“Galileo,” by Mitch Stokes, is an eye-opening biography. Galileo, commonly assumed to be a warrior of science, is said to have stood up valiantly against the church’s hatred of such, and comes out the martyr. This is of course a sorely misrepresented picture of Galileo.
Galileo lived an era dominated by a pagan view of the cosmos, namely, the Aristotelian view. Such a view holds that the cosmos is divided into two sections: the imperfect, below-the-moon area, where moth and rust destroy and change occurs; and the perfect, that which is outside of the orbit of the moon and is immovable (other than the planets, the “wanderers”). And of course, the main characteristic of the Aristotelian model is geocentrism, the idea that the earth is the center of the universe. Galileo, however, was a proponent of the Copernican model of heliocentrism, but was not as dogmatic as many think in our day.
Stokes unveils the fact that Galileo was much more for the church than against it. Throughout his life, he clearly established that his view was simply a theory, and that he was in no way attempting to subvert the church’s authority or challenge church doctrine. In a very powerful letter near the end his life, Galileo states that “the falsity of the Copernican system must not on any account be doubted, especially by us Catholics, who have the irrefragable authority of Holy Scripture interpreted by the greatest masters of theology, whose agreement renders us certain of the stability of the earth and the mobility of the sun around it” (174). Now, this could be taken to be tongue-in-cheek, but we really have no reason to assume this the case, because it is in line with his approach to the subject throughout his life. Thanks to Thomas Nelson for the opportunity to review this great book.
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