Galileo Observed: Science and the Politics of Belief (review)

In 1633 the Inquisition condemned Galileo as "vehemently suspected of heresy" and banned his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. His suspected heresy was twofold: to maintain that the earth revolves around the sun and that scripture is not a scientific authority. The condemnation was the outcome of a trial occasioned by the book's publication and the climax of a dispute started in 1613, when he had criticized the biblical objection to Copernicanism. The controversy involved two major issues: the astronomical question of the behavior of the earth in physical reality, and the philosophical question of the relationship between science and scripture.

While this condemnation ended the original affair, it also started a new controversy that partly reflects the original issues, but has also acquired an autonomous life and continues to our own day. For example, there have been debates about whether and why Galileo's condemnation was right or wrong; and whether or not the condemnation shows the incompatibility between science and religion, between individual freedom and institutional authority, between political expediency and scientific truth, and between scientific research and social responsibility. The subsequent affair also includes episodes such as the Church's acceptance of Copernicanism through the removal from the 1835 Index of Prohibited Books of Galileo's Dialogue and Copernicus's De revolutionibus; the declaration that scripture is not a scientific authority in Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893); and the partial rehabilitation of Galileo by Pope John Paul II (1979–92). And the subsequent affair inheres in a uniquely voluminous and complex historiography, with contributions by scientists, historians, philosophers, theologians, playwrights, novelists, journalists, and so on.

In the study of the affair, there has been an understandable and justifiable tendency to stress the original trial, since it embodies the real cause célèbre, whereas the subsequent controversy is largely a byproduct. However, there is now a growing realization that the neglect of the subsequent controversy is unwarranted and that it deserves serious study both for its own sake and for what we can learn from it about the original episode. This book is partly animated by this guiding idea and is thus welcome.

The book undertakes a critical examination of works by such authors as John Draper (1874), Andrew White (1896), Pierre Duhem (1908), Bertolt Brecht (1938/1955), Arthur Koestler (1959), Walter Brandmüller (1982), Pietro Redondi (1983), Mario Biagioli (1993), Annibale Fantoli (1993), James Reston (1994), and Dava Sobel (1999). Such works are selected for their high circulation and impact. Although Shea and Artigas express some appreciation toward them, generally they are concerned with exposing the errors and sketching a more tenable account. The errors they catalogue span a very wide spectrum: inaccuracies, misinterpretations, distortions, exaggerations, oversimplications, equivocations, superficialities, incoherences, irrelevancies, and one-sidedness. Shea and Artigas charge each work with one or more of these errors and substantiate their charges. In the process, they defend two major theses: the harmony thesis that science and religion are not conflictual but harmonious in their relationship in general, and that in particular the Galileo affair does not really prove otherwise; and the pro-clerical thesis that in Galileo's trial the Church's position and behavior were more reasonable and proper than ordinarily supposed, and Galileo's views and conduct less so.

However, this is a disappointing book. For in their effort to present "Galileo observed" (iii) as he really is and "to set the record straight" (ix), the authors commit many of the errors that they are bent on exposing in other works; and the account they sketch is no more tenable than the average of those other works. The situation is saddening, for the general conception of the project is laudable, and so the flawed execution not only frustrates that worthy goal but also prevents the appreciation of other insights that abound in this book. One of these insights comes at the...