I recently posted on X about the Catholic Church’s role in the Galileo affair. Michal Paszkiewicz replied, helpfully pointing out that the history was more complicated than my post suggested and directing me towards his discussion with Dr John. Listening to it replaced a familiar morality tale with a more demanding question: what actually happened, and why have we remembered it in this particular form? More broadly, it raised questions about how institutions acquire authority, how their precepts become accepted as dogma and why even long-established public accounts must remain open to review.
In 1615 the Catholic Church, through the Inquisition, would have been proud to use this line against Galileo, after he proved the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system. It must therefore be the devil forcing everyone to stick with the heresy that men and women are… https://t.co/Ii5PT3f1zf
— Rob Watson (@robwmedia) August 27, 2026
The basis of Dr John’s discussion was itself a correction prompted by an exchange on X. Dr John had described Galileo’s observations of the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter as shattering geocentrism and supporting a Sun-centred universe. Paszkiewicz challenged this. His unusual perspective comes partly from translating Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s enormous seventeenth-century astronomy textbook, the Almagestum Novum. Working through a system of thought that history eventually discarded has allowed him to recover arguments, observations and uncertainties that disappear when the past is told only through its winners.
The first correction is scientific. Galileo’s observations were important, but they did not demonstrate heliocentrism as conclusively as the popular story implies. The phases of Venus undermined the older Ptolemaic model, but they were also compatible with the Tychonic system, in which the planets orbited the Sun while the Sun orbited a stationary Earth. Jupiter’s moons showed that not everything revolved around the Earth, but did not establish that the Earth itself moved. Sunspots and lunar craters damaged the Aristotelian belief in perfect and incorruptible heavenly bodies, but they did not decide between a moving and stationary Earth.
Galileo’s theory of the tides, which he regarded as powerful evidence of the Earth’s motion, was wrong. He rejected the Moon’s influence on the tides as too occult, even though mariners had long recognised the practical connection. Meanwhile, astronomers could not detect the stellar parallax that a moving Earth appeared to require. The observations were not precise enough, and the distances involved were not understood. Galileo was right that the Earth moved, but some of his reasons were mistaken and the decisive empirical evidence came later. The discussion identifies James Bradley’s observation of stellar aberration in 1727 as an important turning point, almost a century after Galileo’s trial.
The institutional history is equally complicated. The Catholic Church was not simply external or hostile to seventeenth-century science. It was entangled with its universities, publishing permissions, observatories and international networks of scholarship. Church figures had encouraged Copernicus, and Jesuit astronomers corroborated several of Galileo’s telescopic observations. Copernican ideas could be studied as mathematical hypotheses even when their assertion as physical reality was restricted. “Science versus religion” is therefore an inadequate description of a dispute taking place within a world in which scientific, theological and political authority substantially overlapped.
The distinction between the events of 1616 and 1633 is particularly important. In 1616 Galileo was instructed not to advocate Copernicanism as established reality. He was not imprisoned, and his own works were not then prohibited. Years later, encouraged by the election of the initially sympathetic Urban VIII, he published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. According to the discussion, Galileo had made it more strongly Copernican than the work he had described to the Pope, obtained approval through a questionable route and concentrated his attack on the increasingly outdated Ptolemaic system rather than the stronger Tychonic alternative.
What followed was not a clean contest between reason and superstition. It involved a previous injunction, an unreliable licensing process, Galileo’s combative conduct, papal vulnerability and the politics of Urban VIII’s court. Even the familiar claim that Galileo mocked the Pope through the character Simplicio remains uncertain. The conversation treats it as a later explanation rather than an established cause of the trial. Galileo was convicted of “vehement suspicion of heresy”, not formally declared a heretic for proving heliocentrism. His punishment was not torture or imprisonment in a dungeon, but a comparatively comfortable form of house arrest. It nevertheless restricted his liberty and public activity. Neither exaggerating nor minimising that restriction helps us understand the event.
This is where Galileo begins to resemble a mythical hero. The simplified story gives him all the necessary attributes: the visionary who sees what others cannot; the bearer of a new truth; the resistant old order; the ordeal before a tribunal; the forced recantation; and the final gesture of spiritual defiance, “And yet it moves.” That remark is probably apocryphal, but it completes the story. The hero is defeated physically while remaining faithful to a truth that history will vindicate. Paszkiewicz compares the structure to stories of Christ and Socrates. Galileo becomes more than an astronomer. He becomes a martyr through whom modernity imagines its liberation from inherited authority.
That myth had identifiable uses. From the Enlightenment onwards, and especially amid the political and anti-clerical struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Galileo could be recruited as evidence against Catholic authority. Voltaire, Napoleon’s investigators and later advocates of the “conflict thesis” helped organise the past into an apparently continuous war between science and religion. Encyclopaedias, textbooks, plays and popular retellings repeated the same structure. Yet reactionaries could construct an opposing mythology, portraying Galileo as dishonest, arrogant or chiefly responsible for his own downfall. Both versions selected what served their purposes. One required an immaculate scientific saint; the other needed a reckless provocateur.
The historical Galileo is more interesting than either figure. He was brilliant, witty, ambitious, polemical and strategically adept. He popularised science by writing for a broad Italian readership and made foundational contributions to physics. He could also be arrogant, selective and unwilling to concede weaknesses in his arguments. He ignored or dismissed Kepler, whose elliptical model was scientifically stronger, and advanced a mistaken tidal theory with extraordinary confidence. These imperfections do not diminish his achievements. They restore him to humanity. A person can be scientifically important, personally difficult and partly mistaken while still making discoveries that transform the way later generations understand the world.
This is how historical half-truths take hold. They need not begin as deliberate conspiracies. A complicated event is organised into a memorable story; inconvenient details are removed; later writers rely on earlier accounts; and repetition acquires the appearance of independent confirmation. Eventually, the story becomes part of a group’s identity. Challenging it can then feel like taking sides. Questioning the heroic Galileo myth may be mistaken for defending religious authority, while acknowledging the exercise of institutional power may be interpreted as hostility towards religion. Sustained critical examination becomes difficult precisely because the story is already performing ideological work.
The discussion’s most important lesson is therefore not that established history is false, or that suppressed alternatives must be true. Suppression does not validate a claim any more than official endorsement makes one unquestionable. The lesson is that trust depends upon openness about evidence, uncertainty and error. Every institution — religious, scientific, academic, political, commercial or technological — develops assumptions, procedures and authorised ways of speaking. These may be necessary for collective life, but they must never be treated as permanently beyond examination.
Institutions and public authorities should consequently be questioned as a normal part of responsible citizenship, not merely when we already oppose their conclusions. Their dogmas, precepts and procedures should remain subject to evidence, argument and periodic review. The same scrutiny must be applied to those who challenge authority. Being censored, ignored or excluded does not prove that someone is correct. Equally, holding office, possessing expertise or representing an established consensus does not remove the obligation to explain, listen and revise.
This balance matters because trust can be damaged in more than one direction. Institutions weaken it when corrections are concealed, legitimate questions are dismissed or uncertainty is presented as certainty. Critics weaken it when a genuine omission becomes the foundation for indiscriminate suspicion. Conspiracy thinking often begins when someone discovers one crack in an official account and concludes that the entire structure must be fraudulent. The remedy is neither unquestioning confidence nor permanent disbelief, but sustained and open critical examination.
Galileo’s story remains a warning about concentrated authority, but also about our appetite for heroes. We want history to provide figures who embody our preferred ideals and villains who explain why those ideals have not yet prevailed. Galileo has been made to carry that burden for centuries. Recognising the mythology does not require us to abandon admiration or moral judgement. It asks us to admire more honestly, judge more carefully and remain willing to revise the stories through which institutions and movements explain themselves.
The fuller conclusion is less dramatic but more useful. The Galileo affair involved scientific uncertainty, religious interpretation, institutional procedure, personal ambition and political power. Galileo was right about the Earth’s motion, but did not possess the decisive proof later generations attributed to him. He was neither an immaculate martyr nor simply the author of his own difficulties. The mythology preserves a truth about the human struggle with authority, but only part of the truth. History becomes valuable when no person, institution or inherited account is placed permanently beyond question.
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