‘… if they were fatally wrong about Galileo and the Sun and the moon and the stars then, I’ll bet you they’re also fatally wrong about many other things even in today’s 21st century.’
YESTERDAY, I decided to Google “universe” to see how the universe is explained. While doing so, it struck me how a seven-year-old child in 2025 can be left unimpressed by the magic of having information at his fingertips while someone like me who was seven in 1969 remains in awe.
But I was in even bigger awe by how Wikipedia explained what the universe was; actually, to say I was “in awe” is an understatement; what I read blew my mind.
Here are just a few passages:
“Some of the earliest cosmological models of the universe were developed by ancient Greek and Indian philosophers and were geocentric, placing Earth at the center. [12][13] Over the centuries, more precise astronomical observations led Nicolaus Copernicus to develop the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. In developing the law of universal gravitation, Isaac Newton built upon Copernicus’s work as well as Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and observations by Tycho Brahe.
“Further observational improvements led to the realization that the Sun is one of a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, which is one of a few hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. Many of the stars in a galaxy have planets. At the largest scale, galaxies are distributed uniformly and the same in all directions, meaning that the universe has neither an edge nor a center. At smaller scales, galaxies are distributed in clusters and superclusters which form immense filaments and voids in space, creating a vast foam-like structure. [14] Discoveries in the early 20th century have suggested that the universe had a beginning and has been expanding since then. [15].”
Jeesas.
We who grew up in a Christian world were told only about the Sun and the moon and stars and later on about the other planets in our solar system. God created them, we are told. Oh – and the ones telling us all about God and His creations were a bunch of men who were special because God allowed them to interpret His work, His word, and His wishes.
Now those who had the supreme bad luck of growing up in the 1600s were told that the Earth was the center of everything – because Man was God’s greatest creation (we were made in His image, yes?) and so it followed that since Man lived on Earth then the Earth was the center of everything that God created. And anyone (like Galileo) who insisted that the Earth was but one planet that orbited around the Sun was called a heretic and an enemy of God because in effect he was saying that Man wasn’t so special and Earth too wasn’t so special.
Just as sad – people readily believed this stupidity from men who claimed they were the human spokesmen of God – and therefore should have known better anything and everything about God’s creations, but clearly didn’t.
Jeesas.
But what is – and has always been – the reality? We live on a planet that is only one of a billion in a solar system that is only one of billions in a galaxy that is only one of billions. And if God created all these then He did these billions and billions and billions of years long before human ancestors walked upright. But the Pope and the clergy who persecuted Galileo obviously did not know this, though they acted on the claim that they as God’s representatives on earth knew best. And on that claim, they persecuted people, called them enemies of God and threats to His teachings, and who described that way deserved to live, eh?
That to me is the Galileo revelation from that dark episode in our history: a revelation that the men who claimed to speak for God did not in fact speak for Him because they had been caught not actually knowing what He had created. Why is this bothersome? Because if they were fatally wrong about Galileo and the Sun and the moon and the stars then, I’ll bet you they’re also fatally wrong about many other things even in today’s 21st century.
“Oh, but we are just human and humans commit mistakes” is the excuse the men in clerical robes will tell us. And that’s good enough?
If a surgeon – after promoting himself as the best in his craft – ends up killing a patient, is it enough for him to say he is only human? If a pilot causes a plane to crash but survives, can he be excused by claiming he was only human? Will we allow people to hide behind that lame “palusot?”
I don’t think we should. In fact, in law, there’s this principle called “aggravating circumstance” which causes the imposition of an even heavier penalty on an offender. An example is when the offender is an older person like a guardian; a public official; or an agent of the law. They get a higher penalty because they should have been doubly careful given their positions of responsibility and authority.
Well, the same should apply to the clerics who condemned Galileo and even refused to have him buried in a proper cemetery. The Pope who ordered that he should be exhumed and his remains thrown into the Euphrates River. Because as Pope he should have known better about God and his creations. Far, far better.
Doesn’t the Pope have a special line to God?
The Galileo Revelation tells me that when men in clerical robes speak of things they have no expertise in – like sex, for example, or the universe and the billions of galaxies and the gazillions of planets, oh and mining, too – it’s best for me to just utter the words “Father, forgive them for here they go again, talking about things they know nothing about.”
Amen?