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Galileo and the Inquisition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
On the occasion of the publication, in March 1987, of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, and foetal experimentation, there appeared a cartoon in a Roman newspaper, in which two bishops are standing next to a telescope. In the distant night sky, in addition to Saturn and the Moon, there are dozens of test-tubes. One bishop turns to the other, who is in front of the telescope, and asks: ‘This time what should we do? Should we look or not?’ Many see the Galileo affair as a prime example of the fundamental incompatibility between science and religion, between reason and faith. Stephen Hawking, in his recent best-seller, A Brief History of Time, writes a two-page biographical appendix on Galileo which offers ample evidence for the persistence of the view that the accomplishments of Galileo must be understood in the face of the opposition of Aristotelian science and Catholic theology. Galileo, Hawking claims, ‘was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.’ Hawking, in commenting on his participation at a conference on cosmology sponsored by the Vatican at which he challenged traditional interpretations of Big Bang cosmology, evoked the image of himself as a potential Galileo:
The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down a law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went around the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to advise it on cosmology.
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- Copyright © 1990 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Ia Republica 15/16 marzo 1987.
2 Hawking, Stephen W., A Brief History of Time (London & New York: Bantam Books 1988), pp. 179–180Google Scholar.
3 ibid., p. 116. For a discussion of the relationship between variations in Big Bang cosmology and the doctrine of creation, see my ‘Big Bang Cosmology, Quantum Tunneling From Nothing, and Creation,’ in Laval théologique et philosophique, 44:1, fevrier 1988, pp. 59–75.
4 Cardinal Robert Bellarmino to Paolo Foscarini, 15 April 1615, translated in Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, p. 163. I have made a few changes in Drake's translation.
5 ibid.
6 Galileo, Opere, Vol. 5, 357–359.
7 Opere, Vol. V, 102.
8 See William A. Wallace, Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegia Romano in Galileo's Science. In this and other publications Wallace has demonstrated Galileo's commitment to the Aristotelian ideal of scientific knowledge.
9 Galileo, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,’ in S. Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, pp. 182–3.
10 ibid., pp. 183, 186, and 199.
11 ibid., p. 179.
12 In a recent work, Galileo eretico, Pietro Redondi, claims that it was precisely Galileo's commitment to atomism, as found in The Assayer, that was the real source of his troubles with the Church. Despite Redondi's many insights concerning the theological and philosophical world in which the trial occurred, his specific thesis that the dispute concerning the relationship between Copernican astronomy and the Bible was part of a shadow theatre which concealed the serious dispute over Eucharistic theology is hardly satisfactory.
13 For a fuller exposition of this view, see Wallace, William A., ‘Galileo and Aristotle in the Dialogo,’ m Angelicum, Vol. 60 (1983), pp. 311–332Google Scholar.