Sixteen Yers Later Galileo Wrote His Famous

Dialogue On The Two Great World Systems Essay, Research Paper

Does the trial of Galileo indicate that the church was hostile to new ideas in science.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) proved to be the first dramatic example of conflict between science

and religion. Galileo introduced and correctly explained the idea- what is the acceleration of a

free falling object, by doing this he quashed the previous theories of his predecessor, Aristotle.

Aristotle came up with the theory that the weight of an object and the medium through which it

was moving determined the downward speed of the object. Galileo, after having carried out

numerous experiments concluded that in a vacuum, an object accelerated independent of its

weight. He proved this by rolling a ball down a ramp at different angles and calculated the

acceleration. He found that the rate of acceleration was constant, according to the equation:

a=v/t. Aristotle s thoughts tended to deal with the physical world we live in, Galileo on the other

hand was more concerned with an ideal world.

The modern age of science began in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus s book On

the revelation of the celestial orbs . A key feature of the new science was mathematical

reasoning and quantifiable observations. According to the Copernican model the planets and the

earth revolve around the sun, this is accurate although mathematically simpler. One of the

important changes taking place was that people began to view the earth as a mathematical

structure, relationships were quantative, not qualative as they had been for Aristotle. The

scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century owes a lot to maths. Galileo found additional

evidence to support the copernican theory, with a combination of theory and experiment, which

was essential to his study, this can also be traced back to Archimedes in Ancient Greece.

At first the church didn t take Copernicus s theory very seriously as astronomy and maths

didn t seem to have any significant philosophical or theological relevance although Copernicus s

book was dedicated to Pope Paul III and he received it gratefully. Copernicus still made use of

Ptolemy s cycles and epicycles and he also borrowed from Aristotle the idea that the planets

must move in circles because it is the only perfect form of motion. In reality copernicus s book

marked a change in human thought. Owen Barfield, in his book Saving the Appearances calls it

the real turning point in the history of science. It took place when copernicus began to think,

and others, like Kepler and Galileo , began to affirm that the heliocentric hypothesis not only

saved the appearances, but was physically true It was not simply a theory of the nature of

celestial movements that was feared but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely that , if a

hypothesis saves all the appearances , it is identical with the truth. Copernicus s book stated that

the earth was not at the centre of the universe with the sun revolving around it, this is

problematic for Christians who viewed the Aristotlian image of the earth at the centre as in the

bible the sun moves around the earth; Joshua 10:13

And the sun and moon stood still, till the people revenged themselves of their enemies. Is not

this written in the book of the just. So the sun stood still in the midst of the heaven, and hasted

not to go down the space of one day.

It took Copernicus four years to have the confidence to publish the book, he wasn t afraid about

how the church would react but how academics would view it. He was afraid because Aristotle s

work was highly praised whereas he was introducing a new, unproved system of cosmology

which apparently went against the teachings of the bible.

In 1609 telescopic observations of the skies were made by Galileo. After hearing about

the invention of a telescope in Holland he built one for himself and what he found were to have

major consequences for the Aristotelian cosmos. Using the telescope he saw that the sun is a

lump of rock like the earth, not a perfect sphere and he assumed that other planets are the same.

He also discovered that the planet of Jupiter had at least four satellites and the phases of Venus ,

meaning that Venus moves around the sun and not the earth. What he was actually saying was

that the earth is just an ordinary planet and that stars must be much further away, or you would

see the motion of the earth. Motion is trivial compared to the distance of the distance of the sun

to the nearest star and stars are so bright, like our own sun. The problem this posed was that the

earth seems to be insignificant physically as the universe is so big, so does this mean it is also insignificant spiritually.

Protestants found it very difficult to come to terms with Copernicus and the Catholic

church were resistant to change. During the seventeenth century there were many problems for

Christians coming to terms with these new discoveries. A leading Jesu

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