Debunking Old Myths

Galileo was right after all, the headlines blared a few months ago.

The news reports announced that the Roman Catholic Church officially revoked its condemnation of Galileo, imposed more than three centuries ago. Pope John Paul II admitted that the Church made a tragic mistake in forcing Galileo to recant his conviction that the earth goes around the sun.

The story of Galileo has always provided rich fodder for critics of religion. They love to cite it as the textbook case of Christian hostility to science.

But the real story is not a simple tale of good guys versus bad guys. As Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton point out in their book The Soul of Science, the Pope who condemned Galileo was not opposed to his scientific ideas. In fact, he was once a member of a group of Galileo's supporters.

What really concerned the Pope was not Galileo's science but the way he used science to attack the philosophy taught by the Catholic Church, which it had adapted from Aristotle.

You see, Aristotle offered a comprehensive philosophy covering not only metaphysics and ethics but also biology, physics, and astronomy. But when Galileo built the first telescope and aimed it at the heavens, he discovered that Aristotle was dreadfully mistaken in his astronomy. For example, Aristotle taught that the sun was perfect, but Galileo discovered sunspots and other "imperfections."

Soon Galileo was attacking all of Aristotle's philosophy. He hoped to replace it with a new mechanistic philosophy that treated the world as a vast machine, operating solely by mathematical laws, with God as the Great Mechanic.

That's when Catholic authorities got worried. They saw clearly that Galileo was not just addressing scientific questions—that instead he was attacking Aristotelianism as an entire system. But Aristotle taught a classical view of ethics that many theologians appealed to in defending biblical ethics. They were afraid that Galileo's scathing attacks could destroy the moral basis for the social order.

It was this concern for morality and social order, not any hostility to science, that motivated the Catholic hierarchy to oppose Galileo. The conflict was not between religion and science per se, but between Christians holding different world views: the Aristotelian world view and the competing mechanistic world view.

The fact is that Christianity itself is not inherently hostile to science. If it were, we would be hard-pressed to explain why so many founders of modern science were Christians. Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton studied creation in order to glorify the Creator. Galileo himself insisted that his target was Aristotle only, not the Bible, in which he firmly believed.

It's time for Christians to stop being defensive about our history. Don't sit passively when you hear those old charges that Christianity is an enemy of science. Debunk that myth with a true account of history.

The history of science is largely a story of Christians debating how to understand God's relationship in the world. Whether it's Galileo on the Leaning Tower of Pisa or Newton with his apple, Western science is a rich history of Christians putting their faith into action.