“1633, the trial of Galileo, religion against science”

Condemned by the Inquisition for having demonstrated that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, Galileo had to retreat to escape the stake. It would not be rehabilitated by the Church until 350 years later. With Sophie Roux, philosopher.

“The idea that the earth revolves around the sun is idiotic, absurd and philosophically heretical, because it contradicts the doctrine of Holy Church”, affirmed Cardinal Bellarmine, in Galilee, in 1616. On April 12, 1633, in a room of the Santa Maria convent in Rome, an old man in a penitent’s shirt came before these judges. Accused of heresy after writing that the Earth revolves around the sun, he knows what he risks. A few years earlier, because he had said the same thing, Copernicus’ books had been blacklisted by the tribunal of the Inquisition, and the Dominican Giordano Bruno had been burned alive. They had called into question a belief well established for 2000 years, since Aristotle, Ptolemy and later the Roman Church affirmed that the sun revolves around the Earth and that it is stationary at the center of the universe and that It was because he had demonstrated and written the opposite that Galileo appeared before his judges. Patrice Gélinet returns to this trial alongside Sophie Roux, professor of history and philosophy of science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and author of numerous publications on Galileo in several scientific journals.

Patrice Gélinet: Galileo was therefore at the center of one of the most famous conflicts between religion and science, when he demonstrated, 400 years ago, that the earth revolved around the sun, which is obviously for us today obvious, but which, in Galileo’s time, was heresy. For more than 2,000 years, it was believed that it was the sun that revolved around the Earth and that it was stationary at the center of the universe. This is called geocentrism.

Sophie Roux: To think in antiquity that the Earth is at the center of the universe, that the stars are fixed on a large sphere which delimits the entire universe and that the planets and the sun move between the two, is not to misinformation or disinformation. In fact, this is what everyone, at least the most learned, think, since they have set up a geometric model which accounts for a certain number of observations.

Reality is not necessarily the truth. When there is a contradiction between science and scripture, science is in error. If you have proof that the Earth revolves around the sun, you should avoid saying it. So, is this really what was recommended to Galileo?

This is exactly what we recommended. We were talking about Copernicus, which explains why there were no protests from the Church between the publication of Copernicus’ book and 1615, is the fact that this work by Copernicus was preceded by a preface in which, which was not written by Copernicus but by someone close to Copernicus, who affirmed that heliocentrism was only a hypothesis, that it was therefore a sort of mathematical model that should not be taken seriously, otherwise to make calculations. And in fact, it is this position that we would call instrumentalist in the philosophy of contemporary science which is recommended by Bellarmine to Galileo in 1616. That is to say, he is not prohibited from speaking of heliocentrism, but they said to him: “You must present this only as a mathematical hypothesis to make calculations”. And that is the thing that Galileo refuses because he thinks he has the truth.

With “Les infox de l’Histoire”, the third season of the Descartes Foundation podcast in partnership with franceinfo, travel through the eras at the heart of major episodes of disinformation. Patrice Gélinet and his guests expose and analyze the fake news that have hit the headlines from antiquity to the present day. Conspiracy, disinformation, rumors, slander, media hype… A third season of eight episodes to decipher the lies of History.

Producer: Patrice Gélinet
Director: Gilles Blanchard
Documentalist/Production officer: Juliette Marcaillou
Technician: Lucas Derode