Galileo Case

What Galileo Means For Atheists, Catholics, and Protestants in 2025
Gavin Ortlund | 31 March 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS4rjpaZKmA

How do you feel about the idea that the best proof text for Geocentrism is Romans 1?

You know, there are Catholics and even Protestants who haven't abandoned the historic reluctance for the position of Galileo.

I think Pope Michael I on occasion cited Gerardus Dingeman Bouw. Doctor in Astrophysics.

2:16 You are levying a heavy accusation against Pope Urban VIII.

He did not sit in judgement over Galileo. Among the assessors, one other Barberini, a relative of the Pope, did not vote.

If he was annoyed, he went to some length to assure the annoyance would not play into the judgement.

10:38 I think this is the second or third if probably not fourth time you call Galileo's attitude prior to 1633 "Augustinian" ... is your criterium for that the very overquoted "it sometimes happens" passage?

Because if you read book I of De Genesi ad Litteram libri XII, St. Augustine actually comes out very directly as a Geocentric.

7:30 Antipope Wojtyla was not just feeling sorry for how Galileo was treated, he also expressed, erroneously, that he was right.

19:50 For once, Luther is spot on.*

The result, chapter 10, verse 13, is given in narrative and could be phenomenological language.

But the immediate miraculous cause, Joshua's words after the prayer to God, we don't expect phenomenological language in the words working a miracle. We don't expect a miracle worker to say the words that someone else expect's them to say to adress what is involved in the result, but we expect them to say the words that are in fact things involved in the result. If Jesus tells a demon "go out of him" or "go out of her" we don't expect this to be a roundabout adress to a mental disease that's intrapersonal, we expect that another person, created thousands of years earlier, was interfering with the person (from the inside) and told to get out.

19:50 For once, Luther is spot on.

The result, chapter 10, verse 13, is given in narrative and could be phenomenological language.

But the immediate miraculous cause, Joshua's words after the prayer to God, we don't expect phenomenological language in the words working a miracle. We don't expect a miracle worker to say the words that someone else expect's them to say to adress what is involved in the result, but we expect them to say the words that are in fact things involved in the result. If Jesus tells a demon "go out of him" or "go out of her" we don't expect this to be a roundabout adress to a mental disease that's intrapersonal, we expect that another person, created thousands of years earlier, was interfering with the person (from the inside) and told to get out.

21:41 John Owen is actually doing Heliocentrism too much honour in pretending it "built on fallible phenomena" ... no, the phenomena Galileo observed were good, but Heliocentrism was not built on them. And Ptolemaic astronomy is not privileged over Tychonian in Scripture.

John Owen and John Calvin examplify two of the things I mistrust and at times (when too exposed) detest in some Protestants:

• granting the erring scientist that the phenomena support him, like a certain type of Creationist very far from Creation Science who would pretend that Dino bones if real would be a point in favour of Deep Time and Evolution, so they must be false;
• or pretending mad, demon possessed and monstruous someone disagreeing with them, like it seems some Protestants do about my relative support for the Inquisition (while it lasted) and my support for Inquisitors being right and Galileo being wrong.

23:23 Would you mind going a bit further?

Put yourself in their mindset, imagine one of them transported to the present and confronted with all the arguments of modern scientific establishment, BUT not having received this from childhood at home PLUS several times over in school.

What in the modern arguments would persuade them?

I have basically "St. Thomas looking over my shoulder" as I peruse the modern arguments. To me it's clear, if the Medieval and Ancient arguments are given a fair hearing, nothing can persuade anyone short of an Atheist of Heliocentrism. Or some very impersonal type of Pantheist, like a Spinozist or Hegelian. Also no Christian.

In the Middle Ages, one Nicolas Oresme, who ended up as bishop in Lisieux, which you may imagine many Catholics would consider a Holy Place, bc of St. Thérèse Martin or Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, before that, as a scholastic in Paris, gave an argument about Heliocentrism.

a) everything in it is theoretically possible
b) but it is totally superfluous, Geocentrism works just fine.

23:52 Where do you get it from that Heliocentrism was genuine scientific advance (or has become so since)?

Is it just a postulate to make the Galileo case this "cautionary tale"?

24:58 Is Augustinianism short for this overquoted and quotemined quotable quote "it sometimes happens that ..."?

25:26 Tycho Brahe would interpret these verses exactly as a Medieval Ptolemaic would.

You are suggesting that Scripture could say things that go beyond the immediate context verbally and still not really mean them.

26:33 I'm reading Scripture in the context of the Church that made Oresme a bishop and Galileo a suspect.

26:50 To us Catholics that would primarily be Haydock.

The commentary explicitly compatible with Heliocentrism is late:

92:1 This does not prove that the earth moves not on its own axis daily, and round the sun every year. (Berthier)

95:10 The Christian faith shall not be abolished, (Menochius) or corrected. (Haydock) --- "Faith is not to be reformed." (Tertullian)

103:5 The established order shall subsist, though the earth may move, Psalm ci. 27. (Berthier) --- It is fixed by its own gravity in the centre. (Worthington)

Worthington took the position of St. Thomas and held Aristotelic Gravity.

W. F. Berthier wrote in 1782, sorry, was published in the year of his death, namely 1782:

Guillaume-François Berthier, S.J.

One metaphoric sense goes against reforming the faith with modernity changing the meaning.

* "However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth."