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The Aquinas quote has no application in this case. Interestingly, it was Aquinas’ furthering of Aristotelianism in the universities that has a great deal to do with laying the groundwork for the Galileo controversy.

What follows is long, but as a Protestant I am weary of the propagation of the Galileo nonsense (the same is true of the “Flat Earth” myth relating to Columbus). The Vatican needs to stop apologizing for the Crusades, Galileo, and other things. It all reeks of moral and intellectual cowardice.

1. Heliocentrism wasn’t Galileo’s theory. It was the theory of Nicolaus Copernicus, who died 20 years before Galileo was born. So, we should ask why Galileo was cast as the hero in a melodrama about Heliocentrism and science versus Christianity.

The truth is that there never was a genuine dispute between heliocentrism and Christianity, and the so-called persecution of Galileo had mostly to do with his big mouth. Let me explain.

2. As I mentioned heliocentrism was Copernicus’s theory, and Copernicus was Catholic cleric (canon lawyer) who enjoyed the support of the cardinal of Capua and Pope Paul III. His book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543, circulated at little or no cost for 70 years. So, as Philip Sampson points out, Copernicus was unsuitable as a hero in a little play about the persecution of science by Christianity, but Galileo would do, however, because he was tried in connection with his teaching that the sun is the center of the universe.

3. In fact, the conflict over heliocentrism had very little to do with the Bible or Christian theology. It was instead a conflict with the Aristotelian science of the day that was the scientific orthodoxy in the universities. In particular, heliocentrism was directly opposed to the Ptolomaic model of astronomy that had been developed initially in the 2nd century based on Aristotle’s ideas. Ptolomy found that Aristotle’s model of the sun and stars revolving around the earth on their crystal spheres could be made to fit the known facts quite well. As more information about celestial movements came to be known over the centuries, the Ptolomaic system generally proved adaptable and capable of providing accurate predictions.

4. By the 16th Century, enough problems had accumulated with Ptolomy’s system that Copernicus sought to develop a heliocentric model. That model adopted the ancient Pythagorean/Aristarcus hypothesis that the sun is the center of the universe, rather than the earth, as the Aristotelians claimed.

5. In the final analysis, Copernicus’s model proved more complicated than Ptolomy’s, in part because Copernicus assumed that the planets’ orbits were circles. Moreover, the available observational tests at that time provided absolutely no empirical basis for preferring heliocentrism over Ptolomy’s model. In fact, even during Galileo’s lifetime there was insufficient evidence to establish that the earth revolves around the sun. So, contrary to your claim, Galileo wasn’t right in any scientific sense - he was making claims he could not support with evidence.

6. Another of the myths regarding Copernicus is that he delayed publishing his heliocentric theory because he feared punishment by the church and when he did finally publish in 1543 the Inquisition condemned it as heretical.

7. While Copernicus did delay, it had nothing to do with fear of the church or the Inquisition. Instead, Copernicus delayed because he feared ridicule from other astronomers, and in that he wasn’t disappointed. Nevertheless, as noted, the book circulated without incident for 70 years.

8. Galileo enters the picture as a 50 year-old enthusiast for heliocentrism who, like Copernicus, delayed publishing his views on heliocentrism because he, too, feared academic ridicule. In any event, he began publishing his views in the popular press asserting without reservation that the Copernican theory is true and that the Aristotelians were wrong. For their part, the Aristotelians viewed Galileo as a crank on the fringes of this issue who was advancing an ancient Pythagorean/Aristarchean view that had been discredited by Aristotle.

9. Rather than being harried and harassed by the church, Galileo had up to this point enjoyed cordial relations with the church. He had been celebrated by cardinals, had an audience with Pope Paul V, and befriended by the future Pope Urban VIII who, in 1620, wrote an ode in Galileo’s honor.

10. Because of the kerfuffle over Galileo’s popular writings on heliocentrism, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, a distinguished scholar, was asked to look into the matter. After the inquiry, Galileo was not condemned, but rather was told the obvious: the evidence does not support the assertions Galileo had been making about heliocentrism. This also resulted in a reexamination of Copernicus’s book, which was suspended in 1616 for 4 years, and then reissued with minor changes to make clear that heliocentrism was only a hypothesis. For his part, Bellarmine thought heliocentrism made “excellent good sense as a hypothesis.”

11. Here the matter would have remained but for Galileo’s ego. In 1632, at roughly the age of 70, Galileo again went to the popular press with a work called a “ Dialogue Concerning the Chief World Systems”. The Dialogue was framed as a debate between two protagonists – an advocate of heliocentrism and an Aristotelian. Galileo named the Aristotelian “Simplicio”, which was a word play on the name of an early commentator on Aristotle and the word for simpleton or stupid. Needless to say, Galileo was debating with himself and winning big. But this wasn’t enough. He also put in the mouth of “stupid” a favorite argument for the Ptomelmaic system of his admirer, Pope Urban VIII and ridiculed it.

12. Needless to say, His Holiness was not amused, and Galileo was summoned to a hearing in 1633. Galileo was forced to abjure heliocentrism. But far from being tortured and kept in a prison cell, he was given his own rooms and servants while he was detained. He was then sent home with his pensions from the church intact.

13. BTW, Galileo lived and died a Christian, and was buried in the Basilca of Santa Croce.

14. What can we say of Galileo and the Controversy? 1. Made enormous contributions to science – founded kinematics and is said to be the father of physics. 2. Like anyone, he was not infallible or free of personal prejudice. Even though, in a much revised version, heliocentrism was right, Galileo was wrong on the facts.

For all of his brilliance, Galileo was far from being a model of a man who would follow the evidence wherever it might lead. In fact, he was a bit eccentric. Galileo dismissed as a “useless fiction” the idea, held by his contemporary Johannes Kepler, that the moon caused the tides. I believe he also thought comets were optical illusions. Galileo refused to accept Kepler’s elliptical orbits of the planets, considering the circle the “perfect” shape for planetary orbits.

He was a brilliant man whose ego also led him astray from time to time – which is to say he was quite human. His problem with the pope was occasioned by a dispute over heliocentrism, but it had nothing really to do with an intrinsic conflict between religion and science. On this point, the church was more rational than Galileo given the available evidence, and Galileo would probably have also been called to account if instead of ridiculing the Pope’s views on astronomy he had written a tract ridiculing the pope’s personal hygiene or the way he dressed.

15. Like the Columbus myth, the Galileo story was developed by 19th century writers friendly to the French Enlightenment as part of their campaign against the Catholic Church. In the 19th Century the scope of the Galileo myth was expanded to include Protestants as villains as well. As this mendacious embellishment developed, Calvin was alleged to have attacked Copernicus even before the Catholic Church. Bertrand Russell, without citation, claimed that Calvin rejected heliocentrism by citing Psalm 93:1 (the world is also stablished so that it cannot be moved) and exclaiming “Who would venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” Later historians of science such as Thomas Kuhn would claim that this passage appears in Calvin’s commentary on Genesis.

The difficulty is that Calvin probably had not even heard of Copernicus, and no such passage is in his commentary. Instead, it appears that the passage is a late 19th Century fabrication – perhaps by Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell – that was intended to propagate the myth of the enduring warfare between science and theology.

16. What purpose does the Galileo myth – I should say, the Galileo lie – serve? The Galileo story is driven by the desire to promote the view that Christianity and science are necessarily opposed to one another. It is meant to create a false contrast between a modern world that enjoys science and technological progress while, by contrast, religion is based on faith rather than reason and leads to superstition rather than science, to authoritarian repression rather than to democracy. Thus, the real purpose of this lie, like the Columbus lie that I merely mentioned, is to bolster the cultural and political power of secular elites.

While thee is a lot that could be said about both the Galileo myth and the Columbus “flat earth” myth, to good sources are the books by Jeffrey Burton Russell and Philip J. Sampson on these topics.