Galileo, a Catholic visionary scientist

Galileo, a Catholic visionary scientist


The drama of Galileo was not a battle of science against faith.
Galileo was the opposite of an atheist, and even an agnostic. It was a believing Catholic. He had an intelligent faith, and even prophetic.
Alain Noël May 21, 2009



Galileo, a Catholic visionary scientist

Galileo said that the scripture announced what was to say the twenty-first century scholars.

With a significant lead over his time, Galileo was evident that all the texts of the Bible should not be read in the same way. As for the relationship between science and Scripture, he planned according to the maxim of Cesare Baronius: "The Holy Spirit, the Bible teaches us how we're going to heaven, not how the heavens go.

Science and faith according to Galileo

There is in Galilee, the founder of modern physics, the philosophical intuitions take over the Church at Vatican II. But there is no connection between the ideas of Galileo and those that Angels & Demons attributed to the scientist, and his heirs (the replacement of faith by science, or dissolution of the divine in the scientist) ...

What Galileo actually said on this subject is quite something else he stated explicitly that the two truths of faith and science can never contradict each other, "Holy Scripture and the nature of the Word also doing Divine, the first as dictated by the Holy Spirit, the second as a very faithful executor of the orders of God. " [...]


Vatican II is not expressed otherwise. This sentence is of John Paul II, in his speech of November 10, 1979 at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. An academy, said he, "to which Galileo was somehow associated with the institution through which preceded the former which includes prominent scholars today."
We will recognize the allusion to the Lincei of the seventeenth century ...

If Galileo's Dialogue (1632) is a "war machine", to quote Alexander Koyré, this "war" is not against religion but against the shackles of cultural and scholastic philosophy. Straitjacket which Galileo and Lynx wanted to free themselves (as scientists) - and they wanted to free the Church (as a force for the future).
Do not fall into the anachronism!

The main pitfall to avoid, when studying the Galileo affair, is an anachronism, that is to say the case out of its context.
 It is not an attack on the Church against science, but a difficult maneuver European policy disguised as theological trial.

"Until there is no clear evidence of the truth of the Copernican system, it would impose unreasonable to suggest to our contemporaries," said Cardinal Bellarmine.

"Unreasonable", nothing more ... But that's what Galileo had set out to do, and the most radiant.
The Copernican system, in fact, was not proven in practice (and would not be anytime soon). Was it necessary to revolutionize the spirits to a hypothesis, whereas we already s'étripait for reasons of principle to the four corners of Europe? No, thought Bellarmine.

Was it wrong to ask Galileo called "hypothesis" this hypothesis ...? No more. And no modern scientist would do harm to the cardinal on this seventeenth century.

 Do not commit the anachronism of saying Galileo was right. We now know, but nobody in the seventeenth century could not be certain, and 2000 years of human thought (not including joint appearances) played against his theory.

At the same time, Kepler, which is the true founder of astronomy, attracted also by the hypothesis of Copernicus, was not worried so far, p ecause he has to stick to the strict scientific rigor awaiting experimental evidence.