Biographical audio-book

Transcript

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Four years after his second trip, Galileo decided that it was time to return to Rome. In the meanwhile, he had published a discourse on floating bodies and letters on the sunspots in which he argued that sunspots were some kind of clouds near the surface of the sun. This was a blow to arrest Italian ism and an argument in favor of a new cosmology. But Galileo did not want to travel to Rome merely to discuss astronomy. He had come to realize that what he had to do was defend himself against the accusation that what he taught went against Scripture. Galileo had become aware of the sensitivities of the ecclesiastical authorities. When he had submitted his letters on the sunspots, Toe obtained the license to print it. The Carvilles of the Senses forced successive revisions and brought Galileo into contact with the day to day running of the counter reformation. The book wants to have opened with a letter from Mark Valse ER, in which he quoted from Matthew 11 12 The Kingdom of Heaven's suffer violence and men of violence take it by force. The senses objected to the quotation because it might give the impression that astronomers wanted to conquer a domain that belonged to theologians. To allay these fears, the passage was paraphrased to read. Already, the minds of men assail the heavens on them, or Valiant conquered them. Although there was no significant change in content, the biblical passage had disappeared. In a second passage, Galileo had written that divine goodness had directed him to openly describe the Copernican system. The senses had him substitute favorable winds elsewhere. Galileo had called the mutability of the heavens not only false but erroneous and repugnant to the indubitable truth of Scripture, and he had attributed the new astronomy to divine inspiration. When the senses dim erred, he produced a new draft in which he called his own theory most agreeable to the indubitable truths of holy writ, and praised his predecessors for their subtlety in finding ways of reconciling biblical passages on the mutability of the heavens with the apparent evidence in favour of their in mutability. The tacit implication was that since theologians had long interpreted the texts to show their agreement with Aristotelian doctrine, they're already existed in the church, a non literal way of reading biblical passages on astronomy. The senses deemed the revision inadequate and demanded 1/3 version in which Galileo reluctantly excised all mention of Scripture. The attitudes of both the senses and Galileo are instructive. On the one hand, the Senses adamantly refused a layman the right to meddle with Scripture. On the other, Galileo was inclined to describe his point of view as divinely inspired and to brand that of his opponents as contrary to Scripture. The popular conception of Galileo is a martyr for freedom of Thought is an oversimplification. That his views were different from those of the majority of the academic establishment did not make him a liberal. He cherished the hope that the church would endorse his opinions and, with many of his contemporaries, looked to unenlightened Papacy as an effective instrument of scientific progress. But what Galileo does not seem to have understood is that the Catholic Church, attacked by Protestants for neglecting the Bible, found itself compelled in self defense toe harden its position, whatever appeared to contradict holy writ, had to be treated with the utmost caution