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Comment by NoSalt | Hacker News Reader

They have come a long way since convicting Galileo of "a strong suspicion of heresy".

This is an unfortunate piece of propaganda popularized by foes of the Church. Its stickiness is partly due to its role as a founding myth of the "faith as enemy of science" mythology which tries to reverse the facts by arrogating rationality and science onto itself and presents the Catholic Church as the great mythic foe of darkness from which science was liberated.

On the contrary, it is in the bosom of the Church that intellectual life flourished in Europe. Scholastic thought brought to fruition a degree of rigorous thinking unseen before. It worked out the intellectual foundations that made modern science possible. As Stanley Jaki argues, despite the obvious ingenuity of various ancient cultures and civilizations, science never really took off anywhere else to become a sustained enterprise. This is not a coincidence, but a result of worldview and beliefs about the nature of reality, the possibility of knowledge, and the point of human existence. If you believe reality is fickle and unintelligible, if you believe life runs in circles and leads nowhere, you will have little motivation to pursue science.

Where Galileo is concerned, the whole affair was hardly a matter of science. Galileo was notoriously cantankerous, and it was his habit of insulting and assaulting public figures (which included some who were his friends) that landed him in hot water. (Public insults were his way of responding to people who either disagreed with his unproven claims, ones he pushed aggressively, or tried to explain to him that he had not actually demonstrated his claims.) Heliocentrism was not heretical, so there was no possible doctrinal basis for accusing him of heresy. And the penalty was that an old man was put under house arrest in a comfy apartment overlooking the Vatican gardens. Whatever you might say about the justice of the penalty, given the norms of the day (witch hunts in Northern Europe anyone?), this was relatively mild, and nothing to do with "science".

> This is an unfortunate piece of propaganda popularized by foes of the Church

As is/was at least in part, with the Inquisition's tools:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_maiden

Okay the Inquisition doubtless tortured some folks but you picked the worst example to make your point-

> Despite its reputation as a medieval instrument of torture, there is no evidence of the existence of iron maidens before the 19th century.

I think you misunderstood OP- I think he's saying that there was propaganda across the board, including both treatment of people like Gallileo, and also including techniques such as the iron maiden.

I take his point to be precisely that the iron maiden wasn't really used.

> Galileo was notoriously cantankerous, and it was his habit of insulting and assaulting public figures <...> that landed him in hot water.

That is very well put. On the topic of his punishment, I must say, you seriously downplayed it, but it really must be emphasized just how much he brought it onto himself. It's not even that there was "no possible doctrinal basis", but the Church was very purposefully evasive about this, trying to keep its official position somewhat neutral, and it was Galileo who really insisted on starting a process he wasn't going to win.

And you really don't have to dig deep to understand why — simply reading his "The Assayer" by any somewhat socially-aware adult must be enough to get what was the issue with Galileo. The man really knew no chill.

His trial was the result of a filing error. They found a draft copy of a document prohibiting him from publishing certain things, and it wasn't until after the trial started that they realized it had never gone into effect.

Galileo's treatment by the Church was abominable, but it's often forgotten that the Church not only drew the lines of permissible thought, but also served as the primary vehicle for advancing and enabling the life of the mind through its patronage of the university system. It was not merely an oppressor, nor just a benevolent enabler; it was somehow both.

When the church stopped being the arbiter of permissible thought, other arbiters rushed in to fill the void -- such is human nature. The question is not whether such institutions exist in society, but who they are at present.

FWIW, The Vatican Observatory had an interesting podcast series discussing the "real story" of the Church v. Galileo:

Pt 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BNHHy5etQc

Pt 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FYYB9kqkE4

Well, science came a long way in general. There were a number of objections to Galileo's ideas that were not religiously motivated.

See The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown, in 9 parts, a must read!

Part 1: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

Part 2: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

Part 3: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

Part 4: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

Part 5: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

Part 6: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/6-great-ptolemaic-smackd...

Part 7: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/7-great-ptolemaic-smackd...

Part 8: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/8-great-ptolemaic-smackd...

Part 9: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackd...

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