The young sceptic Alex O’Connor of the Cosmic Skeptic video channel has built a substantial audience discussing theological and philosophical questions from an atheistic and rationalist perspective. But when he tries to discuss history, he is on unsure ground and two forays onto the complex subject of the Galileo Affair have seen him present bungled misapprehensions and some outright pseudo historical fantasy to his followers.

The content creator Alex O’Connor is a 23 year old recent graduate from Oxford who has used his study of philosophy and theology to produce popular videos critiquing theistic claims, Christian and Islamic theology and, as a vegan, present ethical arguments against eating and using animal products. Most of his material consists of fairly standard, mainstream arguments on these matters and he does an admirable job of bringing these perspectives to a wider audience in a careful and accessible way. As a result, he has won a wide audience (over 458,000 subscribers) and, for someone so young, a fairly high profile as an articulate and well-informed populariser of rationalist philosophical views. I suppose some of us who have more grey hairs than Mr. O’Connor may find his demeanour slightly smug and rather well-satisfied with himself, but then we also know this is something that is usually cured by time, experience and the getting of wisdom. Well, usually.

But, as we have seen several times, people with backgrounds in philosophy sometimes think they can easily venture into the field of history and have useful things to say about it, often without actually doing the hard work required to understand historical topics. So we have A.C. Grayling opining loudly and with great confidence about the supposed Christian suppression and destruction of ancient learning, making a long sequence of basic howlers with almost every word. Or there is Stephen Law trying his hand at an argument about the historicity of Jesus using his philosophical skills, only to prove he needs to take an undergraduate class in the essentials of historiography. Similarly unencumbered by any relevant background and training, O’Connor has made a couple of very brave forays into a subject so complex that it would daunt many older and less superbly self-assured people: the history of the Galileo Affair. Unfortunately, the vast self-confidence of an Oxford undergraduate is not sufficient to successfully traverse this thorny territory, so the results were mostly utter nonsense, even if they were presented with supreme assurance and aplomb.

It is often the case that anti-theistic activists present terrible interpretations of history in response to theistic apologists doing exactly the same thing. So in January 2021, O’Connor responded to a video by Andy Bannister, director of the Scottish apologetics organisation the Solas Centre for Public Christianity. In his video, Bannister took the distinctly dubious position that not only does science not debunk Christianity but “Christianity is actually the only firm foundation from which you can do science”. And he supports this radical claim, in part, by noting “all the founding fathers who first got the scientific method going … were all Christians … because they believed in a God who was rational and coherent and who created a world that was rational and coherent and logical and therefore you can investigate it expecting to find pattern and order”.

Immediately there are several things clearly wrong with this line of argument. To begin with, history shows that Christianity was not the only world view to posit a rationally ordered universe of predicable laws and principles, so to claim that only Christianity could ever have been the foundation of a scientific world view is historically nonsense. O’Connor identifies a second flaw, arguing that, yes, the founders of the Scientific Method were religious believers because, at least in part, it took some time for the impact of science on other beliefs to happen and have full effect. But then (5.12 mins) he ventures into some examples of these scientific founders and this is where things begin to go badly wrong. Here is O’Connor’s video in full:

There is a enough wrong in what O’Connor says here to form the basis of several articles on misconceptions about both facts of history and how history is analysed. O’Connor is trying to explain why these early scientists did not “lose their faith”, but goes about this odd task in some equally odd ways. For example, there is no doubt that Isaac Newton was a highly devout believer, so O’Connor simply waves this aside by calling him “a rather strange and frantic individual” and detailing how Newton spent time on scriptural analysis, alchemy and “occult practices” and also notes his Christology was Arian. This is all more or less true, but it is hard to see how any of it is relevant. This may be “strange” to us (though how it makes Newton “frantic” I have no idea), but virtually all of it was entirely normal and fairly respectable in Newton’s time. His views on the Trinity were certainly much more unusual, but it is hard to see how they, or anything else O’Connor refers to, can lead to O’Connor’s conclusion that “I’m not so sure we should be taking Newton’s religious views very seriously” (6.08 mins).

How “seriously” we, as people in the early twenty-first century, can take Newton’s distinctly seventeenth century religious ideas is not actually the point. As odd as many of them seem to a modern person, including most modern Christians, the actual point is that he … held them. Devoutly. And he did not see them in any way undermined by his scientific work. On the contrary, Newton saw his religious beliefs and his scientific inquiries as integral to each other. Writing to a young clergyman, Richard Bentley, on this theme, Newton said:

“When I wrote my treatise about our system, I had my eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.”

(10th December, 1692)

Newton goes on in the same letter to note elements in his cosmology which he feels are a “contrivance of a voluntary Agent” and “arguments for a Deity”. For Newton, his science was not incidental to his religion, rather it is an essential and motivating part of it. So O’Connor’s naïve and presentist dismissal of Newton’s seventeenth century religious ideas as “strange and frantic” is not only beside the point, but also ignores how central those ideas were to Newton’s science and vice versa. He probably ignores this because he is simply ignorant of the relevant historical information or its context.

But things get much worse when O’Connor turns to Galileo. Beginning at the 6.08 mins mark in the video O’Connor lays out what he thinks is the real reason Galileo expressed no doubts about Christianity. Here is a text transcript of what he says:

In a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, Galileo argued that Christianity is true but perhaps needs to be reinterpreted to allow for the discoveries of science – specifically Galileo’s belief that the earth orbits the sun, not the other way round as was generally believed at the time. That is, he recommended, based on science, a slight change to the Christian doctrine of the time … and the Church responded by saying: “Good point, we love science and would be glad to take your input on board.”

Oh, sorry, wait – no they didn’t.

They threatened him with torture, ordered him to never speak publicly about his beliefs and eventually falsified evidence against him in court to place him under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

Do you think that that might have something to do with the fact that Galileo never publicly questioned his Christian faith?

Under these conditions, with the Inquisition displaying its instruments of torture and threatening to use them on people who express heretical beliefs, just about anybody would claim to be a Christian.

And this is exactly what the catholic church did to Galileo in 1633.

(6.08 mins)

This argument basically boils down to saying “of course he didn’t publicly question his faith, because people in the seventeenth century got persecuted for that”. This is essentially correct, but it is not much of an argument. The fact is that we have sufficient evidence regarding Galileo’s private religious beliefs to be sure he was, in fact, a Christian believer and none at all that indicate he was somehow harbouring secret doubts about the key tenets of the Catholic faith, only held in check by fear of the Inquisition. Unlike some of his scientific contemporaries – say, Kepler – he was not especially devout in his religious practice or his expressions of belief. He had three children with his mistress, who he never married, though this seems to have been more a matter of Marina Gamba being of insufficient social status to make a suitable marriage partner rather than any indication of religious impiety. Likewise, his placing his daughters in convent or his own taking of a clerical tonsure in 1631 were more matters of circumstance, convention and necessity than clear indications of devout faith.

But we have plenty of material in personal correspondence by him and, especially, to him where we would find a hint of any religious doubts and there is simply nothing there to be found. See Olaf Pedersen’s detailed and careful analysis of the evidence in “Galileo’s Religion”, The Galileo Affair: A Meeting of Faith and Science: Proceedings of the Cracow Conference, May 24-27, 1984, Citta del Vaticano: Specola Vaticana, 1985, edited by Coyne, G.V., pp.75-102). O’Connor mentions Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, in which he makes a detailed and careful theological argument that certain Biblical texts can be fully reconciled with a heliocentric model of cosmology. He did the same in his more widely circulated Letter to Castelli and in other unpublished notes and writings. Anyone who reads these works can see they are written by someone with a keen interest in the relevant theology, a remarkably up-to-date grasp of the complex debates around Scriptural interpretation and a genuine desire to reconcile his science and his faith in a completely orthodox manner. They are definitely not the works of a secret sceptic pretending to outwardly seem a believer – he would not have inserted himself into these issues at all if that had been the case. He was clearly a Catholic Christian believer.

Galileo seems to have been, as O’Connor himself says in his first and far better counter to Bannister’s argument, simply a man of his time and so a believer much like virtually everyone else in seventeenth century Europe; firm in his belief if not overly devout in its practice. This was not a matter of coercion or fear, just one of social and historical context.

But the real problem with O’Connor’s weak argument is not its weakness, but the nonsense he utilises in making it. He illustrates his point with a strange caricature of history.

Early in his January 2021 video O’Connor refers viewers to an earlier and much longer video of his, one with the remarkably bold title “The Trial of Galileo: What Really Happened?” (19 December, 2019). Historians who have devoted their entire lives to the study of the complexities of the Galileo Affair would not presume to be able to say “what really happened” in that trial (let alone do so in a 21 minute YouTube video), but see above about young Mr O’Connor’s enormous self-confidence. In this video O’Connor tries to present the trial of Galileo in its historical and theological context, but only demonstrates that he has little firm grasp of either. Here is the video in full, though I will refer to key sections of its claims via timestamps in my analysis below:

I suppose we should give O’Connor a small measure of acknowledgement for actually looking at the theological context of what happened in the Galileo Affair, since it was far more a matter of theological dispute and court politics than it was one of science. In a defence of this video on Twitter, O’Connor reassured his 50,000 followers that he got his historical information on the subject via his theology degree at Oxford. If this is true, then I am sure the good theological doctors of Oxford know their stuff when it comes to theology, but they should leave history to historians. I suspect the real problem here, however, is O’Connor filtering some simplified and slightly garbled historical context to the relevant theology through a warping combination of his own strong biases and weak research.

He begins with a hint at the alleged “falsified evidence” he refers to in the later 2021 video:

Galileo was legally condemned by the Church for trying to write about the heliocentric model and not only this but in such a way that may have involved some fraud on the part of the Catholic authorities.

(1.32 mins)

At least here he uses the slightly circumspect word “may” rather than simply stating this supposed fraud as fact, as he does in his later video ( “… [the Church] eventually falsified evidence against him … “). But once he warms to his theme later in this longer video, that caution falls away. After dangling this intrigue, he begins with his presentation of the context. He starts with the Council of Trent’s 1546 ruling on the interpretation of the Bible:

In response to the Protestant revolution, the Church called the Council of Trent – an ecumenical council wherein in Church authorities all came together in order to clarify the position of the Catholics and to denounce the heresies of Protestantism. Most relevant to our present discussion is that in Session Four of the Council of Trent the Catholics explicitly limited the interpretation of the Bible to bishops and councils of the Church, meaning that only they could decide what the Bible really meant and how to interpret his messages.

(2.23 mins)

This is essentially correct and is certainly the key to understanding the crux of the Galileo Affair; one that most popular commentators miss completely. Prior to 1615 the Church simply did not care about Galileo or any other mathematicus or astronomer accepting heliocentrism. Galileo did not hide his acceptance of Copernicanism, while for their part the Church authorities generally saw the whole issue of the various competing cosmological models as something for the natural philosophers and “geometers” to sort out among themselves. But this was to change.

There were two separate debates going on in the second half of the sixteenth century which began to converge in the early seventeenth century and finally collided in the Galileo Affair. The first was the debate about cosmology; one that began with Copernicus and intensified with new astronomical observations starting with the supernova of 1572. The second was a debate about how the Council of Trent’s rulings on Biblical interpretation should be understood and applied. By far the best monograph on the intersection of these two debates is Richard J. Blackwell’s superb book Galileo, Bellarmine and the Bible (Notre Dame, 1991), which provides a detailed guide to the relevant theological context, with translated editions of key documents relating to the Galileo case. I cannot recommend Blackwell’s book highly enough for people who actually want to understand the Galileo Affair.

The Fourth Session of the Council of Trent (8 April, 1546) approved two proclamations that would have direct relevance to the Galileo case. The first of these read:

The Council also maintains that these truth and rules are contained in the written books and in the unwritten traditions …. Following then the examples of the orthodox Fathers [the Council] receives and venerates … both all the books of the Old and New Testaments, since one God is the author of both, and also the traditions themselves, whether they relate to faith and morals as having been dictated either orally by Christ or by the Holy Spirit, and preserved in the Catholic Church in unbroken succession.

(“Decree on Tradition and on the Canon of Sacred Scripture”, in Blackwell, Appendix I, p. 181)

Here the Council was countering the Lutheran principle of sola scriptura that insisted on the Bible as the only source of authority on Christian doctrine and practice. The Council of Trent upheld and reinforced the Catholic teaching that both the Bible and “unwritten traditions” that came to be elucidated by the “orthodox Fathers” of the Patristic tradition and its later theological interpreters were sources of authority on doctrine and practice. This is why the authority of the various Patristic writers and theologians carried great weight in the later debate about whether heliocentrism could be compatible with the Bible.

The second decision of the Council was to be even more relevant to the Galileo Affair:

Furthermore, to control petulant spirits, the Council decrees that in matters of faith and morals, pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine no one, relying on his own judgment and distorting the Sacred Scriptures according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church …. has held and does hold, or even contrary to the unanimous agreement of the Fathers.

(“Decree on Tradition and on the Canon of Sacred Scripture”, in Blackwell, Appendix I, p. 183)

Here again the Bible and the “agreement of the Fathers” are upheld together and, again, we find a reference to interpretation of these two sources of authority on matters of “faith and morals”. This ruling further specifies that it applies to interpretations “pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine”. It is important to note here that the phrase used in both of these declarations and usually translated as “faith and morals” has a much broader meaning in the Latin that it appears in English translation. Blackwell notes that in the phrase “in rebus fidei et morum” the word mores:

… is not limited to morality. It also includes such other “practical” matters as the determination of the canon, edition, and translation of Scripture, the legitimacy of councils and papal elections, the canonization of saints, and the determination of the sacrament of ordination.

(Blackwell, pp. 12-13)

These proclamations probably all seemed sufficiently clear to the bishops assembled at Trent, but in the following decades there were inevitable differences in opinion on how these decisions were to be understood and how exactly they should be applied in practice. Of particular relevance to the Galileo Affair was the interpretation of the Tridentine declarations on the interpretation of Scripture as it pertains to “matters of faith and morals, pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine”. The issue here being, what exactly falls under these criteria?

Among the most prominent and influential interpreters of Tridentine theology was the Spanish Dominican friar Melchior Cano (c. 1509-1560). Cano’s De locis theologicis (published posthumously in 1563) was a highly regarded work of systematic theological analysis, written by a scholar who had served as an advisor to the Council of Trent. Cano expands on the Tridentine declaration on the dual authority of both Scripture and Tradition, defining how “the Church” gives authority to Tradition via its “pastors and doctors”, “the saints” and “the Apostolic See”, meaning bishops and theologians in council, the ancient Church Fathers and the Papacy. But he also acknowledges that there are degrees of the authority of the Church Fathers, laying out six levels of this authority. Four of these are very relevant here:

(1) When the authority of the saints, be they few or many, pertains to the faculties contained within the natural light of reason, it does not provide certain arguments but only arguments as strong as reason itself when in agreement with nature ….
….

(4) In the case of matters which pertain very little to the faith, the authority of even all the saints creates a probable belief but not a certain one .…

(5) In regard to the exposition of the Sacred Scriptures, the common interpretation of all the old saints provides the theologian with a most certain argument for the corroboration of theological assertions; for indeed the meaning of the Holy Spirit is the same as the meaning of all of the saints .…

(6) All the saints taken together cannot err on dogmas of the faith .…

(Cano, De locis, VII. 3, quoted in Blackwell, pp.18-19)

So do the questions regarding the motion of the earth and the stability of the sun fall under (1) or perhaps (4), as Galileo would later argue? Or under (5) and (6) as the head of the Roman Inquisition, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, would come to suggest? The issue was very far from clear cut.

And it was certainly recognised as being so when it came to interpreting Scripture in the light of natural philosophy. While Biblical books such as Genesis were certainly held to be both God’s truth and historical, medieval and early modern Catholic exegetes did not rely on a purely literalistic reading of them (see The Great Myths 11: Biblical Literalism). So in the later sixteenth century the influential Jesuit exegete and commentator Benito Pereyra (1535-1610) set out rules for interpretation in his huge four volume commentary on Genesis (Commentariorum et disputationem in Genesim tomi quator, 1591-95). Of particular interest is his Fourth Rule:

[I]n dealing with the teachings of Moses, do not think or say anything affirmatively and assertively which is contrary to the manifest evidence and arguments of philosophy or the other disciplines. For since every truth agrees with every other truth, the truth of Sacred Scripture cannot be contrary to the true arguments and evidence of the human sciences.

(Pereyra, Commentariorum, I.13, quoted in Blackwell, p. 22)

Of course, this is not some new principle: it was established by Augustine in his own commentaries on Genesis and is an expression of the long established medieval principle of the Two Books Doctrine; where the “Book of God” (the Bible, Church tradition, the Patristic writers) and the “Book of Nature” (the material world as analysed by natural philosophers) both describe the world and so should be taken as complementary and used together to resolve any seeming contradictions between them). So when Galileo came to invoke this idea, he was drawing on a well established and accepted principle. It is significant that we know he consulted Pereyra’s work when writing his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615) that O’Connor refers to above, and even quotes this Fourth Rule verbatim in it. It should also be noted that what Pereyra refers to as “philosophy” here is “natural philosophy” or what we call “science”. This is a key point in relation to the 1633 condemnation of Galileo, but one which eludes many ill-informed commentators, including, as we will see, O’Connor.

All this context means several of O’Connor’s statements in his longer “What Really Happened?” video are substantially wrong. He states:

[T]he official understanding of the Church at the time was that the earth is at the centre of the universe instead and doesn’t move at all.

(3.17 mins)

This is wrong. There was no “official understanding of the Church” regarding heliocentrism prior to 1616. As I have detailed at length before (see The Great Myths 6: Copernicus’ Deathbed Publication), the Church’s reaction to Copernicanism and other heliocentric models from 1514 to 1616 was one of little more than mild interest. It was considered a matter for the scientists and, given that only a tiny handful of them accepted heliocentrism as a fact, it was also not considered a subject of any importance for the Church. A few churchmen had noted the Scriptural problems with the idea, but most of their objections in this period were purely scientific – based on astronomy and physics – and these were also enough for almost all astronomers, mathematicians and natural philosophers to regard the Copernican model as a useful calculating device, but a flawed and erroneous cosmological model. Galileo was an exception to this wide consensus.

While there was, contra O’Connor, no “official understanding of the Church” on heliocentrism, there certainly was an accepted consensus on what certain relevant Biblical texts seemed to mean and why they supported the scientific consensus that the earth does not rotate or orbit the sun. The important point here is that these two things – the theological consensus on the relevant Scriptures and the scientific consensus on the cosmology – supported each other; wholly in keeping with the Two Book Doctrine. O’Connor baldly states that by going against this alleged “official interpretation” Galileo was automatically in violation of the Council of Trent:

Galileo consistently argued throughout his writing is that God’s word is always correct and trustworthy, but he also argued that, being inerrant, Scripture cannot contradict what is true in nature – both must be true. So, putting this together, since Galileo believed that the earth orbits the sun and that our interpretation of Scripture must therefore reflect this, but the Church’s official interpretation of Scripture is that the earth doesn’t orbit the sun, this essentially equates to Galileo reinterpreting Scripture and saying that the church’s interpretation is wrong. But as I mentioned before, the Council of Trent had forbidden any individual from doing this kind of scriptural reinterpretation so Galileo had broken the rules.

(3.28 mins)

O’Connor gets several things wrong here. As already noted, the idea that Scripture and nature, properly interpreted, cannot contradict each other was not just something said by Galileo, it was accepted by everyone – this is the long-established Two Books Doctrine. More importantly, it was not clear that Galileo doing his own interpretation of the relevant Biblical texts meant he has “broken the rules”. That depended on whether these scientific matters fell under the Tridentine ruling against individual interpretation regarding “matters of faith and morals, pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine”. Galileo followed Pereyra in thinking they did not – a perfectly respectable position, if not one that every theologian agreed with. It also depended on what level of authority should be given to the consensus of the Church Fathers on the interpretation of the relevant Biblical texts. Again, opinion here was divided and Galileo’s writings fell comfortably within the parameters of at least two of Cano’s rules on that point. So whether Galileo had actually “broken the rules” was far from clear and open to several potential interpretations.

O’Connor paraphrases part of Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina:

It is completely unreasonable for the church to expect the scientist to ignore what they’ve discovered and blindly trust the approved interpretation of Scripture instead Galileo argues continually that Scripture cannot be false and we would be foolish to attempt to disprove it but also argues that nature cannot be false either and so if our observations of nature contradict our interpretation of Scripture our interpretation must be wrong.

(4.43 mins)

Galileo certainly defends the idea that, IF the science on a question is settled, then the Two Books doctrine means that this scientific understanding needs to be reconciled with Scripture – which may entail the reinterpretation of some Biblical texts. But it is critical to understand that, while Galileo clearly thought the Copernican model was true, he himself accepted that it had not been proven. What he is doing in both the Letter to Castelli and the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina is presenting a way the relevant Biblical texts could be read if that definitive proof was ever found. He, like everyone else, was still working within what Blackwell calls “the old Aristotelian requirement of full certitude”, not a modern conception of a hypothesis that carries the best weight of evidence. In an unpublished note from 1615, Galileo states this clearly:

It is the highest prudence to believe there has been no demonstration of the mobility of the earth …. and we do not ask anyone to believe this point without demonstration. …. If the proponents of [it] were to have no more than ninety percent of the arguments on their side, they would be rebutted.

(Blackwell, Appendix IX, p. 271)

Galileo goes on to say that this lack of a conclusive proof does not mean the proposition “should be scorned and to be considered to be a paradox” either, but he accepted that the weight of opinion was against him for very valid reasons.

So when O’Connor gets indignant, saying the Church’s Tridentine rulings were tantamount to “commanding that [scientists] must not see what they see and must not understand what they know” or must “ignore what they’ve discovered”, he is ignoring the fact that heliocentrism had not been proven and not even Galileo thought that it had. The question was about what authoritative weight the prevailing consensus of interpretation of the Scriptures had, given that there was still considerable scientific doubt about any heliocentric model and the consensus of science was heavily against the idea. O’Connor’s high dudgeon about scientists being required to “ignore what they’ve discovered” and what they “know” is totally misplaced. Heliocentrism had not been “discovered” and was not “known”. It was still a hypothesis and one with, at that point, serious and valid scientific objections against it.

And this was a point made very succinctly in 1615 by the head of the Roman Inquisition, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. On March 7, 1615, Galileo’s friend and patron Prince Federico Cesi wrote to him regarding “a letter by a Carmelite father who defends the opinion of Copernicus by reconciling it with all the passages of Scripture”. He was referring to a booklet by Paolo Antonio Foscarini, a Calabrian priest and former professor of theology, with the shortened title A Letter concerning the opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus. Foscarini was not an astronomer, though he seems to have been fairly well-read on that side of the issue and an admirer of Galileo. But the surprise for Galileo came in the fact that Foscarini presented theological arguments very similar to the ones Galileo had been developing in his unpublished (and as yet not widely circulated) Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. So it remained to be seen if Foscarini’s unexpected foray into the debate about Biblical interpretation and Copernicanism would advance or harm the cause of Galileo and his supporters.

Foscarini makes it clear in his work that he is arguing that, in principle, Copernicanism is not contrary to the standard Scriptural passages usually cited and that, if at some point in the future it was proven to be true, it could be reconciled with the Bible. This is exactly the position of Galileo (including the acknowledgement that heliocentrism was not yet proven) in both his widely-circulated Letter to Castelli and the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, which he still hoped to publish. So Galileo wrote careful notes on Foscarini’s work and waited for the official theological response to it with keen interest.

He did not have to wait long. Within weeks a complaint about Foscarini’s Letter was lodged with the Inquisition and an unnamed theologian of the Holy Office wrote a rather poor response to it. Foscarini wrote a detailed Defence of his original work in reply, seemingly in late March 1615, which focused on the issue of whether a subject like heliocentrism could be said to fall under the Tridentine formulation of in rebus fidei et morum (“in matters of faith and morals”), arguing that it did not and that it fell into the category of Cano’s rules 1 and 4 (see above), so the opinion of the ancient “Holy Fathers” was not automatically authoritative. On this basis, Foscarini argues:

[In] matters which pertain to the natural sciences and which are discovered and are open to investigation by human reason, the Sacred Scriptures ought not to be interpreted otherwise than according to what human reason itself establishes from natural experience and according to what is clear from innumerable data.

(Blackwell, Appendix VII B, pp. 258-9)

In both his Letter and his Defence, Foscarini makes very carefully supported theological arguments, showing a strong grasp of the debates around how the Council of Trent’s proclamations were to be interpreted and bolstered by reference to Augustine and other Patristic writers and even using a line of argument employed by Cardinal Bellarmine elsewhere. These are serious works and ones deliberately aimed at taking the debate directly to the theological conservatives in general and to Bellarmine himself in particular.

Bellarmine was, after all, the pre-eminent theologian of the day and, as head of the Roman Inquisition, very much the man who Foscarini (and Galileo) needed to convince. On April 12, 1615, Bellarmine gave his reply in a widely-circulated open letter, and he was definitely not convinced. Bellarmine’s response (see here) is fairly short but highly succinct and, despite its brevity, comprehensive. It is also remarkable in the very broad way Bellarmine chooses to interpret the Council of Trent’s reference to “matters of faith and morals”. Contra Foscarini (and Galileo), Bellarmine states that the questions surrounding heliocentrism certainly do fall under the rubric of in rebus fidei et morum, so “the common agreement of the Holy Fathers” does indeed apply:

Nor may it be answered that this is not a matter of faith, for if it is not a matter of faith from the point of view of the subject matter, it is on the part of the ones who have spoken. It would be just as heretical to deny that Abraham had two sons and Jacob twelve, as it would be to deny the virgin birth of Christ, for both are declared by the Holy Ghost through the mouths of the prophets and apostles.

(Blackwell, Appendix VIII, p. 266)

This stance effectively broadens the definition of what pertains to “matters of faith and morals” to encompass almost anything and everything, as Galileo observes in his private notes on Bellarmine’s response. He notes with ironic irritation that, given the breadth of Bellarmine’s definition, then it would also follow that disputing any detail in the Scriptures, however trivial, is allegedly heretical. So Galileo observes privately, taking a deliberately silly example, even denying the existence of Tobias’ dog (mentioned in passing in the Deuterocanonical work Tobit – 6:1 and 10:4) would, absurdly, become effectively heretical. But while this was not the determination Foscarini or Galileo wanted or expected, it would have been both unwise and futile to dispute the issue further. Foscarini effectively withdrew from the debate and Galileo shelved his plans for publishing his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina.

But more relevant here is the second part of what Bellarmine had to say. This is because O’Connor insists that ruling that the issue of heliocentrism did fall under the Tridentine proclamations was “commanding that [scientists] must not see what they see and must not understand what they know” or must “ignore what they’ve discovered”. But this is not what Bellarmine says at all. On the issue of whether or not heliocentrism is true, Bellarmine definitely does not claim the “Holy Fathers” have the final word:

I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun was in the centre of the universe and the earth in the third sphere, and that the sun did not travel around the earth but the earth circled the sun, then it would be necessary to proceed with great caution in explaining the passages of Scripture which seemed contrary, and we would rather have to say that we did not understand them than to say that something was false which has been demonstrated. But I do not believe that there is any such demonstration; none has been shown to me.

(Blackwell, Appendix VIII, p. 266)

So Bellarmine is leaving open the possibility that such a demonstration – which he, Foscarini and Galileo all agree has not been established – could one day be made. And he is noting that, if this occurred, the relevant Scriptures would, indeed, need to be reinterpreted. But he notes the fact that there are still considerable scientific doubts regarding the key propositions underpinning any heliocentric model and so he concludes, in a key element in his response “in a case of doubt, one may not depart from the Scriptures as explained by the Holy Fathers” (my emphasis). It is critical to understand that Bellarmine is not upholding the traditional Patristic interpretations of the Scriptures carte blanche, but is doing so in the situation, as everyone agreed, that there was still strong doubt, an overwhelming scientific consensus against heliocentrism and no clear demonstration of heliocentrism as fact. O’Connor’s reading of this as a ruling that scientists have to ignore fact and obey what the Church, the Bible and the “Holy Fathers” say is a wholesale and woeful misinterpretation of the situation.

Despite Bellarmine’s interpretation, Galileo was not one to back down and still sought a way to defend his ideas against his academic detractors; though a letter to his friend Monsignor Piero Dini in May 1615 expresses his great frustration:

So far as possible, I should like to show them that they are mistaken, but my mouth is stopped and I am ordered not to go into the Scriptures. This amounts to saying that Copernicus’ book, accepted by the Church, contains heresies and may be preached against by anyone who pleases, while it is forbidden for anyone to get into the controversy and show that it is not contrary to Scripture.

(Quoted in William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 71)

He felt he could still convince the theological powers that be if he could go to Rome in person “where I could use my tongue instead of my pen”. Back in February 1615 the Dominican friar Niccolò Lorini, part of the cabal of rivals and detractors Galileo scornfully nicknamed “the Pigeon League”, had made a complaint to the Inquisition regarding the Copernican views of “the Galileists”, but an Inquisitorial consultant had dismissed those allegations after analysing Galileo’s Letter to Castelli, concluding “though it sometimes uses improper words, it does not diverge from the pathways of Catholic expression” (“Consultant’s Report on the Letter to Castelli (1615)” in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989, p. 136). But the “Pigeon League” did not let things rest there and on March 20, 1615, Lorini’s fellow Dominican, Tommaso Caccini, made a deposition to the Inquisition, strongly implicating Galileo in suspect ideas concerning the Bible and his heliocentric ideas. This was reported back to Galileo in Florence by his friends in Rome and further inquiries by the Inquisition, along with the exchange between Foscarini and Bellarmine, are the reason Galileo was keen to get to Rome to defend himself.

He arrived in Rome on December 10, 1615, and spent several weeks visiting various cardinals and other dignitaries. But the wheels of the Inquisition continued to turn, and despite all of Galileo’s lobbying, on February 24, 1616, the Inquisition received a Consultants’ Report that ruled the proposition that the sun was “the center of the world and completely devoid of local motion” was “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical” and the idea the earth “moves as a whole and also with diurnal motion” also “receives the same judgement in philosophy and that in regard to theological truth it is at least erroneous in faith” (Finocchiaro, p. 146). It seems the first Galileo heard of this was when, two days later, he was summoned to an audience with Cardinal Bellarmine and ordered not to argue in favour of Copernicanism.

Unsurprisingly, O’Connor’s characterisation of these events contains several bungles. He declares in ringing tones that “in 1616 Pope Paul V, in an official decree, formally declared heliocentrism as heretical due to it being ‘false and completely contrary to the divine scriptures'” (6.57 mins). This is pure nonsense. There was no such “official decree” from the Pope and heliocentrism was never declared to be heresy at this point or any other. What O’Connor appears to be referring to here is the “Decree of the Congregation of the Index (5 March, 1616)” (Finocchario, p. 148) noting a ruling by Pope Paul on the banning and amendment of several books in light of the Inquisition’s finding of the previous week. O’Connor does not understand the technical language of the 24 February finding, so he appears to think the ruling that the propositions were “formally heretical” (i.e. the lesser level of error where something is heretical in form or substance, though not actually fully heretical per se) means this imaginary Papal “decree” was a “formal” or official declaration.

O’Connor then declares that “Copernicus’ book on heliocentrism was subsequently banned until ‘corrections’ were made to it such as the removal of suggestions that the earth moves” (7.08 mins). This too is completely wrong. The corrections ordered for De Revolutionibus were few and very minor; all involving statements or strong implications of heliocentrism as a fact. All the many “suggestions” of it as a hypothesis, with the detailed arguments for these ideas were left untouched. These made up about half of the book. If the Church had wanted it “banned” outright they could have done so – the same decree of the Index fully banned Foscarini’s Letter after all. But Copernicus’ book was still considered valid and useful, just not the very few parts that treated the still unproven idea as more than a hypothesis.

O’Connor also bungles even the smaller elements in the sequence of events. In his telling, “one month before the official decree we just mentioned was issued by the church …. Bellarmine was sent to inform Galileo about the forthcoming decree which would officially label Galileo’s views as heretical” (7.35 mins). This is a tangle of nonsense. As already noted, this Papal “official decree” never existed. If O’Connor is referring to the Index’s March 5 decree, which is the only document that comes even close to what he claims, then there was certainly no meeting between Galileo and Bellarmine “one month before” this. The only meeting between Bellarmine and Galileo in 1616 was on February 26, two days after the Inquisition’s report and only nine days before the Index’s decree. Finally, O’Connor repeatedly refers to Bellarmine “visiting” Galileo. This is ridiculous. Galileo, as a lowly mathematicus and minor ducal functionary, was summoned to an audience with Cardinal Bellarmine at the latter’s palace, in keeping with the vast social and hierarchical gulf between the two men. Yet somehow O’Connor seems to imagine a Cardinal Inquisitor and “prince of the Church” popping over to Galileo’s place for a cup of tea and a chat, like a small town vicar visiting a parishioner. This is just more evidence that he has absolutely no understanding of the evidence or its social, cultural and political context. No wonder his interpretation is so hopelessly garbled.

But it is as this point that O’Connor’s version of events veer from misrepresented and misunderstood to wild fantasy.

This is because here O’Connor returns to his claim that the Inquisition used fake evidence to convict Galileo. O’Connor refers to Galileo’s April 1624 visit to Rome where he had a series of audiences with the newly elected Pope Urban VIII, who had long been a supporter and friend of Galileo; at least, as much as a high ranking prelate could be friends with a lowly functionary. As a result of these meetings and other overtures, Galileo was clearly given permission to write on the issue of heliocentrism again, so long as he stayed within the boundaries of the 1616 ruling and explored the subject as an instrumentalist hypothesis, not as a fact. The result, eight years later, was Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) – the work that would trigger his 1633 trial. O’Connor summarises all this:

Now, in accordance with the advice of Pope Urban that he’d been given, Galileo wrote his book in the form of a dialogue between fictional characters, each one defending different models of the solar system. Now, this fictional approach and the fact that both sides were argued would presumably, Galileo thought, make the discussion a hypothetical one just as the Pope had recommended. “Not so!” said Galileo’s critics, many of whom thought that the arguments presented by the character Salviati, who was the one defending heliocentrism, were just a little bit too strong – clearly winning the argument – and suggesting that this character’s views were in fact the ones being advocated by the author. Whatever be the case, Galileo had written a powerful if hypothetical and fictional defence of the heliocentric model which – surprise, surprise – didn’t go down too well with the Church.

(10.13 mins)

As usual, this is a typically glib and characteristically misrepresentative summary. To begin with, Galileo did not write the arguments as hypotheticals because of some gentle “advice” by the pope. He did so under strict, explicit and direct instruction to do so from Pope Urban via his Master of the Sacred Palace, Niccolo Riccardi; the Vatican functionary responsible for the licencing of approved publications. In a lengthy and convoluted process of to and fro over approval to publish the work, in which the very busy Riccardi effectively outsourced the reading of the main body of the work to a fellow Dominican friar, the Master of the Sacred Palace made it perfectly clear that Copernicanism was to be presented as a theory that accounted for astronomical observations and not as physical truth. Galileo and his supporters had won permission for the book to be written on the grounds that Protestants were mocking the Catholic Church over the 1616 ruling and saying Catholic scholars were simply ignorant of the Copernican thesis. Riccardi made it clear that the tenor of the book was to show that Rome understood the thesis perfectly well and made its ruling in that full knowledge and understanding. What Urban and Riccardi got was not what they had in mind at all:

They did not expect Galileo to argue for Copernicanism but to vindicate the Roman Curia for condemning it in 1616 by showing that the ecclesiastical authorities (including Urban VIII) knew the arguments for both sides. They wanted him to make clear that the motion of the earth was a clever theory, useful for computations, but the evidence for it was weak and controversial, and that the Church had been wise to defend the traditional, literalist interpretation of natural phenomena described in the Bible.

(Shea and Artigas, p.156)

O’Connor’s account also makes it seem that Galileo stuck to the purely hypothetical structure perfectly well and that the impression the heliocentric arguments in the book were “just a little bit too strong” was just something held by “Galileo’s critics”, with the heavy implication that this impression was simply because heliocentrism was the better position. This is nonsense. Anyone reading the work, even without a background in the scientific context of the time, can see that Salviati is given all the best arguments and most hard-hitting lines, that the supposedly neutral and reasonable Sagredo is wholly on Salviati’s side and that the hapless Simplicio is the deliberately weaker contributor. Galileo also stacks the deck by making the debate about “two world systems”, in a period in which there actually several potential contenders.

So he weights things even more heavily in the Copernican model’s favour by not only ignoring Kepler’s model (as most did at this point), but also ignoring the model favoured by most astronomers and natural philosophers: that of Tycho Brahe. Given that this model accounted for all the same data as the Copernican but also avoided the seeming and as-yet-unresolved problems of a moving earth, this is a glaring omission in a supposedly objective analysis. This is compounded by the fact that he only contrasts Copernicanism with the very weakest model available – the traditional Ptolemaic one – which had effectively been abandoned by astronomers in the light of recent telescopic discoveries. So it was not just some mealy-mouthed impression on the part of “Galileo’s critics” that the book was a biased defence of Copernicanism couched as an objective hypothetical discussion: this was a patent fact to anyone who read it.

Further, Galileo had originally given the book the title Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea, because he wanted its centrepiece to be his (badly flawed) “argument of the tides” for the movement of the earth. He considered this the killer argument for the physical reality of the Copernican system and saw the permission to publish this book as his way of presenting it to a wide audience. But Riccardi had firmly rejected that original title on the grounds this argument was too far from the agreed parameters of the work; seemingly unaware (since he outsourced the reading of the whole work) that the tides argument makes up the final day of the book’s dialogue and represents the climax of Salviati’s side of the dialogue.

So O’Connor gives the impression that Galileo did as “advised” and the reaction of “the Church” was basically unreasonable. The truth is that Galileo stayed theoretically within Riccardi and Urban’s instructions, but having been given an inch, he took a rhetorical mile. Urban had also required him to include the position the pope himself held that none of the hypothetical models could ever actually be demonstrated because God, in his omnipotence, could order the universe any way he chose. Galileo did this in a way, by putting a version of this argument in the mouth of Simplicio at the end of his work: saying the tides argument was “much more ingenious than any others I have heard” but warning that “it would be excessively bold if someone should want to limit and compel divine power and wisdom to a particular fancy of his”. Galileo makes it clear whose argument he is referring to here, with Simplicio attributing it to “a man of great knowledge and eminence, and before which one must give pause”.

Many have noted that Galileo puts the pope’s argument in the mouth of a character whose name could potentially be interpreted as “the simpleton” and even go so far as to say that this so insulted Urban that it caused all of Galileo’s subsequent troubles. This is rather too simplistic; though this potential reading probably did not help things for Galileo with the proud, thin-skinned and increasingly paranoid pontiff. But the real issue appears to have been the obvious and deliberate skewing of the book’s arguments toward one side and the fairly flagrant violation of the conditions on which its publication had been approved. On the instruction of an angry Pope Urban, the book’s publication and distribution ceased and the Inquisition was instructed to examine the Dialogue carefully. In September, 1632, a special commission reported that “Galileo may have overstepped his instructions by asserting absolutely the earth’s motion and the sun’s immobility and thus deviating from hypothesis”. But this was compounded by the discovery in the files from the 1616 inquiry of a case note – the document on which Galileo’s subsequent trial would turn:

[We think] that he may have been deceitfully silent about an injunction given to him by the Holy Office in the year 1616, whose tenor is: “that he abandon completely the above-mentioned opinion …. nor henceforth hold, teach or defend it in any way whatever, orally or in writing; otherwise the Holy Office would start proceedings against him. He acquiesced in this injunction and promised to obey”.

(Finocchario, p. 219)

That Galileo had not written the book the pope had agreed to clearly angered Urban. That this work had been published at a time when the politics of the Thirty Years War saw Urban under attack for laxity on doctrinal matters by the Spanish cardinals would have embarrassed and angered him further. But to have concealed what appeared to be an explicit personal instruction from the Inquisition to not discuss the matter in any way during his discussions with Urban in 1624 and negotiations with Riccardi in 1630-32 played the pope for a fool. Galileo, the former papal favourite, fell dramatically from favour and Urban VIII, the Renaissance prince, clearly wanted the Inquisition to make an example of this upstart mathematicus. The 1616 injunction noted above was the tool they would use to do this.

This brings us back to O’Connnor’s dark hints about fraud. Here is how he summarises the events of the 1633 trial of Galileo:

The Pope … subsequently ordered a commission to investigate Galileo resulting in him finally being put on trial in 1633. And this commission discovered something interesting as proof against Galileo. Remember, the charge against Galileo was this supposedly according to the church he had been ordered, way back in 1616, by Cardinal Bellarmine not to talk or write about heliocentrism in any way whatsoever and here he was writing a book clearly contradicting that injunction. Now in order to prove that Galileo had been explicitly told not to do this – that he had been ordered not to write about it – the prosecutors, the Pope’s Commission, produced a copy of a letter that they discovered in the files of the Holy Office, that Cardinal Bellarmine had apparently written to Galileo just after the two met, recounting what had been said at the meeting. In this letter from Cardinal Bellarmine, Galileo was told quote henceforth not to hold teach or defend (it it being heliocentrism) in any way whatever either orally or in writing otherwise the Holy Office would start proceedings against him.

This does seem pretty damning. Here is a copy of a letter written by Cardinal Bellarmine explicitly recounting that Galileo had been told not to teach about heliocentrism “in any way whatever” and that if he did he would be legally prosecuted. Clearly Galileo broke this injunction by writing his Dialogue.

(11.11 mins)

Yet again, this bungles things badly. What the Inquisition found in their files from 1616 was not some “letter from Cardinal Bellarmine”. It was actually two documents. The first was a minute note from a meeting on February 25, 1616, recording that Cardinal Giovanni Millini, Secretary to the Inquisition, had informed the Inquisition’s Lord Assessor and the Lord Commissary that Galileo was to be instructed to “abandon these [heliocentric] opinions” and, “if he should refuse to obey”, that he should “in the presence of a notary and witnesses”, be issued an injunction “to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it”. And it noted that if Galileo were not to agree to this, he should be imprisoned. (see Finocchario, p. 147)

The second document discovered in 1633 was the one O’Connor appears to be totally mischaracterising as a “letter from Cardinal Bellarmine”. This was actually a file note from the next day (February 26, 1616) recording that the injunction had in fact been given to Galileo in a meeting in the palace of Cardinal Bellarmine and in the presence of Bellarmine and the Inquisition’s Commissary General, Bishop Michelangelo Seghezzi. It states that Bellarmine gave the injunction “before me [i.e. the notary who recorded the file note] and witnesses” and that it stated Galileo was to “abandon completely the above mentioned position …. and henceforth not to hold, teach or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing; otherwise the Holy Office would start proceedings against him.” (Finocchario, pp. 146-7). It noted that “Galileo acquiesced in this injunction and promised to obey.”

So this was not some “letter”, it was a record of the meeting Galileo had with Bellarmine. Its exact status is slightly unclear, given that it was not signed by the meeting’s participants, the witnesses or by Galileo. So it is more of a memorandum and perhaps simply reflects the writer’s understanding of what was said. This did lead some nineteenth century historians to suggest it was a forgery created in 1633 to frame Galileo, but it is important to understand that (contra O’Connor) no historian accepts this speculation today. It seems to be an authentic record and, taken with the previous day’s minute noting that Galileo was to be ordered to stop teaching or defending heliocentrism “or from discussing it”, the February 26 note’s specification that he was “not to hold, teach or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing” seems likely to be accurate.

So yes, O’Connor is essentially correct when he asks rhetorically “so it seems that the church was justified in punishing him, right?” (12.38 mins). But here he waxes conspiratorial:

Well buckle up: here’s where things get really interesting. In the most dramatic part of the entire trial – get this – Galileo produced his own version of the same letter, but not only that Galileo’s letter was the original letter which the prosecution didn’t know he had. Galileo’s version of the letter was written in Bellarmine’s own hand and signed by the Cardinal; neither of which were true about the Church’s version of the letter. In other words, the Holy Office presented a copy of a letter to condemn Galileo, but Galileo had the original and the prosecutors didn’t know this until he produced it during the trial.
But so what, right? The church’s letter was just a copy of the original so who cares if Galileo was in possession of the first version.

Well, mysteriously – one might even say suspiciously – Galileo’s version of the letter doesn’t say that Galileo was ordered not to talk or write about heliocentrism in any way whatever. Instead it just tells him that heliocentrism is wrong and shouldn’t be explicitly advocated and since Galileo’s book was a work of fictional dialogue this would mean he never actually broke any of the church’s commands. Galileo’s original letter was missing the crucial order upon which his entire trial was predicated. How very strange.

(12.39 mins)

The only thing “very strange” here is this garbled jumble of total nonsense. To begin with, as noted above, the key document produced by the Inquisition was not some “letter from Cardinal Bellarmine”, it was a case note detailing what Galileo had been instructed in 1616. Knowing this and before they revealed the note in question, during his first deposition at his trial (April 12, 1633) the Inquisition questioned Galileo about what he had been instructed in the wake of the 1616 ruling on heliocentrism. Galileo made it clear that he believed he was told not to hold any heliocentric views “absolutely”, but that he could take and use them “suppositionally” (see Finocchario, pp. 258-9). To support this, he produced what the trial notes call “a sheet of paper with twelve lines of writing on one side only”. This document, not the one later produced by the Inquisition, was a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine and Galileo produced it as proof that he was allowed to explore heliocentrism “suppositionally”, so long as he did not present it as fact. Here is what Bellarmine wrote:

We, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, have heard that Mr. Galileo Galilei is being slandered or alleged to have abjured in our hands and also to have been given salutary penances for this. Having been sought about the truth of the matter, we say that the above-mentioned Galileo has not abjured in our hands, or in the hands of others here in Rome, or anywhere else that we know, any opinion or doctrine of his; nor has he received any penances, salutary or otherwise. On the contrary, he has only been notified of the declaration made by the Holy Father and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, whose content is that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus (that the earth moves around the sun and the sun stands at the center of the world without moving from east to west) is contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended or held. In witness whereof we have written and signed this with our own hands, on this 26th day of May 1616.

(Finocchario, p. 153)

This letter is dated to two months after the meeting with Bellarmine on February 26 and it appears to have been written to counter rumours that Galileo had been charged with heresy. In April, Bendetto Castelli wrote to Galileo to say these rumours were being repeated in Pisa and not long afterwards another friend, Giovanfrancesco Sagredo, wrote to say they were abroad in Venice as well. So Galileo appealed to Bellarmine and the letter he received was his insurance against these misrepresentations. But Galileo seemed to have also taken it as his “Get Out of Jail Free Card” and a licence to discuss heliocentrism “suppositionally”. Bellarmine’s letter only says Galileo was told heliocentrism “cannot be defended or held” but does not specify that he could not “hold, teach or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing”. So while it does not include that last detail, it does not actually say Galileo could discuss the idea as a hypothetical, nor does it actually contradict the February 26 case note.

It was only after Galileo produced this document that the Inquisition questioned him about his meeting with Bellarmine and asked “if one were to read to him what he was then told and ordered with injunction” would he remember this. Possibly sensing he was being walked into a trap, Galileo replied that he did not “recall” having been told anything other than what he had already declared. He was then read the February 26 case note, specifying that he could not “hold, teach or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing”. He responded that he did not “recall” the injunction this way:

I do remember that the injunction was that I could not hold or defend, or maybe even that I could not teach. I do not recall, further, that there was the phrase “in any way whatever”, but maybe there was.

Finocchario, p. 260)

At this point Galileo referred again to his “certificate” from Bellarmine, noting it did not contain the key phrases and said that perhaps he “did not retain them in my memory, I think because they are not in the said certificate, which I relied upon and kept as a reminder.” (Finocchario, p. 260)

This excuse does not seem to have cut much ice with his questioners, who went on to ask if, in his negotiations with Riccardi regarding permission to publish the Dialogue he had mentioned the 1616 injunction he had been given. Galileo admitted that he had not because “I did not judge it necessary” (Finocchario, p. 261). What we have here is Galileo being caught out by his interrogators and having to back-peddle by pleading misunderstanding and misremembering things. It is certainly nothing like O’Connnor’s fictional account, with Galileo triumphantly trumping the Inquisition by bravely producing “the original letter”. Nothing like that ever happened.

So O’Connor’s characterisation of the events and relevant documents is total nonsense. His supposed “letter” produced by the Inquisition was not a letter at all and was not by Bellarmine. What Galileo produced was a letter from Bellarmine, but definitely was NOT the “the original” of the Inquisition’s document and was something else entirely, written two months later. And it was Galileo who produced his document first and the Inquisition who then revealed theirs, in proof that Galileo’s recollection of the Bellarmine meeting was, at best, highly faulty.

But O’Connor has a conspiracy theory to peddle and so, warming to the task, his nonsense continues:

I mean okay, let me be clear here. Let me just briefly sum up this picture for you: the Church, in its inerrant and infinite wisdom declares heliocentrism to be heretical. They visit Galileo and later put him on trial for breaking an order he was apparently given in 1616. But the letter they used to prove that he’d been given this order was only a copy and Galileo produces the original letter which mysteriously doesn’t mention the order at all.

Okay, so what are we to make of this? Why might the Church be in possession of a copy of a letter with a suspicious addition not in the original, that just so happens to support their case against Galileo? Was this all just a big coincidental happy accident for the Church? Some scholars have rudely suggested that the Church faked their version of the letter in order to bring down Galileo. But I mean it surely would never do something as evil and dishonest as that, would they? Well, I’ll leave it to your own consideration, dear viewer, now that you know the facts.

(14.00 mins)

Except “the facts” that O’Connor presents to his “dear viewer” and on which he sarcastically declares they can make up their minds are total and complete garbage. His whole account of what documents were produced and when they were presented is gibberish that bears little relationship to what actually happened. So his heavy implication in this video (and his bald assertion in the later one in January 2021) that the Church’s key document was a forgery is utter nonsense. But O’Connor smugly declares to his viewers that “now you know the story of Galileo’s trial” and asks them if they think any punishment of Galileo was “justified”. Except the story O’Connor has spun is fiction.

But O’Connor is not done yet. He now indulges in a little of the historiographical fallacy of Presentism:

Even if Galileo did actually receive that order, even if the Church wasn’t lying or faking anything, the order was still an unjust one and so his punishment would still have been unjust too. Remember, the order itself was to stop talking about heliocentrism – a scientific truth we now know to be undeniably accurate – simply because it contradicted Scripture. So even if the Church really did order Galileo in 1616 not to talk about it, they had no right to. And it only makes Galileo all the more brave for continuing to champion the scientific method despite the unimaginable risk.

(16.31 mins)

It is hard to see by what objective standard O’Connor can declare that the order given to Galileo was “unjust” and the Church “had no right” to give this order. Certainly, we moderns would consider such an order unjust today and that the Church would have no valid right to give such a command on a matter of science. But this was in 1616. In the early seventeenth century, our modern conceptions of free inquiry and untrammelled academic freedom simply did not exist. Galileo, Bellarmine and everyone else involved in this affair lived in a different world to ours; a world of hierarchy, authority and absolutism. Every one of them – including, it has to be stressed, Galileo himself – would definitely have considered the Church did indeed have a “right” to make a ruling that the issue was a theological one and so give a command to a faithful Catholic believer as a result. Galileo clearly disagreed with the theological position, but at no point in any of his writings or correspondence does he even hint that the Church did not have the authority to rule on these matters. It is a patent distorting anachronism to present Galileo as someone bravely championing “the scientific method” in defiance of Church authority. He was a man of his time, not ours. It makes absolutely no sense to judge the Church of the early seventeenth century by modern standards of academic freedom that did not then exist. And it is completely silly to get outraged by these events on the basis of the fact that we know, with the infinite wisdom conveniently conveyed by hindsight, that heliocentrism was, much later, shown to be true.

O’Connor then moves, “for the sake of fairness”, to dispute what he calls “one potential argument in defence of the actions of the Church” which he attributes to “Catholic historians”:

In Galileo’s day, let’s not forget, heliocentrism was far from established. Galileo never actually proved that it was true nor had anybody done so, not conclusively anyway. At the time it was still a mere hypothesis. Not only this, but Cardinal Bellarmine himself actually once said that if unequivocal proof was presented to support heliocentrism the church would reinterpret the Scriptures. So it’s not that Galileo was silenced because he was a threat, but because he couldn’t actually prove what he was arguing and so the Church wasn’t anti-science because heliocentrism wasn’t science yet.

(17.14 mins)

This is not something only presented by “Catholic historians” as an “argument in defence of the actions of the Church”. It is something noted by anyone who actually understands the events in question. Heliocentrism was not proven. It was still a hypothesis. Everyone involved acknowledged this, including Galileo himself. Furthermore, only a tiny handful of scholars agreed with Galileo’s belief that it was correct, so the Church had the overwhelming weight of scientific consensus behind it when it ruled it was “absurd in philosophy” and went on to declare it was “formally heretical” in that it contradicted some Biblical texts. And Bellarmine did indeed say that, if it were ever demonstrated, those texts would have to be reinterpreted – which is precisely what eventually happened. Galileo was censured because his presenting the idea as fact was, actually, seen as “a threat” in an age of contested theological authority. But this was not because the Church was “anti-science”, it was because they knew that the science (as it stood at that point) was on its side. Without the benefit of our hindsight, they did not know this was going to change.

But O’Connor is not going to let the Church get off that easily:

Now, I could answer this objection by imploring you to go and just simply read the actual sentence administered by the church to Galileo in 1633. …. It’s palpably clear that the Church wasn’t just saying that Galileo’s views hadn’t been proven, but that they were false and that this is why Galileo was condemned.

(17.49 mins)

Except, as noted earlier, O’Connor simply does not understand the wording of the sentence or of the 1616 ruling and the decree of the Index: all of which are careful to note the propositions were “foolish and absurd in philosophy”. Yes, this means the ruling was that they were (in our words) scientifically wrong. At this early stage in the development of modern science, there was not yet any language for a working hypothesis that was not yet proven and was still being explored as a possibility. Something was either “demonstrated” or it was “false” – conceptually, there was no in between. The men of the Inquisition probably suspected, with Bellarmine, that this was unlikely to ever change, but Bellarmine at least acknowledged this as a possibility. So O’Connor’s appeal to “simply read the actual sentence”, as though this is all that is needed to understand some very complex context and meaning, is (as usual) far too simplistic. But O’Connor continues:

Even if Galileo couldn’t conclusively prove the heliocentric model that he advocated, the process of discussion and debate that books like his Dialogue represented define and are absolutely crucial to the scientific method. It’s this – the the challenge, the inquiry the questioning – that the church attempted to silence in Galileo. This is why the accusation that the Church was in conflict with science is a justified one. Not because they tried to silence a fact, but because they tried to prevent the honest method of obtaining facts, fearing that they would contradict Scripture. Not because the Church held to the wrong view, but because they did so dogmatically without allowing any challenges.

(19.30 mins)

Again, this is all both anachronistic and over simplistic. The ideal of free and unrestricted scientific inquiry that O’Connor presents here simply did not yet exist in the early seventeenth century, so condemning the Church of this time for not upholding this ideal is absurd. How could they? Similarly, the conceptual room modern science gives to ideas that are generally rejected by most scientists but still a working hypothesis also did not yet exist. So, again, how can the Church of that time be condemned for not giving this room to Galileo’s ideas? As it happened, the small space that was given to heliocentrism – that it could be considered as an instrumentalist calculating device – turned out to be sufficient for the idea to stay active and, later in the seventeenth century, eventually come to be accepted thanks to circumstantial but cumulative evidence that saw Kepler’s model triumph over the alternatives (see Thony Christie’s excellent summaries of how this happened in his “The Transition to Heliocentrism: The Rough Guides”). But O’Connor’s assessment that the Church was, indeed, “anti-science” because it did not hew to ideals of scientific inquiry that simply did not yet exist makes no sense as historical analysis. O’Connor does not understand history and seems generally uninterested in doing so. His objective is purely rhetorical and ideological – he has a sermon to preach and is happy to distort and mangle history so he can do so.

Conclusion

This article has been long, but necessarily so. Yet again, we have an anti-theist polemicist presenting pseudo historical nonsense out of a combination of profound ignorance and clear bias. But, yet again, it takes far more time, space and words to show this than it does for him to state his nonsense in the first place. I have gone to some effort here to give a sufficiently detailed account of the background and context that O’Connor ignores or simply does not understand. And to show how much of his version of events is, at best, confused, misrepresentative and simplistic. His silly conspiracy theory, of course, is far worse than the rest of his bad history. It is total and complete nonsense, based on an utter failure to understand the relevant documents, their context or even the basic sequence of events. Yet it is presented with smug, sneering aplomb, dressed up as ‘the facts”, “the story of Galileo’s trial” and even “what really happened”.

O’Connor sarcastically lets his “dear viewer” come to their own conclusion, after feeding them a pile of garbage. And it seems his fans have lapped it up: his video has over 9,500 likes on YouTube. Even more depressing than this, the comments section on his video are full of praise for his distorted nonsense, expressions of wonder at how much the viewers feel they have “learned” from his garbage and – worst of all – enthusiastic pleas for him to produce “more videos like this on history”! Once again an incompetent analyst with no background or training in the relevant methodology, source materials or context, makes pompous declarations about history and misleads our fellow atheists with stupid nonsense. People really need to stop paying attention to incompetent polemicists like O’Connor on historical topics. And O’Connor needs to stick to what he knows and leave history to the experts.

Addendum 03/08/22

After completing this already lengthy article, I realised I had forgotten to address one of the myths O’Connor mentions. In his January 2021 video O’Connor refers to Galileo being “threatened with torture” and describes the conditions under which he claims Galileo was questioned in 1633, saying it included “the Inquisition displaying its instruments of torture and threatening to use them”. This idea that Galileo was “shown the instruments” and so was in genuine danger of torture is a commonplace in many popular accounts of the Galileo Affair and forms a key element in the mythic version of the events, whereby the noble Galileo knuckles under to the Inquisition because he has the terrible tools of torture before his eyes. The phrase “shown the instruments” is often referred to in quote marks, implying that this phrase is found in the documentation of Galileo’s trial. Actor and prominent atheist, Stephen Fry, went one lurid step further and declared that Galileo in fact was tortured, and spoke with some passion in a television debate in 2009 about this terrible crime. This is despite the fact that this never actually happened.

Similarly, the whole idea that Galileo was “shown the instruments” of torture has no foundation in any of the trial documents and nothing indicates that, as O’Connor claims, there was any kind of “displaying [the Inquisition’s] instruments of torture and threatening to use them” at any point in Galileo’s trial. More importantly, the evidence shows very clearly that Galileo was never in any danger of being tortured and that he and everyone else knew that this was the case.

The best discussion of this myth and its attendant issues is Maurice Finocchario “Myth 8 – That Galileo was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism” in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (ed. R. Numbers, Harvard, 2009, pp. 68-79). As Finocchario shows, the only element in O’Connor’s claims on this point that is even close to correct is the idea that Galileo was “threatened with torture”, though even this is misleading. There are only two references to torture in the documents relating to Galileo’s trial. The first is the minutes of a meeting of the Inquisition on June 16, 1633, that refers to the decision that “Galileo is to be interrogated, even with the threat of torture”. The deposition that Galileo made on June 21, 1633, shows that this was made clear to Galileo, noting that “he was told to tell the truth, otherwise one would have to recourse to torture”. In response, Galileo assures the interrogators that “I am here to obey”.

So this means that the claim Galileo was “threatened with torture” is technically correct, though these are legal formulae used in all such circumstances. Whether or not there was any genuine risk of torture depended on many other factors, as Finocchario makes very clear. As odd and macabre as it seems to us, the Inquisition had as many rules around the application of torture as they had about everything else. The Roman Inquisition very rarely used torture for anyone and there were very clear parameters for when and how torture could be applied and to whom.

To begin with, certain people could not be tortured at all, including children, pregnant women and the old or the sick. Given Galileo was 69, had recently been too sick to travel to Rome and suffered from both arthritis and a hernia, he was therefore immediately disqualified for any kind of torture. The rules also forbade the torture of clerics of any kind. Two years before the trial Galileo had been granted a clerical benefice and had taken the tonsure, which means he would have been exempt on this ground as well. Galileo’s charges also fell short of actual heresy, making any form of corporal punishment or torture inappropriate. Finally, even if none of these things were the case, Galileo had many powerful friends and supporters in Rome including several cardinals – the idea that a defendant with this kind of social backing would have been tortured is fanciful.

And everyone involved in the process knew all of this. So while there was a formalised threat of torture given as part of the procedure used, no-one would have seen it as anything other than formula. Galileo was not shown any “instruments of torture”, contrary to O’Connor’s lurid assertions, and there was no actual danger that he would ever had actually been tortured. Once again, O’Connor simply does not know what he is talking about.

Further Reading

Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier : The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism, (University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine and the Bible (Notre Dame, 1991)

Thony Christie, “The Transition to Heliocentrism: The Rough Guides” and his extensive 52 part series “The Emergence of Modern Astronomy: A Complex Mosaic” on the Renaissance Mathematicus blog.

Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989)

Olaf Pedersen, “Galileo’s Religion”, The Galileo Affair: A Meeting of Faith and Science: Proceedings of the Cracow Conference, May 24-27, 1984, Citta del Vaticano: Specola Vaticana, 1985, edited by Coyne, G.V.

William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius, (Oxford University Press, 2004)