The Copernican and Galilean Controversies
The Copernican and Galilean Controversies
The early modern period witnessed the first of several controversies in which scientific progress raised questions of theological importance. In this section, we shall consider the ideas developed by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), and how they sparked serious theological debates over the interpretation of the Bible.
The model of the universe that was most widely accepted during the early Middle Ages was devised by Claudius Ptolemy, an astronomer who worked in the Egyptian city of Alexandria during the first half of the second century. His model placed the earth at the center of the universe. Increasingly detailed and precise observation of the movement of the planets and stars during the Middle Ages caused increasing difficulties for this theory.
During the sixteenth century, the geocentric model of the solar system was gradually abandoned in favor of a heliocentric model, which depicted the sun as lying at its center. Copernicus's treatise On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (1543) presented the earth as one of a number of planets orbiting the sun. This “Copernican revolution” represented a radical departure from the existing model, and must be regarded as one of the most significant changes in the human perception of reality to have taken place in the past millennium. The church had become so used to interpreting Scripture from a geocentric perspective that it assumed that this was the explicit teaching of Scripture itself.
Fresh controversy broke out over the heliocentric model of the solar system in Italy during the early decades of the seventeenth century. Debate now centered on the views of Galileo Galilei, who mounted a major defense of the Copernican theory of the solar system. Galileo's views were initially received sympathetically within senior church circles.
Although the controversy centering on Galileo is often portrayed as science versus religion, or libertarianism versus authoritarianism, the real issue once more concerned the correct interpretation of the Bible. Galileo's critics argued that some biblical passages contradicted him. For example, they argued, Joshua 10: 12 spoke of the sun standing still at Joshua's command. Did not that prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was the sun which moved around the earth? Galileo countered by arguing that this was simply a common way of speaking. Joshua could not be expected to know the intricacies of modern celestial mechanics, and therefore used an “accommodated” way of speaking.
The official papal condemnation of Galileo's view was mainly based on the argument that the Bible was to be interpreted “according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and of learned theologians.” In other words, innovative interpretations of the Bible were wrong, by definition. The views of Galileo were therefore to be rejected as innovations, without any precedent in Christian thought.
This second point needs to be set against the long-standing and bitter debate between Protestantism and Catholicism over whether the former represented a heterodox innovation or a legitimate recovery of authentic Christianity. The idea of the unchangeability of the Catholic tradition became an integral element of Catholic polemic against Protestantism. As we noted earlier (p. 44), Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet had insisted that “the teaching of the church is always the same.” Novelty was a hallmark of heresy. And Galileo's interpretation of the Bible at this point seemed to represent an innovation.
The highly charged and politicized atmosphere at the time made it inevitable that Galileo's views would now meet with resistance. The key factor was that of theological innovation: to concede Galileo's interpretation of certain biblical passages would seriously undermine Catholic criticisms of Protestantism, which involved the assertion that Protestantism introduced new (and therefore erroneous) interpretations of certain biblical passages. Galileo had the misfortune to get caught up in the crossfire and undercurrents of this debate.
This debate is widely seen as marking the collision of religion and science, setting the scene for their “warfare” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is an over-interpretation of its significance. It is fundamentally about finding the right way of interpreting the Bible and about dealing with earlier interpretations of the Bible that reflect the cultural and scientific assumptions of their age, rather than the biblical text itself. We shall explore how some models of biblical interpretation enabled the views of both Copernicus and Galileo to be accommodated within mainstream Christianity later in this work (pp. 169–70).