It's also worth pointing out that Galileo was also in a battle with another group of incumbents: the Aristotelian physicists at the universities.
These folks stirred up the hornets' nest somewhat deliberately. As he records it, they "hurled various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain arguments, and they made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly." They also manufactured "a shield for their fallacies out of the mantle of pretended religion and the authority of the Bible." It was they, together with local priests, who appear to have referred Galileo to the Inquisition in Rome.
Armp suggests Galileo trespassed into the realm of theology. But the division of science and theology wasn't well demarcated in that era.
Indeed, the church had a long tradition of buying into an Aristotelian model of the universe. It was not ready to accept that - if you believe in Biblical inerrancy - you have to relegate some of its teachings to a metaphorical state.
But this was just what Galileo argued. He said that there could not possibly be a schism between reason and faith. Nature was written in God's hand as surely as the text of scripture. Any interpretation of the Bible that contradicts nature must therefore be a misreading."
For "discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations."
And "the holy Bible can never speak untruth-whenever its true meaning is understood."
Employing Galileo's premise, this must be true. But then, how does one reconcile this with the contemporary certainties of church teaching?
Some of the arguments against him were rooted in science - as we understand it today. And some of the arguments against him were theological in nature. The evidence of the Bible was considered a viable source of cosmological truth. In places, the Bible says the sun is in motion, and so it was argued. It was impossible for Galileo not to address this sort of argument head on. But on a larger scale, the cosmology of Aristotle was bound together with the holistic theology of the church from the writings of Origen to Thomas Aquinas. It was an entangled ball of wool.
The professors of physics at the universities understood this. As did Galileo. But perhaps the papacy at first wished to avoid becoming embroiled in the cosmological argument. It wanted Galileo to accept the existing formulation that had been applied to Copernicus' theory: that heliocentrism is a mathematical construct which is subsidiary to cosmological and theological reality as defined in the Bible and Aristotle. Under that construct, the church could maintain the truth of its universal model, while scientists might continue to develop their ideas.
But Galileo was armed with a telescope. And his telescope showed that the assumptions of Aristotelian philosophy were false. The celestial realm was imperfect (the moon had mountains and craters). The moons of Jupiter orbited their planet and not earth. If the premises were false, the entire cosmological edifice of Aristotelian physics must also be spurious. Certainly, Galileo forced the church's hand. And helped split the scientific premise of objective scientific observation and evidence from the purposes of the church.
So I tend to agree that the church wasn't spoiling for a fight. But ultimately, it claimed and enforced the power of decision. Even if its response was mild by contemporary standards, ultimately its scientific premise of a theologically-defined universe was abandoned in favour of an empirical model.
That is, perhaps, until the difficulties of observation associated with hypotheses like string theory have emerged.
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