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When all the astrologists and theologians in the Vatican agree, am I to believe some obscure Pisan mathematician who says that the earth whirls around its poles and the circles around the sun, a proposition that is both against the evidence of my senses and contrary to Holy Scripture?

I know you were engaging in sarcasm to ridicule today's Global Warming Chicken Littles, but to be fair, it was primarily the 'scientists' of the day that were going after Galileo. They were 'schooled' in the Ptolemaic model of Astronomy, and they didn't like this upstart telling them that they were wrong. They were the ones who leaned on the Pope to tell him that he needed to slap down this 'infidel'. And no, Holy Scripture doesn't say anything about the Earth's place in the Solar System. It tells us that 'He hangeth the Earth on nothing' (perceptive insights for someone writing some 4000 years ago), but the primary focus of this Book is to tell us about a God of love and justice reaching out to lost mankind - and it doesn't share a lot of insights regarding physics.

Actually, the Vatican-Galileo controversy is a lot more complicated than the simple morality tale of a conflict between superstition and science that silly people like Bertolt Brecht make it out to be. A good precis can be found in Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers. Harvard Astrophysicist turned historian of science, Owen Gingerich in The Eye of Heaven gives a modern scientist's perspective. Ptolemaic astronomy would be seen as a better physical theory in modern terms. What Copernicus accomplished was little more than a change in coordinates, and to less convenient coordinate system.

To complicate things further, Koestler suggests that the Jesuits were convinced Copernicans by the time of Galileo kerfuffle, but wanted to introduce Copernicanism in a manner that wouldn't cause a fuss or get anyone excommunicated. They saw Galileo's needlessly confrontational style as counterproductive. There is something to this since De Revolutionibus had been out for 80 years without being placed in the Index until Galileo raised a ruckus.

My little analogy was for the edification of those whose minds are incapable of Jesuitical subtlety.