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Whenever argument breaks out over science and religion, those who emphasize tension between the two almost inevitably turn to the story of Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church. But David Lindberg, professor emeritus in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin, says that people may not know the real story—and that this may be partly responsible for misconceptions about the relationship between faith and science.

Lindberg is the author of The Beginnings of Western Science. With Ronald L. Numbers, he is the coeditor of God and Nature, the forthcoming eight-volume Cambridge History of Science, and Battlefields of Science and Christianity Revisited: From Augustine to Intelligent Design.

Is Galileo's story a good example of the relationship between science and religion?

The Galileo case has been taken as symbolic of the relationship between science and the church. But it wasn't. In fact, the Galileo case was exceptional.

Many Christians have grown up with the idea that there was this terrible encounter in which the oppressive church stamped out science.

There is another view circulating within the Christian community. Namely, that Christianity provided fundamental assumptions without which modern science could never have occurred. This notion is that the human intellect was designed to be able to comprehend this nature that God had created.

I think both ideas are equally false and misleading.

The relationship between science and Christianity goes back to the beginning. The early church fathers found the Greek classical tradition, including Greek science, dangerous in a number of respects. It contradicts Scripture at a number of points, so there were skirmishes that continued through the Middle Ages.

At this time, there was a strong scientific movement at the centerpiece of the medieval university education. There were several occasions when scientific tradition and Christian theology attempted to occupy the same intellectual ground, and there was conflict.

There was also competition in addressing the same issue with different answers. These participants prefer peace to warfare, so they looked for means of accommodation and compromise, and they found them. In general, they found those means in either reconsidering their scientific view or reinterpreting the Bible. So, actually, a peaceful coexistence was worked out by these medieval scholars.

And they supported the idea that the sun revolves around the Earth?

Fundamental to the educational system of Europe was a description of the way the universe was arranged. This cosmology placed the Earth at the center—and the earth was a sphere. That was the view of Aristotle.

In 1543 Copernicus, who was not a Catholic priest as is often maintained, encountered an ancient idea of a heliocentric universe. He looks at this carefully and finds certain advantages in it.

Copernicus argues that the sun is, in fact, in the center and the Earth is a planet orbiting around it. Copernicus published that theory in 1543 but it was not widely accepted.

Galileo was learned in astronomical matters, but not a particularly good mathematician. There were two reasons he joined the fray over heliocentricism. One was the quest for patronage. Second, I also think the arguments that Copernicus had presented influenced him considerably.

What was happening within the church at this time?

Before Galileo came along, you could hold any view you wanted on a cosmological issue. Nothing could be less significant than that because the church had big problems. That was the tiniest of the tiny problems. The church had just lost half of Europe through the Protestant Reformation.

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47