Galileo and Religion

From a theological perspective, it matters not at all whether the earth moves around the sun or vice versa, since the Bible hardly deals with any of these scientific questions at all. Galileo was correct that the purpose of the Bible was to teach certain religious and spiritual truths, not to provide scientific information on chemistry, physics or biology. Even if its authors had been aware of these subjects, they were basically irrelevant to the stories they intended to tell. In Genesis, for example, the Bible asserts that God created the universe out of nothing in the very distant past, but never mentions whether the earth or other planets are moving. Among those few people in the ancient world who gave any thought to these matters, the views of Aristotle and Ptolemy had been officially accepted by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, and therefore it...
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