[joelg]

my understanding (which is definitely not exhaustive!) is that the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced than is popularly retold, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still.

Paul Feyerabend has a book called Against Method in which he essentially argues that it was the Catholic Church who was following the classical "scientific method" of weighing evidence between theories, and Galileo's hypothesis was rationally judged to be inferior to the existing models. Very fun read.

[marcofloriano]

I completely agree with your comment. The common narrative about Galileo and the Church is often oversimplified and overlooks the intellectual context of the time. As you pointed out, it wasn’t about a crude Biblical literalism—after all, even centuries before Galileo, figures like Saint Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, already accepted that the Earth is spherical.

By Galileo’s era, the Catholic Church was well aware of this scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and natural philosophy. The dispute was far more about competing models and the standards of evidence required, not a refusal to accept reason or observation.

Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?

[ajkjk]

> Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?

That seems pretty unfair. The article is clearly structured to treat the Galileo thing as an example, not a premise. It is supposed to be a familiar case to consider before going into unfamiliar ones. In that sense it clearly still works as an example even if it's false: does it not set you up to think about the general problem, even if it's a fictional anecdote? It's no different than using some observation about Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter as an example before setting into a point. The fact that it's fictional doesn't affect its illustrative merits.

[carbonguy]

> The fact that it's fictional doesn't affect its illustrative merits.

Indeed, it may even reinforce the overall argument being made in the post we're discussing; the "Galileo vs. Catholicism" narrative is itself a linchpin trope in an empirical scientific worldview, with the trope reinforcing (among other beliefs) that "it's right and proper to pursue and advocate for objective truth even to the extent of making enemies of the most powerful."

Considering the likely audience for a piece like this post we're discussing, that the Galileo narrative doesn't necessarily reflect what actually happened historically makes it a pretty good example on a meta-level. Are any of us who have the belief in the ultimate value of objectivity going to give up on it because a potentially weak example was used to support it?

[marcofloriano]

Indeed, thanks for pointing out. I tried to edit my comment, but it's not possible anymore.

[psychoslave]

Galileo started the troll himself depicting the opponent theory in the mouth of Simplicius.

And even with its acquaintances with the pope, he finished jailed at home. Far better than being burned alive like the Church did with Giordano Bruno.

So, yes, they are more nuances to the affair, but the case around lack of observable parallax or other indeed judicious reasoning is not going to create a great narrative to sell on the one hand, and on the other hand focusing on technical details is kind of missing the forest for the tree of what where the social issues at stake the trial examplified.

[SkyBelow]

Was it during Galileo's era or was it a much earlier time with Greek philosophers when the idea of heliocentrism was rejected because the lack of parallax movement of the stars? The idea of stars being so far away they wouldn't show parallax movement wasn't acceptable without stronger evidence than what was available at the time, given how massive that would make outer space, so the simpler explanation was that the sun moved.

[rcxdude]

Earlier, for the most part. There was a fairly well known set of standard objections. A lot of the others were to do with the implications of the earth rotating, like the fact that things seem to fall straight down (not quite, but it was only after Galileo's death that someone managed to demonstrate this clearly, and not for lack of trying), and that you don't get a huge wind generated by the rotation (it does affect the winds, but you need a far more sophisticated framework for understanding motion that only really started to take shape with Newton to put this together). The star parallax thing was further complicated by an quirk of optics, which is that stars don't appear to be perfect point objects, they (to the naked eye and to telescopes) do have some apparent diameter, and that diameter implied that if they were far away enough to not have parallax, not only would the universe need to be much bigger, the stars themselves would need to be huge, many times the size of the solar system.

It also didn't help that Galileo's model was still incorrect and inelegant, due to the insistence on circles and epicycles. It actually needed more cycles to explain than the geocentric version of the model! It was Kepler that actually got things right and elegant by allowing orbits to be ellipses.

(As an aside, there's one exchange of letters between Galileo and a bigwig member of the church, where amusingly, to modern observers, the church guy was more correct about the astronomy and Galileo was more correct on the theology!)

[antognini]

This is a really good overview. However:

> It actually needed more cycles to explain than the geocentric version of the model!

This part is not true. The main advantage of Copernicus's model was that it reduced the number of epicycles needed. In the Ptolemaic system every planet (except the Moon and Sun) required an epicycle with a period of one year, which we now know was needed in order to account for the relative motion of the Earth on its own orbit. In a heliocentric system these epicycles could be eliminated. Copernicus presented his model more in terms of it requiring fewer calculations.

[rcxdude]

The Ptolemaic system was already not particularly favored and was well and truly killed in Gallileo's time (in part by his observations). The competition was Tycho Brahe's model, in which the sun revolves around the earth but the planets revolve around the sun. They for the most part make identical predictions as far as astronomical observations, but Brahe's was very slightly simpler and didn't cause the other objections.

[Asraelite]

> By Galileo’s era, the Catholic Church was well aware of this scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and natural philosophy.

I'm confused. Are you saying that the Church knew the Earth was round or not? If they knew, then it doesn't matter what arguments were made, it was all in bad faith and therefore wasn't scientific.

EDIT: Never mind, I misread

[mcswell]

The sphericity of the Earth was not what Galileo and the Church were arguing about--they were arguing about whether the Sun revolved around the Earth, or the Earth around the Sun.

[mike_hearn]

The idea that people used to think the Earth was flat is a common misconception. Sometimes medieval painters would draw the Earth that way for artistic purposes, but nobody seriously thought it worked that way for real.

Why not? It's obvious to anyone who watched a ship sail over the horizon that the Earth must be a sphere because you see the body of the ship disappear before its sail mast does.

[looperhacks]

The church knew that the earth was round. Which is largely irrelevant, because Galileo argued for a heliocentric model vs the (at the time popular) geocentric model. Nobody argued that the earth was round

[kijin]

The author doesn't use the Galileo episode as a premise, only as a catchy illustration. If anything, the more nuanced version of the story seems to support their argument better than the simplified version does.

[ajuc]

> Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?

Same way Galileo could be correct about Earth circling the Sun despite basing it on incorrect assumptions :)

[libraryofbabel]

> the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced than is popularly retold

Ex historian here. This is true. It’s a complicated episode and its interpretation is made more murky by generations of people trying to use it to make a particular rhetorical point. Paul Feyerabend is guilty of this too, although he’s at least being very original in the contrarian philosophy of science he’s using it for.

If anyone is interested in the episode for its own sake (which is rare actually, unless you’re a renaissance history buff first and foremost), I’d probably recommend John Heilbron’s biography which has a pretty balanced take on the whole thing.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Does Feyerabend explain why Galileo was placed under house arrest?

Perhaps I'm missing some nuance here, but I don't see why a rational argument about competing models would require such drastic suppression.

[opo]

I have always thought the lesson here is to be careful when insulting those with a great deal of power over you. Pope Urban VIII was originally a patron and supporter of Galileo:

>...Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name "Simplicio" in Italian also had the connotation of "simpleton."[55] Authors Langford and Stillman Drake asserted that Simplicio was modeled on philosophers Lodovico delle Colombe and Cesare Cremonini. Pope Urban demanded that his own arguments be included in the book, which resulted in Galileo putting them in the mouth of Simplicio. Some months after the book's publication, Pope Urban VIII banned its sale and had its text submitted for examination by a special commission

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

[PhasmaFelis]

It wasn't his theory, it was that he presented it in the form of a dialogue with a character who was an obvious stand-in for the Pope, and then made that character sound like a complete idiot.

The heresy charges were an excuse to punish him for being disrespectful. He'd gotten approval from the Pope to publish; he would have been fine if he'd just been polite.

Obviously that's still petty and unjustified, but science denial wasn't the real reason for it.

[akurtzhs]

He indirectly called the Pope a simpleton, and the Pope took offense.

[rcxdude]

The Catholic Church was quite tyrannical about opining on matters of theology. Heliocentrism vs Geocentrism, which discussed in terms of whether it's really true or not (as opposed to merely an interesting mathematical model), was considered to be this. That didn't mean that the church was unwilling to discuss it, but that they wanted the public discourse to be controlled to avoid it seeming to conflict with their domain, at least until they could be convinced (and Galileo's main problem is that he could convince very few people inside and outside the church, due to lack of available evidence) and change their official line themselves.

The other problem for Galileo was that he did basically just piss off a bunch of people (he was, by all accounts, very good at publicly dunking on people, whether they were right or wrong. He'd be a natural on modern social media). There was a large group who basically started conspiring against him, trying to implicate him in going against the church, and then his book (which was 'approved' through a very chaotic, almost comical sequence of bad timings and missed communication) managed to insult and piss off the Pope, who was previously a very close friend.

So, ultimately the broad thrust of the situation is not changed: the church was ultimately wrong and unreasonable in their demands, and Galileo was ultimately correct in rejecting Geocentrism, but the church was more reasonable than generally implied in the simplified telling, and Galileo was a lot less correct, and especially lacked good rational arguments and evidence for his specific model.

[veqq]

> why Galileo was placed under house arrest

Galileo's friend Barberini became Pope and asked Galileo to write a book. But Barberini became paranoid about conspiracies and thought it had seditious, secretly-critical undertones.

[legitster]

I just recently watched a lecture about this and was fascinated.

Specifically, the (incorrect) model of the universe that was used in Europe at the time had been refined to the point that it was absurdly accurate. Even had they adopted a heliocentric model, there would have been no direct benefit for for a long, long time. If anything, Galileo's work was rife with errors and mathematical problems that would have taken a lot of work to figure out.

So the argument was to take on a bunch of technical debt and switching costs for almost no benefits.

[kijin]

Regardless of what the standards of evidence were at the time, it surely wasn't "scientific" to threaten someone with prosecution for publishing a supposedly inferior hypothesis. That was politics.

Speaking of politics, the Reformation happened with nearly perfect timing and several countries became safe havens for those who had disagreements with the Catholic Church. This window of safety helped incubate modern science during its critical early years. Less than 50 years after Gelileo died, Newton published Principia. By then it was already well accepted, at least in England, that the Earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around.

[PhasmaFelis]

Absolutely agree that it was politics, not science, but it wasn't really anti-science either. In a nutshell, his theory was fine on its own; he was punished for insulting the Pope.

[teabee89]

Reminds me of the Galileo podcast series in the Opinionated History of Mathematics by Viktor Blasjo: https://intellectualmathematics.com/opinionated-history-of-m...

[wahern]

> and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still.

The church is and was a large, often heterogenous institution. For some the issue was about conflict with literal interpretations of the bible, not merely the predominate allegorical interpretations (a more widely held concern, at least as a pedagogic matter). AFAIU, while the pope wasn't of this mind, some of the clerics tapped to investigate were. See, e.g., the 1616 Consultant's Report,

> All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology.

https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/sacred-space-astronomy/in...

[isleyaardvark]

Galileo had a trial 20 years before the second, more famous one, where he was banned from promoting Copernican ideas, and Copernican books in general were banned by the Inquisition and by papal order. But because 20 years later he insulted the Pope that was protecting him from being arrested, some people act like that means it had nothing to do with Heliocentrism.

[throwawayffffas]

The important thing is not why they thought they were right but the fact they could not tolerate being wrong, or even tolerate dissidence on that one little inconsequential thing.

That's why you have people today pushing for flat earth and creationism.

Because their whole shtick is we are always right about absolutely everything.

[jajko]

To be honest, I don't ever saw the reason to make him some sort of almost-martyr. People were wrong and fighting for a good cause many times in history, stuff is always way more complex than surface glance reveals.

The moral of the story isn't how great he was, but how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent (which itself was a highly political process) and how ridiculous it was that they had any sort of power over whole society. And power they had, and rarely used it for some greater good.

[zahlman]

> To be honest, I don't ever saw the reason to make him some sort of almost-martyr.

I think the best reason is what you already describe:

> how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent

[SoftTalker]

> how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent

Cancel culture of the time.

[wolvesechoes]

> but how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent

I mean, he was put under a house arrest. Many nobles would make his life far more unpleasant if he would present them as he did present pope.

[jack_h]

As I’ve grown older and witnessed history in action I’ve begun to understand that reality is much, much more complicated than the simple narratives of history we lean on as a society.

Just think of how many different competing narratives are currently in existence surrounding this tumultuous point in history and realize that at some point some of these narratives will become dominant. Over time as the events leave social memory the key conclusions will likely be remembered but a lot of the reasoning behind them will not. As it exits living memory most of the nuance and context is lost. Over time we may change the narrative by reconsidering aspects that were forgotten, recontextualizing events based on modern concepts and concerns, misunderstanding what happened, or even surreptitiously “modifying” what happened for political ends. Or to put it more plainly, history is written by the victors and can be rewritten as time goes on and the victors change.

[staph]

Thanks for the book recommendation! I wasn't there for the Galileo spat, so I can't be certain, but I always appreciate more reading.

[gowld]

https://www.amazon.com/Galileo-Was-Wrong-Church-Right/dp/097...

Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right CD-ROM – September 1, 2007 by Robert A. Sungenis (Author), Robert J. Bennett (Author)

[Uehreka]

> Robert A. Sungenis

I wish Hacker News would let me use emojis so I could put three red sirens after this man’s name.

Sungenis isn’t a good-faith investigator trying to shed light on nuances around Galileo’s argument. He’s a tradcath (old-school Catholic who rejects Vatican II) hack who wants to cast shadows on Galileo from as many directions as possible in the hopes that he can soften people up on the idea of Geocentrism. His approach is very cautious and incremental and relies a lot on innuendo; he makes it difficult to really pin him down on the things I just said about him. But if you look up the things this guy’s written and the kinds of people he hires to “write the dirty work” when necessary, it’s pretty clear what his project is.

Edit: I will note that I am not familiar with Paul Feyerabend and the book mentioned in the top comment, it’s totally possible that those are from a different school of thought more interested in good faith discussion about the scientific method (or not, I don’t know). I would just advise taking any “turns out” argument about Galileo and the Church with huge grains of salt, given that this topic attracts some very slippery people with ulterior motives who intentionally appeal to contrarians like many of us on this site.

[maxbond]

> I will note that I am not familiar with Paul Feyerabend and the book mentioned in the top comment, it’s totally possible that those are from a different school of thought more interested in good faith discussion about the scientific method

I haven't read Against Method yet, but my understanding is that Feyeraband's point is that the scientific process, as it is actually practiced, is a lot less sterile than is generally described. He argues it involves a lot of ad-hoc hypothesis and unjustified intuitive leaps. He's not saying the Church was right to believe in Geocentrism, he's saying that strict adherence to a particular methodology is neither desirable nor how science is actually practiced.

The tagline is "anything goes," as in any methodology may or may not be useful in creating knowledge, and it's utility is subject to change. So we can't rule any of them in or out and must constantly test them against reality.

[Bluestein]

> the hopes that he can soften people up on the idea of Geocentrism

He's actually trying to sell Geocentrism, you mean?

[Uehreka]

Yes, he’s a magisterial fundamentalist. He views the idea of a non-Geocentric cosmos as destabilizing to the (to him) necessary hierarchies of nature, man and society ordained in the Bible according to traditionalist readings. But unlike a lot of fundamentalists, he’s good at “hiding his power level” enough to occasionally sneak into more serious conversations, and he’s patient enough to stick to a more incrementalist approach to changing people’s minds (instead of constantly yelling about people being damned if they don’t listen to him). He’s a bad and dangerous dude.

Dan Olson did a great job breaking down Sungenis’ film “The Principle” back in 2020, this Folding Ideas video is a great watch: https://youtu.be/icwDF8wRgF4

[Bluestein]

(Have got to say the video is interesting, if, a bit frightening ...)

PS. "Drake's Imbecility Corollary: Aliens have not found us given how they decided to occupy increasingly non-scientific positions, for effect, being now sufficiently developmentally degraded so as to make contact imposible".-

[spiritplumber]

yep.

[Bluestein]

As in, in earnest? Or click-rage bait style?

(I guess at some point you start arguing "I guess none of us have been out there to know better ...

... so it's all a hoax". A millenary hoax -

[rcxdude]

That title is ultimately swinging too far the other way. Galileo was a lot less correct than commonly assumed, and the church was more reasonable, but the church was still wrong in the end, both factually and morally for the level of control over the discussion which they wielded.

[ceejayoz]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sungenis

> Robert A. Sungenis (born c. 1955) is an American Catholic apologist and advocate of the pseudoscientific belief that the Earth is the center of the universe. He has made statements about Jews and Judaism which have been criticized as being antisemitic, which he denies. Sungenis is a member of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, a Catholic Young Earth creationist group.

[polynomial]

Persevered through the article and comments in hopes someone would point this out.