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Christianity
Remembering Galileo: The Church and Science
In 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial by the Roman Catholic Church. Galileo was an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, as well as a devout Catholic. He is best known for his development of heliocentric theory; the concept that the solar system revolves around the sun. Copernicus invented heliocentrism approximately one hundred years prior, but it was not widely accepted then. Even though we now recognize this theory as accurate, during Galileo’s lifetime it was both controversial and heretical.
According to anthropologist George Murdoch, every culture has had a framework for both religion and cosmology. Religion and cosmology each provide humans with a locus point for the world. Cosmology helps provide a reference for our physical world, the history of our origin, and has the potential to provide expectations for the evolution of our world in the future. Religion gives orientation for a realm beyond our physical reality, the purpose of our origin, and has the potential to provide hope for the evolution of our world in the future. In the seventeenth century, Galileo challenged the church’s established Aristotelian theology of cosmology by promoting Copernican heliocentrism. Religion and cosmology came into conflict through Galileo’s body of work.
