Is God a Mathematician_ - Mario Livio [39]
It was necessary, however in the Holy Scripture, in order to accommodate itself to the understanding of the majority, to say many things which apparently differ from the precise meaning. Nature, on the contrary, is inexorable and unchangeable, and cares not whether her hidden causes and modes of working are intelligible to the human understanding or not, and never deviates on that account from the prescribed laws. It appears to me therefore that no effect of nature, which experience places before our eyes, or is the necessary conclusion derived from evidence, should be rendered doubtful by passages of Scripture which contain thousands of words admitting of various interpretations, for every sentence of Scripture is not bound by such rigid laws as is every effect of nature.
This interpretation of the biblical meaning was clearly at odds with that of some of the more stringent theologians. For instance, the Dominican Domingo Bañez wrote in 1584: “The Holy Spirit not only inspired all that is contained in the Scripture, he also dictated and suggested every word with which it was written.” Galileo was obviously not convinced. In his Letter to Castelli he added:
I am inclined to think that the authority of Holy Scripture is intended to convince men of those truths which are necessary for their salvation, and which being far above man’s understanding cannot be made credible by any learning, or any other means than revelation by the Holy Spirit. But that the same God that has endowed us with senses, reason, and understanding, does not permit us to use them, and desires to acquaint us in any other way with such knowledge as we are in a position to acquire for ourselves by means of those faculties, that it seems to me I am not bound to believe, especially concerning those sciences about which the Holy Scripture contains only small fragments and varying conclusions; and this is precisely the case with astronomy, of which there is so little that the planets are not even all enumerated.
A copy of Galileo’s letter made it to the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome, where affairs concerning faith were commonly evaluated, and especially to the influential Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). Bellarmine’s original reaction to Copernicanism was rather moderate, since he regarded the entire heliocentric model as “a way to save the appearances, in the manner of those who have proposed epicycles but do not really believe in their existence.” Like others before him, Bellarmine too treated the mathematical models put forth by astronomers as merely convenient gimmicks, designed to describe what humans observed, without being anchored in any physical reality. Such “saving the appearances” devices, he argued, do not demonstrate that the Earth is really moving. Consequently, Bellarmine saw no immediate threat from Copernicus’s book (De Revolutionibus), even though he was quick to add that to claim that the Earth was moving would not only “irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians” but would also “harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.”
The full details of the rest of this tragic story are beyond the scope and main focus of the present book, so I’ll describe them only briefly here. The Congregation of the Index banned Copernicus’s book in 1616. Galileo’s further attempts to rely on numerous passages from the most revered of the early theologians—St. Augustine—to support his interpretation of the relation between the natural sciences and Scripture did not gain him much sympathy. In spite