Yes, Galileo was an asshole. Yes, he had many bad arguments and couldn’t tell which were better than others. Yes, Riccioli was a good scientist. But the conventional wisdom is pretty much correct. Your essay is largely cherry-picked and misleading. You may not be Catholic, but I’ve heard identical ones repeatedly from Catholics, including identical ignorance of what Galileo actually contributed. So it appears to me that your sources were designed for the purpose of rehabilitating the Inquisition.
Also, the question is not merely, whether the weight of the evidence in 1616 or 1633 was against of heliocentrism, but whether it was so overwhelmingly in favor that argument should be banned.
his opponents were citing Aristotle, not the Bible in their arguments
They were citing both. Most of them did not consider the Bible infallible on temporal matters, but they did consider it powerful evidence, starting with Martin Luther, who condemned Copernicus by citing Joshua’s miracle of stopping the motion of the sun across the sky.
Martin Luther may seem out of place in Catholic arguments, but he changed history. His contemporary Copernicus didn’t run into trouble because the Catholic Church was secure. He died before the Counter-Reformation.
Last time I looked into this, I concluded that the Inquisition (which is not just Riccioli!) couldn’t even tell which hypotheses were being argued about. There are really three hypotheses: stationary geocentrism, rotating geocentrism, and heliocentrism. The hypothesis that the sun and planets revolved about the Earth, but that the Earth rotated on its axis every day had many followers, both in antiquity and the Renaissance, yet few noticed that already this theory, and not just full-blown heliocentrism contradicts Joshua. Galileo’s greatest contribution was Galilean relativity, arguments about why we would not notice the rotation of hundreds of meters per second.
The heliocentric view had only a single advantage against the geocentric one: it could describe the motion of the planets by a much simper formula.
That’s a pretty big advantage. But Galileo provided a lot more. He famously observed the moons of Jupiter. The really big contribution of the telescope was the phases of Venus, which really trumps anything else. (You could take the position that only Venus and Mercury went around the sun. This was occasionally put forward in both Antiquity and the Renaissance. That it never took hold, even before Galileo, I find bewildering. It makes it difficult to judge anything else.)
I’m sorry that I included the contributions of Galilei only in a comment, not in the main article. I never intended to claim that Galilei didn’t contribute anything to science, nor did I intend to claim that the Catholic Church was always right.
You’re missing the point. The phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter were arguments for the heliocentric view contributed by Galileo but noticeably absent from your article.
Yes, Galileo was an asshole. Yes, he had many bad arguments and couldn’t tell which were better than others. Yes, Riccioli was a good scientist. But the conventional wisdom is pretty much correct. Your essay is largely cherry-picked and misleading. You may not be Catholic, but I’ve heard identical ones repeatedly from Catholics, including identical ignorance of what Galileo actually contributed. So it appears to me that your sources were designed for the purpose of rehabilitating the Inquisition.
Also, the question is not merely, whether the weight of the evidence in 1616 or 1633 was against of heliocentrism, but whether it was so overwhelmingly in favor that argument should be banned.
They were citing both. Most of them did not consider the Bible infallible on temporal matters, but they did consider it powerful evidence, starting with Martin Luther, who condemned Copernicus by citing Joshua’s miracle of stopping the motion of the sun across the sky.
Martin Luther may seem out of place in Catholic arguments, but he changed history. His contemporary Copernicus didn’t run into trouble because the Catholic Church was secure. He died before the Counter-Reformation.
Last time I looked into this, I concluded that the Inquisition (which is not just Riccioli!) couldn’t even tell which hypotheses were being argued about. There are really three hypotheses: stationary geocentrism, rotating geocentrism, and heliocentrism. The hypothesis that the sun and planets revolved about the Earth, but that the Earth rotated on its axis every day had many followers, both in antiquity and the Renaissance, yet few noticed that already this theory, and not just full-blown heliocentrism contradicts Joshua. Galileo’s greatest contribution was Galilean relativity, arguments about why we would not notice the rotation of hundreds of meters per second.
That’s a pretty big advantage. But Galileo provided a lot more. He famously observed the moons of Jupiter. The really big contribution of the telescope was the phases of Venus, which really trumps anything else. (You could take the position that only Venus and Mercury went around the sun. This was occasionally put forward in both Antiquity and the Renaissance. That it never took hold, even before Galileo, I find bewildering. It makes it difficult to judge anything else.)
I’m sorry that I included the contributions of Galilei only in a comment, not in the main article. I never intended to claim that Galilei didn’t contribute anything to science, nor did I intend to claim that the Catholic Church was always right.
You’re missing the point. The phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter were arguments for the heliocentric view contributed by Galileo but noticeably absent from your article.