earth was not merely a fiction adopted for its convenience in scientific work, but was truly the way things really are, regardless of what the Church thought about the matter. By crossing that line, Galileo directly challenged the Church’s authority during a critical phase of the Counter-Reformation, and the Church understandably had objections, both scientific and theological.
Galileo Thought Otherwise
I will not go into the former, because my priority is to explain the “mistake” of Wade Rowland’s title, and to describe the intriguing parallel between Galileo’s situation and that of the Intelligent Design movement today as we confront the scientific community’s institutions, which are as powerful over questions of knowledge in our time as the Church was in Galileo’s. In brief, some esteemed theologians interpreted the Bible as implying or assuming geocentrism, whereas some esteemed scientists, notably Galileo, interpreted the evidence of science as requiring a sun-centered astronomy.
Assuming that both the Bible and scientific investigation are reliable sources of knowledge, as nearly everyone did at the time, then either the theologians were mistaken in their interpretation of the few lines of Scripture that seemed to create a problem, or the scientists were mistaken in their interpretation of the evidence of nature. It seems obvious that both possibilities ought to have been considered, but Galileo thought otherwise. He quoted Augustine to prove that Scripture often employs figurative language and so the interpretation of Scripture must be guided by what is known through reason and observation.
So far so good, but Galileo did not concede that the reverse was also true, because he thought that nature was its own interpreter, and presented reality directly to the scientific observer. To illustrate the mistake, Rowland paraphrased Galileo’s explanation from his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (the mother of Galileo’s patron Cosimo, the grand duke of Tuscany): “In any case, Galileo argues, the Bible is not a scientific text. It is a moral and spiritual document that should not be relied upon for information on the nature of the physical universe.”
Certainly, the fact that the Bible may appear to contradict evidence produced by scientific inquiry should not be enough to debunk the scientific claims. Moreover, Galileo insisted, Scripture should not be used to deny any scientific claim that is susceptible to confirmation, even if the confirmation may not yet have been achieved. How it is to be determined that a claim may be proved, in the absence of that proof, is a problem he does not address. Galileo clearly believed that there was little that science could not illuminate. This position left the role remaining to religion as one of filling in the gaps: temporarily providing explanations in areas into which science had not yet expanded its knowledge.
Galileo does not appear to have seen this implication, but the Church clearly did, and found unacceptable the inevitable marginalization it implied. Loyal son of the Church though he may have been, Galileo nonetheless came very near to stating the radical doctrine that nowadays we call positivism, or scientism. If Galileo could not foresee how granting this kind of epistemic supremacy to science would result in the marginalization of religion, we have no need for foresight because we have seen the outcome. No wonder the Church thought it had to assert its authority!
The Church of Science
I have turned to the Galileo episode not to compete with historians in assessing the blame for the tragedy, but because the elements of that conflict are present again in the hot argument between the Intelligent Design movement in biology and Darwinism. Today the scientific profession has firmly grasped the authority once possessed by the Catholic Church and contested by Galileo, the power to judge which claims have the status of knowledge and which do not. Like the Church of Galileo’s day, the Church of Science can tolerate almost any concept if it remains no more than a hypothesis or metaphor, provisionally adopted as an aid to understanding and not advocated as literally true.
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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