What were Galileos social & political influences?
According to one of these readings, Galileo knew the Earth to go round the Sun, as Copernicus had written, rather than the converse as implied in several Biblical passages. The Church would not allow science to disprove the revealed truth of Scripture, however, and hence threw Galileo to the Inquisition where he was forced under threat of torture to disclaim this opinion and never speak of it again. He was then imprisoned under house arrest for the remainder of his life, a clear example of the conflict between scientific investigation of the world around us and the presumed infallible authority of the Bible. Another, less well known myth states instead that the Church had been correct to deal with Galileo as it did. Having seen no convincing scientific evidence or reasons to abandon the Ptolemaic Earth-centred system, the Church ignored Galileo’s skilful rhetoric and held to the eminently reasonable approach of not abandoning an idea that was supported both by common sense and Scriptur
