Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition, painting by Cristiano Banti

Galileo’s heliocentric ideas conflicted with the Catholic Church’s erroneous interpretation of certain Bible verses and, due to the absence of a wall between religious and scientific investigations, these misinterpretations caused errors in Catholic scientists’ scientific investigations. I’ll explain the misinterpretations before detailing how they tripped up the Catholic scientists.

1. The Catholic Church made the mistake of taking the Psalms literally. Psalms are poetry and poetry should never be taken literally, even if it is divinely inspired.
2. The Catholic Church failed to interpret Ecclesiastes 1:5 in the proper context:

   ^“5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
   And hastens to the place where it arose. “

   Ecclesiastes describes the writer’s experience of searching for life meaning in the physical world and not finding it until he looks beyond physical reality. Accordingly, much of Ecclesiastes describes the author’s experiences and perceptions. This particular verse describes the repetitive nature of author’s physical existence and is not meant to describe the physical movement of the Sun.

3. The Catholic Church applied the wrong meaning of “world” in its interpretion of 1 Chronicles 16:30:

   ³⁰ Tremble before Him, all the earth.
   The world also is firmly established,
   It shall not be moved.

   This verse isn’t describing the structure of the solar system. Instead, it is part of a longer passage proclaiming God’s sovereignty over all that he has created. Here, “world” doesn’t mean the Earth. “World” means the universe.

Humans are fallible, both in their scientific investigations and in their religious investigations. It only makes sense to try to isolate investigations from each other to prevent mistakes in one from causing mistakes in the other. Attempting to preserve consistency with misinterpretations of Scripture during the Galileo affair, Catholic scientists clung to scientific models that were inconsistent with the observed evidence. If they had erected a wall between their religious and scientific investigations, they would have made better progress towards learning the structure of the Sol system.

Lessons From the Galileo Affair, Teaser

Lessons From the Galileo Affair, Part 2 of 2