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The most infamous clash between science and religion is
undoubtedly the Galileo affair. According to popular mythology the great Italian
physicist Galileo Galilei almost lost his life at the hands of the Roman
Catholic Church for championing the idea that the earth revolves around the sun,
rather than the sun circling the earth. Yet historians have now shown that the
whole story has been greatly exaggerated, and that the reality was a lot more
complex.
In fact Galileo never spent a single day in jail. During his
trial he was housed in luxury in a cardinal's palace, and throughout his life
some of his greatest supporters were cardinals and other churchmen. At the time
of his trial, in 1633, no one had definite proof that the earth orbits the sun.
The truth is that astronomy then was not accurate enough to decide between an
earth-centered and sun-centered system. Nonetheless, the hierarchy of the Roman
Catholic Church (along with many other scholars at the time) was slowly moving
towards accepting this new vision of the heavens, and it is likely that the
whole conflict could have been avoided if Galileo himself had been a bit less
arrogant. The church was far from admirable in its behavior, in that Galileo was
committed to house arrest for the last eight years of life, for espousing his
views. Yet the church did not try to stop him from pursuing his science, and it
was in fact during this time that he wrote his great book, "Dialogs
Concerning Two New Sciences", which established his role as a founder of
modern physics.
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| Contributed by: Margaret Wertheim
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