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Galileo's trial

Ian

Unregistered
I
I'm confused. There are some people on the internet claiming that the trail between Galileo and the Church never took place. What really happened?
 
Galileo's Trial

Do you think that in the time of Galileo, the Pope and others got confused when they mixed faith with science?
 
Galileo

And I think that you think that it was because the theologians got mixed up because of the knowledge that they had at the time that people say that Galileo had a trial.
 
At the time everyone thought that science was an aspect of faith. They were simply seeking to understand gods' creation. Any theory that contradicted the bible was therefore considered to be not only wrong, but actually heretical.

Galileo was tried by the inquisition for heresy and recanted his support for the Copernican system in order to avoid imprisonment and torture.
 
There's a lot of misinformation about this topic around the web. For example, some say he was tortured. He was not, but he was told it could happen. I think it was standard practice to inform people this was an option the church would use if it wanted.

Also, the trial was not an argument between Galileo and the church about whether the earth is the center of the universe or not. The inquisitors didn't get into astronomical arguments. It almost got down to breech of contract type trial. Years before, Galileo agreed not to write about the topic in any way, but he did. He got in trouble for this disobediance as much as his views.

It might have been a personal matter too. It seems the pope took Galileo's book as a personal insult. His book that got him in trouble had a character that was basically named "fool" who repeated words of the pope.

Also, there was sort of "election year" politics going on because the church was fighting the reformation (30 years war) and could not appear weak. Like most things, it's a complicated story that has been distilled down to something simple over the years.
 
It wasn't so much that he had agreed to not publish the info altogether, but rather that he wouldn't publish unless he had real evidence. At the time Galileo had some data but it wasn't ironclad. At the time the Church really wasn't the rabid dogmatist (at least regarding physical phenomena) that it has been portrayed to be. It was however keenly aware of the political repercussions of any challenge to the orthodoxy. This is why the Church made a deal with Galileo to give them some leeway for the spin campaign.
He published anyway, because he was so certain of the rightness of his theory. The Church was caught off-guard and, understandably a bit miffed, so they slapped him down.
 
uneasy said:
It might have been a personal matter too. It seems the pope took Galileo's book as a personal insult. His book that got him in trouble had a character that was basically named "fool" who repeated words of the pope.
Click to expand...
If it was a personal matter, did the pope indicate that it was a personal matter? When the pope disliked somebody personally, was a sloppy investigation undertaken to gather any information -- true or false-- that could be used against the person disliked by the pope?
 
wollery said:
At the time everyone thought that science was an aspect of faith. They were simply seeking to understand gods' creation. Any theory that contradicted the bible was therefore considered to be not only wrong, but actually heretical.
Click to expand...

I wonder when J.P.2 will admit the church was wrong about vacuums being possible.
 
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