Galileo's Religion Versus the Church's Science? Rethinking the History of Science and Religion

Abstract

Galileo’s conflict with the Catholic Church is well recognized as a key episode in the history of physics and in the history of science and religion. This paper applies a new, historiographical approach to that specific episode. It advocates eliminating the words science and religion. The Church concluded that the plainest facts of human experience agreed perfectly with an omniscient God's revealed word to proclaim the earth at rest. Supported by the Bible, Galileo, God-like, linked the elegance of mathematics to truths about nature. The Church, in effect, resisted Galileo's claim to be able to think like God, instead listening to God himself – and paying close attention to what man himself observed. We can thus see that the phrase “Galileo's religion versus the Church's science” is as meaningful (or meaningless) as the usual designation “Galileo's science versus the Church's religion.”