In the wee hours of morning, a spectre rose up from the floor in a great, billowing cloud. It spoke.
I was once Galileo Galilei, philosopher of Florence. NCrissieB invited me to speak for you today. It is now 400 years since I published A Starry Messenger, the work that steered man away from pure reason and toward empirical science. And after all of that time, people still confuse the errant theories of man for those given by the hand of God. By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox. What makes one a scientist is not that his every utterance is of fact and not belief, but rather that he knows the difference.
Four hundred years ago, the earth stood still at the center of the universe. The heavens were perfect and held things worthy of God alone, and man was created in his image.
I ground lenses and built a powerful spyglass to look at the heavens. I stared at Jupiter each day for eight weeks, and saw heavenly bodies revolving around it. How could this be if the universe was revolving around earth? And the sky wasn't perfect. Our moon was covered with crags and divets.
The theologians thought my spyglass was lying.
The problem was not with their logic itself. It was using reason alone that led him astray. They formed a conclusion, gave it authority by God, and used it as an axiom. Like Aristotle, they believed they could understand the natural world without carefully observing it, and it lead them to error. It was Artistotle's conclusions that predetermined his results, not God. And I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages. If God meant for the bible to be an Astronomy text, why did he leave the Astronomy out? The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.
It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment. And people do this today. It is only when the cynical convolves with the stupid that Adam Smith's invisible hand is mistaken for the fate of God. That climate change is mistaken for nature's irritability. That schools teach cosmology based on what is written in the bible. When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state.
I lost that battle during my lifetime, and died having renounced my work. It wasn't my scientific analysis that lead to the Copernican Revolution. I changed the world by teaching people how to build a telescope. The people looked for themselves. My books were banned by the church, and teaching Copernican cosmology was forbidden, but eventually people used their own eyes. We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.
It was the telescope, not me, that lead to the Copernican Revolution. In spite of the fact that heresy was punished by death, Ptolmeic cosmology was on its ear in less than a century. Newton published his laws of gravitation in 1687 -- work that disproved any possibility of a geocentric universe.
During the 17th century, Science was a grassroots effort.
With hope for the future, Galileo's spirit evaporated into mist.
*Direct Galileo quotes are boldfaced and sourced here.