It appears a devastating fact of history that the church took poor Galileo into a Vatican jail and beat him by ten for every public comment he’d made that the earth moved around the sun. It is such a devastating fact that every young person seems to know the tale like they know about Santa Claus. They’re not sure when or who told them the story; it’s just something they’ve always known. The problem is that just like Santa Claus, the tale of Galileo’s jailing and torture is make-believe. Galileo was never jailed, and not once beaten. He did find himself in some tense moments, and was indeed pushing the church into a new way of seeing the heavens above.[1] But never did Galileo see himself as anything other than a committed Catholic philosopher.[2] As a matter of fact, he gave one of his daughters to the church as a nun, and she devoted her life to prayer—particularly for her father.
Becoming a natural philosopher and arguably the first modern scientist was never the goal for young Galileo. His father was a music teacher and Galileo himself a skilled musician. His father had actually written a book about musical theory. Recently, studies have shown a connection between musical aptitude and skills in math. There seems to be some connection between the mysterious structure of music and the mathematical order of nature.[3] So looking back, it is not surprising that one of the greatest mathematical minds of the seventeenth century was the son of a musical theorist.
For Galileo’s family, money was an issue. When it became clear that the boy had an aptitude for numbers, he was encouraged to become a doctor. But like Luther, who just seventy-six years earlier had turned Europe on its head when he denied his father and became a monk instead of a lawyer, Galileo would deny his own father’s wishes and chose philosophy over medicine.
Galileo ended up both studying and teaching at the university in Pisa, the place where the tower leans. The story is that Galileo would climb that tower to drop things from it, intrigued by the speed of their descent. This is probably part of the fairy tale. It is true that Galileo thought a lot about dropping things from heights, and about motion more generally, but it was probably more of a thought experiment, like Einstein’s riding on a light beam, than an actual occurrence.[4]
Nevertheless, Galileo was out to show that the revered philosopher Aristotle was wrong. Poor Aristotle had not fared well of late. He had been rediscovered in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and with the help of Thomas Aquinas, his thought became the foundation of late-medieval theology. To be a Western Christian, in no small part, was to be in dialogue with Aristotle. Since the days of Aquinas, Aristotle was a rock star, but by the early 1500s his scientific brilliance was being questioned.
Luther, that crass monk in Germany, had already taken his shots at Aristotle, landing devastating blows using Paul’s epistles and justification by faith alone. But now one of the Catholic Church’s own was questioning Aristotle’s assertion that heavier items fall faster to earth because material always returns to its source. So because a rock is more densely bound to the ground than a feather, it will more quickly return to its source.
Yet, Galileo realized that this wasn’t accurate. A cannonball and feather actually drop at the same rate, his experiments showed; the pull to the earth affects them equally. The only difference, Galileo showed, was wind resistance. The pull of gravity was equally universal—and equations could prove it. Galileo’s point was that if a feather and cannonball were dropped in a vacuum they would fall at the same rate.[5] In a spooky symmetry of history, the very year Galileo died, a baby in England was born who would crack this code, showing the universal constant law of gravity. That baby was Isaac Newton.
Truth be told, Galileo never really liked Pisa, so when a chance came to move to the Republic of Venice and teach in the university at Padua, he jumped at the opportunity. It was not only a bigger and better university, but, more importantly to Galileo, it offered more money. His father had died, and Galileo’s only inheritance was debt. Padua promised more money and time to work on his calculations. But it also provided more freedom. As a republic it had its distance from the Vatican and the impositions of the pope. In Padua, Galileo could take his swings at Aristotle without much fear of repercussion.
Aristotle had asserted that the earth, and the heaven it sat in, were eternal. The earth was at the center and the stars, moon, and sun moved around it. To Galileo’s contemporaries, this seemed not only logical but also biblical. But a devout Christian from Poland named Nicolaus Copernicus followed Augustine, and he recognized that the scriptures must not be confused for a treatise on the natural world. The Bible speaks the truth with certainty about who God is and how God acts, but it is no cosmological textbook, and says little about the actual movements of the heavenly bodies. So this devoted Christian theorized that it was the sun, not the earth, that rested at the center of the universe.[6] That meant it is the earth that moves around the sun, and not the other way around—which Aristotle had believed.
After reading Copernicus’s book years after his death, Galileo was convinced, mainly because it fit so well with his own experiments and equations on motion. But it wasn’t actually Copernicus’s math that convinced Galileo; it was the person on Sasha’s T-shirt: Johannes Kepler, the same guy after whom NASA named the planet-hunter. He’d written his own book providing the mathematical backing for Copernicus’s theory. Kepler, a pious Lutheran, was teaching at a seminary when he wrote his book.[7] And when Galileo read it he was convinced that the earth was in orbit around the sun—and not in the circles that Copernicus had assumed, but in an oval-like movement.[8] This was just the conclusion of speculative equations until Galileo got his hands on a child’s toy.
The same year that Kepler’s book came out, Galileo got ahold of his first telescope. His first thoughts were not necessarily scientific. Rather, Galileo had “his mind on his money and his money on his mind.” Like a hip-hop artist, Galileo was a genius on the hustle. He was always looking for a way to up his salary and win more freedom for himself. In a republic like Venice, quick financial gain was possible, and Galileo had already sampled it when he had found a rudimentary way to calculate longitude. The implications for trade and defense were enough for this rich port city to pay. So when Galileo held a telescope for the first time, he saw possibilities no one else had before—both for proving Copernicus’s theory, but also, importantly, for making some quick cash.
Just as Steve Jobs didn’t create the personal computer but exponentially improved it, so Galileo didn’t invent the telescope but turned it into an important instrument. For about three hundred years before Galileo, people all over Europe had been making lenses for spectacles. But only recently had a Dutch lens maker put them into a tube. He imagined it as a plaything for children, a way to make a few coins at carnivals. But Galileo was not only an imaginative businessman with concern for design, use, and capital (Steve Jobs), but also a hands-on, dirty, technical engineer (Steve Wozniak).[9] Galileo realized that he could radically improve this tube, upping its magnification by twenty times, by grinding his own lenses. Soon enough he was standing on top of a building with all Venice’s important men, showing them boats at a distance that would need hours of travel before becoming visible to the naked eye. The military defense use was so clear that Galileo was now a secure man with an agreement to take a very high salary from the Republic for the rest of his life.
Galileo also had his own ideas of what to do with this tube, so one night he turned it on the moon and was the first human being to see it magnified.[10] There was so much more to see! Soon Galileo had discovered satellites (moons) around Jupiter. This observation, as well as others, along with more accurate calculations, proved that Copernicus was right. Galileo’s next move was to publish a book.
With literary flare, The Starry Messenger positioned Galileo as a space traveler, beaming himself across the heavens, describing his discoveries. Unlike Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon, Galileo’s vehicle of transportation was the telescope. Galileo was the first person to see himself as spaceman![11]
The book made Galileo’s name one of the greatest in all of Italy. Princes and bishops now called him a treasure. But, of course, at the same time that it intrigued people, it disturbed them. For instance, it had been assumed that the moon was a perfect sphere, flat and smooth like a marble. But when Galileo discovered its surface was rocky and pocked, people where thrown into cognitive dissonance. Many assumed that if there were mountains on the moon like here on earth, then surely it was logical to assume that there were moonmen—aliens![12]
Like Sasha, they wondered what the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (and the taking of the Eucharist) would mean if the moon were inhabited. What makes the Christian imagination able to produce scientific findings and geniuses like Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo is also what makes it susceptible to aliens. Because it is within creation, at a particular place in spacetime that God encounters us in Jesus Christ, we’re forced to ask, What happens if this location is relativized by the expanse of space? And if God comes to us in human form, what happens if intelligent life comes in many forms, like Tatooine’s Mos Eisley Cantina? At one level this makes sense; if the fullness of God takes on human form, then what does this have to do with aliens? But the particularity of the incarnation means that there is always identification and differentiation. Jesus lives as a Jewish man in the first century, so what does this have to do with a woman in Africa in the twenty-first? I’m not sure that alien encounters would undercut the Christian imagination of a personal universe, but rather, could witness to it. But we’ll have to explore this more below.
What seems clear, both today and in Galileo’s time, is that the possibility of life elsewhere is slim. Most of the infinite space beyond us is absent of, and even opposed to, life. Galileo saw it that way, telling his anxious readers, first, that he saw no clouds or water on the moon, therefore organic life was impossible. Plus, to add to the impossibility, the divergent temperatures were too great to support life. It was too hot when the sun hit it and far too cold when dark. Galileo was already pointing to a fact we’ll explore in the next chapter. Life is a tricky riddle that needs the most precise conditions to be sustained.[13]
This is exactly what the Kepler planet-hunter is searching for. It is looking for those odd planets that just may be at the right temperature to have water for life—and these planets are out there, making intelligent alien life possible. But as Trent had mentioned, there is a biological timing issue that makes it anything but a certainty. Not only do we need very finely tuned conditions for life, but also we need huge amounts of time to create the kind of intelligent life that could fashion civilizations, and invent communication technologies, and hyper-speed drives. It has taken our planet 4 billion years to do so, and only in the last 100,000 years (which is just a drop in the ocean of time on this planet) has there been intelligent life (and only 10,000 years of that has had civilization). Only in the last hundred years have we had the ability to send signals into space.[14] Not only would another planet need to have these very fine-tuned conditions to get life, but in turn, its evolving would have to match our own with enough harmony that we could make contact.
To play out the scenario, it is possible that on another planet intelligent life is now just creating basic writing, and by the time they’re ready for radio-wave communication (not to mention a spacecraft able to travel a million light-years), our civilization would have imploded as we face a mass extinction and ecological disaster. Or they could be ahead of us, and if not already extinct themselves, would have to be enlightened enough to avoid moral corruption or self-destruction and seek contact with other intelligent life in the universe as aggressively as we are. So, oddly, Martin’s concern for mass extinctions and Sasha’s questions about aliens are linked, most directly in their opposition (this shows that again science is no unified thing, but a loose container).[15] So, while the size of the universe and sheer numbers of planets moving around stars make it seem logical that just one other planet has intelligent life on it, the necessities of time and contact make this seem a very thin possibility.
Nevertheless, through Galileo’s telescope our vision was for the first time expanded to show the size of the universe and open to imagine aliens.[16] What shook Galileo’s readers, and shakes Sasha too, is how the existence of aliens would challenge the soteriological goal of faith. How would the incarnation, Eucharist, and forgiveness of sins work with extraterrestrials? Would it make faith’s soteriological goal meaningless? Yet, from within the epistemic goal of faith, the existence of aliens may give witness to how deep the personal (and even hypostatic) nature of the universe might be. If these aliens were the kind of personal beings who gave and received ministry (and the evolutionary theory of our species seems to assume that they would have to be to get the kind of shared-mind innovation necessary for advancement—these are what some theorists call the “ratchet effect”), then they too could reflect the image of the personal ministering God that is revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. To encounter aliens with personal faces, then, would point to the depth of a personal order, upending the assumption that our personal being is just an improbable oddity in a cold, impersonal existence.
And this is where Sasha is stuck. She is pulled in both directions. If there are aliens, she questions faith’s soteriological goal. But even if Jared or Trent can help her reconcile this, if she’s honest, her deeper issue is the divergent epistemic assertions of faith when it comes to space. She wonders if our personal minds are just a mishap of the universe (maybe even more so if there isn’t alien life). In other words, she wonders if it is possible that faith’s assertion that the universe is personal is only an illusion of our subjectivity. The more Jared talks with Sasha the more he realizes that Sasha’s issue isn’t really whether there are aliens, but how it is possible to see the mind of God and the importance of personhood in a universe where there are not only big infinites (galaxies, massive black holes, and supernovas) but also the smallest infinity (Higgs particles, dark matter, and quarks).
The myth of Galileo’s jailing seems believable because the ramifications of his telescope were profound. After Galileo, we are no longer at the center of the universe, and therefore we can question whether we are the center of attention at all. Galileo’s discoveries show that indeed space is massively larger than could be imagined. This profoundly starts us on the path of contemplating the actuality that these big and small infinites do indeed exist. And we are led to wrestle with how they witness (or not) to a personal God.
As Galileo’s star was rising in Italy, so was his trouble. The leaders of Venice realized that Galileo had not been completely truthful about the telescope—the hustler was exposed—but don’t hate the player, hate the game! Galileo had assured leaders of the Republic that he alone possessed the ability to make magnified lenses for the telescope. But soon others were figuring out his engineering trick. The cushy lifetime salary was stripped from him. With hurt feelings, Galileo decided to depart the Republic of Venice for his hometown of Florence. Many wondered why, and in retrospect, it may have been a bad decision.[17] The money and free time in Florence wasn’t much greater, and the freedom was much less. Venice was mostly free of papal power, but not Florence; it was deeply entrenched in Vatican oversight. However, the prince of Florence admired Galileo so deeply that an opportunity to head home as a court mathematician was too good to pass up.
As time passed, appreciation for Galileo only increased. He was invited on trips to Rome, to private audiences with the pope, toting along his telescope. But rumblings were starting. They came first within the Florence court itself, some wondering how this assumption that earth moved around the sun could fit with scripture. The book of Joshua says the sun, not the earth, stood still (Joshua 10). Maybe overestimating his own abilities, Galileo responded, committing himself to scripture on all matters but cosmological.
For most, this made sense. But the fracture that tore the Western church in two was still throbbing after the Protestant Reformation. Not only were many looking to protect the church from any new heresies, but they’d also taken it on the chin for not upholding the truth of scripture. So some, particularly the Dominicans, would be damned if they would allow a genius mathematician to speak about scripture and put the church further at risk.[18]
The heat was turned up on Galileo—it wasn’t just zealous Dominicans now, but also fellow philosophers. Galileo’s radical support for Copernicus, as we said above, opposed Aristotle. And there are few creatures more vindictive than scholars whose theories have been opposed. So when Galileo took on Aristotle, he was, in turn, taking on the philosophical establishment (and it would be his fellow philosophers, even more than clergy, that would make sure Galileo was silenced).[19] Historian John Hedley Brooke says it this way: “Galileo seems to have felt that his difficulties with the Catholic Church had their origin in the resentment of academic philosophers who had put pressure on ecclesiastical authorities to denounce him.”[20] These, particularly Jesuit, philosophers were not willing to stand by and let Aristotle be disparaged. And it is they who Galileo attacked (again, in retrospect, probably not a good move).[21]
But Galileo’s hubris may have been spurred forward by what he saw as a serendipitous occurrence. A bishop from Florence who admired and supported Galileo had been named pope.[22] It now seemed time for Galileo to publish his book in support of Copernicanism and silence those opposing philosophers. But what Galileo didn’t realize is that Pope Urban’s mantle of authority was now much heavier than when he was simply the bishop of Florence. Urban was now concerned about the political fallout of such a book.
During this time, all books needed the permission of the church to be published. Somewhat tentatively, Pope Urban agreed to Galileo’s pro-Copernicus book, with one stipulation: Galileo must be clear that Copernicanism and its belief that the earth moved around the sun was just a theory. At no point did the church ever suppress Galileo’s ideas. He was only asked to do the pope a favor by labeling them “speculative.”
But for whatever reason—probably because of competition with those Jesuit philosophers—Galileo refused, and the book appeared with a splash, asserting as fact that the earth moved around the sun. Pope Urban was furious. And while Galileo was given a cold shoulder and much unwelcome treatment on trips to Rome, he was neither jailed nor tortured.
However, Galileo was tried, and after bending a knee to church authority, he was given his verdict. It was decided that he would face no punishment but house arrest, returning to a country villa outside Florence. He was even free to go to mass and visit his mistress. The plagues that ravaged Italy made him feel more caged in than he was. But there was no restriction on visitors, and his daughter, the nun, visited him often. Galileo even gave her convent financial support (not the actions of someone furious with the church). No doubt the church is guilty for suppressing Galileo’s ideas for the good of their own political gain, but there is no truth in the rumors that Galileo was abused, or that Galileo, even in his exile, chose science over faith.
Never did Galileo see himself as anything other than a committed Catholic. It is a misunderstanding for Sasha and her friends to imagine that faith fears the size of the cosmos. The reason that the myth of Galileo’s imprisonment seems to stick is because it is from his legacy that we are forced to confront how infinitely big this universe is. Facing the infinity of space is no doubt a struggle for all minds to comprehend, but Galileo’s vision of its size never led him to be jailed or to personally give up his faith. Nevertheless, it leads many of our young people like Sasha to wonder, How can this big infinity of space allow us to still believe that the universe is bound in a personal order, minded by a personal God?
The scientific discovery of the big infinity of space no doubt raises this challenge for our young people. And within a few hundred years of Galileo, those following in his legacy would discover that the universe was not only infinitely big, but growing by the minute. It would be another man, a world away in California, who would reveal that, indeed, the seemingly infinitely big universe was expanding. He too, using a telescope, revealed Einstein’s greatest blunder. This man was Edwin Hubble.