Yes, Galileo and Copernicus were devout Christians. Though Galileo had problems with the inquisition, so did other Christians of the time. That conflict doesn't make him unique or non-Christian.
Nicholas Copernicus
Revolutionary astronomer
"[It is my] loving duty to seek the truth in all things, in so far as God has granted that to human reason."
"The two great turning points of the Reformation age, the Lutheran and the Copernican, seem to have brought mankind nothing but humiliation," wrote historian Heiko Oberman. "First man is robbed of his power over himself, and then he is pushed to the periphery of creation."
In contrast to Luther, however, Nicholas Copernicus was not one to make bold, public gesture; instead he spent his life in relative quiet, hesitant to publish his revolutionary views until his very last days. And yet Copernicus, as much as Luther, revolutionized how Europeans thought of themselves, their world, and their God.
Timeline
1453 Nicolas of Cusa invents concave lens
1456 Gutenberg produces first printed Bible
1472 Johannes Regiomontanus observes Halley's comet
1473 Nicholas Copernicus born
1543 Nicholas Copernicus dies
1545 Council of Trent begins
World-class scholar
Copernicus was born in Torun, in eastern Poland, where his father was an influential businessman. Copernicus studied first at the University of Cracow, where he first took an interest in astronomy ("most beautiful and most worth knowing," he said), and then moved on to the University of Bologna to study Greek, mathematics, and more astronomy. At Bologna he fell in with scholars who agreed that Aristotle's cosmology was too inelegant—in Copernicus's words "no sure scheme for the movements of the machinery of the world which has been built for us by the Best and Most Orderly Workman of all."
After a brief visit home to be installed as canon (a permanent salaried staff position in a cathedral), he returned to Italy to complete his doctorate of law and to study medicine at the University of Padua. In 1506 he returned to Poland, and though only in his early thirties, he was said to have mastered all the knowledge of the day in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and theology.
Astronomy as hobby
As a canon, he served as confidant and secretary to his uncle, the bishop, and as a physician to the poor. Though weighed down with administrative and medical duties, he found time to formulate his ideas on astronomy into a booklet he called his Little Commentary (1512). He was not treading popular ground, since medieval theologians had nearly made it a point of orthodoxy that the earth was the center of the solar system, proof that humankind was the center of God's attention. Copernicus knew that "as soon as certain people learn that … I attribute certain motions to the terrestrial globe [that is, that the earth moved around the sun], they will immediately shout to have me and my opinion hooted off the stage…." Still he considered it his "loving duty to seek the truth in all things, in so far as God has granted that to human reason."
In 1514 the pope asked if he could help revise the calendar. Copernicus replied that "the magnitude of the years and months … had not yet been measured with sufficient accuracy." But he took this as a personal challenge and turned his tower apartments into a night observatory. His daylight hours were spent on his official duties with the sick, in administration, and guiding the diocese through a war between the Teutonic Knights and the King of Poland.
Eventually Copernicus passed on his official responsibilities to younger men and settled into semi-retirement in his private observatory. This might have been the end of a full life had not a young Lutheran mathematician and disciple visited the old astronomer. Copernicus, invigorated by the encounter, finally agreed to publish theories he'd been developing for a lifetime. In his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543), he appealed to the pope to judge between him and the "idle talkers" who "although wholly ignorant of mathematics … distorting the sense of some passage in Holy Writ to suit their purpose … attack my work."
His work passed into the hands of the less courageous. His editor inserted an anonymous preface indicating that the work was a mathematical construct to better explain the motions of the planets, not a description of how the solar system actually worked.
Copernicus's ideas (though anticipated by some ancient astronomers, he discovered in his studies) were too much for contemporaries; even a revolutionary like Martin Luther found it impossible to believe the sun, not the earth, anchored the solar system.
It wasn't until Galileo (1564–1642) that Copernicus's ideas were seen for what they were—a revolution in how humankind conceived of itself. For some this implied that de-centered earth was an insignificant speck to a distant God; others, though, marveled that the creator of a now infinite universe would lavish such attention on a planet that seemed to stand at the periphery of all creation.
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Church vs. Galileo
From 131 Christians Everyone Should Know by Mark Galli and Ted Olsen.
Elesha Coffman
Galileo Galilei, though famous for his scientific achievements in astronomy, mathematics, and physics and infamous for his controversy with the church was, in fact, a devout Christian who saw not a divorce of religion and science but only a healthy marriage: "God is known by nature in his works, and by doctrine in his revealed word."
Galileo, who died this week in 1642, never got his university degree. He studied for four years and dropped out, then studied on his own for two years, living as a tutor and publishing solutions to complex problems. This brilliance got him the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa, where he immediately made enemies.
The "natural philosophers" of his day made their discoveries debating the works of Aristotle. Galileo believed in observing nature under controlled conditions and describing the results mathematically. This difference alone created friction, but Galileo humiliated his enemies with public demonstrations of their errors—for example, Galileo proved, contra Aristotle, that bodies of different weights would fall at the same velocity. His enemies ran him off in two years.
In 1609 Galileo heard of a device to make distant objects appear closer: a telescope. The applications of such an instrument were immediately obvious to him. He quickly put together a telescope and displayed it to the Venetian Senate, which was so impressed, it immediately doubled his salary. That winter he turned his telescope on the sky and made some astounding discoveries. In complete contravention of accepted beliefs, he saw that the moon was not a smooth sphere, that Jupiter had moons, and that Venus had phases, indicating it orbited the sun. He published a small pamphlet describing his observations in 1610. It made him world-famous.
At 46, after 20 years of quiet study, he was now in demand. Lured to Tuscany with a grand salary, Galileo abandoned his wife and put his daughters in a convent. He made a triumphant visit to Rome, where the papal court vied to do him honor. The head of church astronomers confirmed his discoveries and Jesuit astronomers jostled to look through the telescope.
But his academic enemies were not finished. They induced Dominican friars to preach on such texts as "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" and cast Galileo's views—especially his support of the Copernican discovery that the earth revolved around the sun—in the worst possible light. The feeling in Rome was that Copernicus's views would be more devastating to the church than those of Luther or Calvin. Pope Paul V ordered the Inquisition to look into the matter.
Galileo contended that proper interpretation of Scripture would agree with observed fact. The "Book of Nature," written in the language of mathematics would agree with the "Book of Scripture," written in the everyday language of the people. Besides, the "Bible teaches men how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go," and it would be "a terrible detriment for the souls if people found themselves convinced by proof of something that it was made then a sin to believe."
But the Inquisition ruled against him in 1616. This was not as unreasonable as it appears. His position flew in the face of common sense and 1,500 years of academics. It violated the accepted laws of physics. The star parallaxes demanded by this system could not be observed (and would not be until 1838). The Inquisition condemned the Copernican system and forbade Galileo from teaching it as fact.
But Galileo never gave up. When a friend was elected pope in 1623, Galileo went to see him, but Urban VIII would not lift the injunction for fear of undermining church authority. Galileo did obtain permission to write about "the systems of the world," both Ptolemaic and Copernican, as long as he discussed them noncommittally and came to the conclusion dictated to him in advance by the pontiff—that is, that man cannot presume to know how the world is really made because God could have brought about the same effects in ways unimagined by him, and he must not restrict God's omnipotence.
So Galileo embarked on his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632). As soon as it came out, with the full and complete imprimatur of the censors, it was greeted with applause and cries of praise from every part of Europe as a literary and philosophical masterpiece. But even though formally noncommittal, it clearly championed the Copernican system and featured a dull defender of Ptolemy in whom the pope saw too much of himself.
Galileo was called back before the Inquisition in 1633. A document was produced (later proved a forgery by historians) that said Galileo had promised not to write about the Copernican system whatsoever. The old fighter, now 70, was ordered to renounce publicly his teachings and submit to house arrest.
It wasn't until 1981 that the Catholic church ordered a commission to look into Galileo's case, and another 11 years before the commission acknowledged the "errors" of Galileo's judges.
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