Simple questions do not always have simple answers. "Didn't the church oppose Galileo?" is certainly one such question. Everyone "knows" the church opposed Galileo, but what does this mean?
Despite the complexity of Galileo's engagement with the church, there are several relevant facts that can be simply stated.
For one thing, every significant player in the Galileo affair was a committed Christian. This was no tale of a secular scientific community pitted against a backward, antiscientific church. The Roman Catholic Church provided greater patronage to astronomical study than did all other contemporary institutions combined.
That being said, straightforward readings of certain biblical passages (Gn 1; Jos 10:12; Pss 19:4-6; 93:1;104:5,19; Ec 1:4-5) suggest an earth-centered cosmology with the sun revolving about a stationary earth. By the early seventeenth century, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, such a plain interpretation of these passages was normative throughout Christendom. Moreover, both common sense and the weight of contemporary scientific opinion opposed the idea of the earth's motion.
Hence, any public defender of the Copernican (sun-centered) cosmology would have to overcome two difficult challenges. He would have to supply conclusive scientific evidence for the earth's motion and the sun's fixity-something that was not then available, even to Galileo. In addition, he would have to provide expert theological guidance to explain how properly to interpret those biblical texts that seemingly contradicted the Copernican hypothesis. Galileo was not a theologian. He was a mathematician and natural philosopher.
Galileo believed that he possessed proof of the Copernican hypothesis (in his theory of the tides), he was mistaken. His theory was seriously flawed. Overconfidence in the strength of his case led Galileo to tread out of his area of expertise and into the theological territory of biblical interpretation. As a layman, he overstepped his bounds by presuming to give guidance on reading the Bible.
What did the Roman Catholic Church do? It acted prudently and conservatively by upholding the received biblical and scientific opinion of the day. In 1616 the Theological Consultors of the Holy Office (advisers to the Pope) declared the Copernican theory heretical and foolish. Protestant leaders, such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, had expressed similar disapproval of Copernicanism.
In 1633,Galileo was judged to be "vehemently suspected of heresy" and sentenced to house arrest for defending the Copernican hypothesis. Of greater significance is the fact that the church never formally condemned the Copernican theory ex cathedra. That is, it never formally made opposition to Copernicanism an article of faith. Neither has any Protestant denomination done so. The Pope, his advisers, and other Christian leaders may have erred in their personal opinions on the matter, but all stopped short of asserting anti-Copernicanism an official doctrine of Christianity. Galileo was punished as a Christian layman for overstepping his bounds in a theological matter (biblical interpretation) that touched on a scientific question. In the end this was a religious dispute about biblical interpretation between Christians within the Roman Catholic Church.
Did the church oppose Galileo? Yes, it did. But that opposition was grounded in a careful attempt to preserve both Christian orthodoxy and scientific integrity in a time of tumultuous change. The remarkable fact is that, despite the inclinations of its leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, the Christian churches never made opposition to Copernicanism an official article of faith.
Extracted from the Apologetics Study Bible.
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