Science: Rehabilitating Galileo's Image

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Bellarmine cautioned Galileo that the new Copernican view of the heavens should be treated as no more than a hypothesis. For a while the scientist heeded that advice. But when an old friend, Maffeo Cardinal Barberini, became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Galileo felt confident enough to write his most controversial and, ultimately, self-ruinous work: Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems.

The book, written in the form of a conversation between three fictional characters, argued the relative merits of the Copernican universe and the older Ptolemaic system, which held that the sun and planets revolved around the earth.

Galileo made it plain that his sympathies were with the character upholding the Copernican view, a know-it-all who disdainfully dismissed his opponents. He made Ptolemy's advocate sound like a simpleton, even giving him the name Simplicio. Into Simplicio's mouth went some of the arguments made by Pope Urban against the Copernican world.

Convinced that the wily scientist had made a fool of him, Urban signaled the Inquisition to proceed against Galileo.

The tangled record is far from clear, but Galileo appears to have been found guilty on two charges: he had defied the order to treat the Copernican system only as a hypothesis and, in espousing that view, he was "vehemently suspect of heresy."

As John Paul once noted, the case created in the minds of many religious people doubts about the possibility of "fruitful harmony between science and faith, between church and the world." But arguing that such harmony can in fact exist, the Pope says that the church has now paid a suitable tribute to Galileo by accepting a major contention of the pioneering astronomer: that the Bible does not contain specific scientific truths, but speaks metaphorically about such events as the creation or the movement of the sun. As Galileo said, quoting a churchman of his day, "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach how to go to heaven and not how go the heavens." That is surely a credo any contemporary astronomer, indeed any 20th century scientist, can accept. —By Frederic Golden. Reported by Wilton Wynn/Rome