The challenge of sweeping points of view is a loss of rigorous thinking being overwhelmed by a dazzling array of statements that may or may not be immediately relevant.

I’ll give it a try and see if we move along faster.

Many years ago I had the same understanding of the Galileo affair that you present. But, over time I saw strong contradictions that did not cause me to doubt the history and instead I wondered what lead up to such bizarre church behavior. One such contradiction arose when developing a comprehensive theory of innovation. I had completed studies of Russian, Hindu and Western models of innovation / idea generation and thought that it completely covered the field. But then I came upon the ancient Muslim technology world and am still in the process of unearthing their fundamental methods to see if it is unique to the other three or a composite. All was well until I learned that prior to the year 1000 there was a high degree of collaboration between Roman Catholic, Jewish and Muslim scholars in studying the universe and especially through the sciences. Even the pope at the time had been trained at a “university� operated by all three faiths. Sometime thereafter murderous tensions grew between and within all three groups – but that is another topic.

What is clear is that much knowledge of the universe and philosophy flowed into Europe via Catholicism. It is the rigorous systematic theology of Roman Catholicism that gave birth to the sciences as we know it. Even cathedrals were oriented and designed to facilitate astonomical studies. Catholicism founded the university system and also promoted learning the sciences. But, the more I traced the evolution of thinking methods related to the sciences the more Galileo stuck out as an anomaly.

I then ran into some history that told a different story from the more popular rendition. By the time of Galileo many theologians had fully separated the physical sciences from the theological sciences except to say that theology is the “Queen of all Sciences�. By this they meant that the physical sciences helped one better understand the creator which is what theologians also attempt to do. By the time Galileo was stirring up trouble, late in his life, he had not been practicing science for some years. Instead he had jumped into theology. He was attempting to force the church to adopt his interpretation of some competing scientific thoughts on planetary motions and also to change their interpretation of the bible. Contemporary theologians commenting on Galileo’s tantrums expressed that theology does not depend on the sciences and biblical interpretation is also independent since the Book is not a compendium of science. Galileo continued to persist and he could get attention because he was so well respected by the Church hierarchy. But, he turned everyone against him when he made a fool of the pope in a publication. By the time of his trial he was an old frail man. He was offered an opportunity to recant, not his ideas of planetary motion, his theological interpretations. He refused. He, fairly, was convicted of teaching a hypothesis as a theory and was sentence, unfairly, to house arrest and to silence. Interestingly the Church encouraged the work of Copernicus and sheltered Kepler from persecution by the Calvinist.

Galileo also insisted that the planets moved in perfect circles since a circle is perfect therefore God could not have created an inferior design. The Jesuits had proof that the planetary motions were not perfect circles but Galileo could not accept the data. Bellarmine advised Galileo that it was OK to maintain Copernicanism as a hypothesis but there wasn’t sufficient proof for it to be a theory. (The meaning of theory was different back then.)

The Copernican revolution is not the realization of how planets moved, it is a new understanding of the nature of theory. If a hypothesis is consistent with the observed reality then the hypothesis is identical with truth. This was revolutionary and rather upsetting to the academics since it was a radical departure.

During his house arrest Galileo was housed at Church expense in a luxurious apartment overlooking the Vatican gardens along with personal attendants. He received this treatment because he was so well respected by Church officials. In an age where protestants and catholics were recently killing each other over theological hair splitting some feel Galileo got off pretty easily. The various universities continued teaching what Galileo thought but as one of several hypotheses and not as a theory.

Much of the myths surrounding the Galileo trial and the idea that Catholicism was opposed to science is likely a remnant of the Fog of War, the battle between various Christian faiths. What it has lead to the tyranny of science today. Anyone wanting to avoid looking foolish needs to assert that only that which can be seen and measured is reality and all else is some kind of primitive malarkey.

I recently was in an interesting conversation with a bible thumper and an atheist. Neither are very big on the meaning of words. I observed that the atheist believed in God but didn’t know it and that the bible thumper was most likely an atheist and certainly was offended when I sought to explain to him what he really was.

On the other side of the spectrum of our discussion in this forum are theological studies. One can approach this subject assuming there is a God. By training I take the other approach of observation and modeling that is essential to my livelihood. The tyranny of science is the constraint placed on the type of allowable models. This constraint is asymmetrically applied in banishing any thought of a higher order of being if it cannot be directly measured and observed. The asymmetry is glaringly obvious to someone like me since much of my work subject cannot be directly measured or observed.

For instance, the pope in the early 70’s invited all spiritualties globally to send a representative, who is considered a proficient, to a convention in Assisi. One surprising result was that the spiritual experiences were pretty much the same the world over. The explanations and “theologies’ (note that many do not have a deity) were radically different but the outcomes were the same.

In another instance scientist studying the pure primitives, those who were not in a civilized structure of mutual dependence, noticed that all of them held the same moral values. These pure primitives were on different continents and separated by time and distance. Some were current and others have since gone extinct or were assimilated long ago. Their names for these moral values and their explanations of the origin of the world varied. They all held to the idea of a life after death.

It is known that civilized man, even crudely civilized, gave rise to religions that sought to control unknown forces and thereby increase the wealth or comfort of the practitioners. Some of these primitive religions were quite violent. And, as we all should know, it seems that all surviving religions have had a hard time of letting go of violence. To me this is more attributable to the nature of human beings and not the nature of religion. Human are quite violent for many reasons including soccer.

My own observation is that the underlying force of religion, spirituality, is also consistent across all cultures. By consistent I mean that the same underlying rules for living exists everywhere. People are fundamentally good (including Muslims). There are distortions and atrocities but these are momentary aberrations. This consistency allows the creation of a model, consistent with my methods of doing the physical sciences, and this model has predictive qualities in that the outcomes are statistically significant. There may be other more robust models and I am receptive to the notion. Those tyrannized by false concepts of science are too intimidated to even consider such models.

The above is just a tour of my mind. Even my wife struggles with some of the notions above and prefers to discuss physics rather than philosophy.