Galileo's Children

Today is the feast of St. Robert Bellarmine. He had a famous meeting with Galileo in 1616 that was later popularized as "Galileo's first trial," but wasn't really a trial. There in reference to Galileo's heliocentricism, Bellarmine warned Galileo not to teach as definite what was still conjecture. It's notable that Galileo's "proofs" of the rotation of the Earth were questionable at best. For example, he claimed the single daily tide in the Mediterranean Sea (anomalous among Earth's oceans) supported his thesis. In reality, it would only be centuries later that real proofs like Foucault's pendulum and stellar parallax became available. So in this encounter Bellarmine correctly discerned the certainty of the propositions and was the better natural philosopher, that is, scientist.¹

One of the often-overlooked undercurrents of the case is that Galileo wasn't even a natural philosopher, formally. His title at Padua was Professor of Mathematics, not of the more exalted and substantial (Natural) Philosophy. Mathematics was regarded as inferior to philosophy because it failed to discuss real causes. And Galileo's status at the University was correspondingly inferior.

The fixation on mathematics and the inability to discern certainty is a besetting fault of modern science, and one source of the error of scientism, which places science above all other sources of knowledge. Our culture suffers tremendously because our "science" is not properly contextualized as being of an inferior level of certainty compared to many important truths of philosophy. It's not much of an exaggeration to observe that alongside his many great triumphs, Galileo also bequeathed his errors to us, his intellectual heirs.

May we have the courage to uphold the truth and to give science its proper respect. St. Robert Bellarmine, pray for us!

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Notes

1. The irony is that Galileo might at that time be called in some respects a better theologian than his true adversaries (Bellarmine was not really an adversary). In his 1615 "Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina," he adopted the wise statement, "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."