Galileo Galilei: Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany,
1615
The
reason produced for condemning the opinion that the earth moves and the sun
stands still in many places in the
Bible one may read that the sun moves and the earth stands still. Since the Bible cannot err; it
follows as a necessary consequence that anyone takes a erroneous and heretical position who maintains that the
sun is inherently motionless and
the earth movable.
With
regard to this argument, I think in the first place that it is very pious to
say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth-whenever
its true meaning is understood. But
I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which
are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the
Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning,
one might; fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true
might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies.
Thus it would be necessary to assign to God feet, hands and eyes, as well as
corporeal and human affections, such as anger, repentance, hatred, and sometimes
even the forgetting of things past and ignorance of those to come. . .
Now
the Bible, merely to condescend to popular capacity, has not hesitated to
obscure some very important pronouncements, attributing to God himself some
qualities extremely remote from (and even contrary to) His essence. Who, then,
would positively declare that this principle has been set aside, and the Bible
has confined itself rigorously to the bare and restricted sense of its words,
when speaking but casually of the earth, of water, of the sun, or of any other
created thing? Especially in view of the fact that these things in no way
concern the primary purpose of the sacred writings, which is the service of God
and the salvation of souls - matters infinitely beyond the comprehension of the
common people.
This
being granted, I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to
begin not from the authority of scriptural passages but from sense experiences
and necessary demonstrations; for the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature
proceed alike from the divine Word the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost
and the latter as the observant executrix of God's commands. It is necessary
for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man,
to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as
the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is
inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or
cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are
understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which
sense experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove
to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony
of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words.
For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as
those which govern all physical effects; nor is God any less excellently
revealed in Nature's actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible. . .
. . . I do not feel obliged to believe
that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has
intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge
which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason
in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct
experience or necessary demonstrations. This must be especially true in those
sciences of which but the faintest trace (and that consisting of conclusions) is
to be found in the Bible. Of astronomy; for instance, so little is found that
none of the planets except Venus are so much as mentioned, and this only once
or twice under the name of "Lucifer." If the sacred scribes had had
any intention of teaching people certain arrangements and motions of the
heavenly bodies, or had they wished us to derive such knowledge from the Bible,
then in my opinion they would not have spoken of these matters so sparingly in comparison
with the infinite number of admirable conclusions which are demonstrated in
that science. Far from pretending to teach us the constitution and motions of
the heavens and other stars, with their shapes, magnitudes, and distances, the authors
of the Bible intentionally forbore to speak of these things, though all were
quite well known to them. Such is
the opinion of the holiest and most learned Fathers, and in St. Augustine we
find the following words:
"
. . .Hence let it be said briefly, touching the form of heaven, that our authors
knew the truth but the Holy Spirit did not desire that men should learn things
that are useful to no one for salvation."
. . .It follows as a necessary
consequence that, since the Holy Ghost did not intend to teach us whether
heaven moves or stands still, whether its shape is spherical or like a discus
or extended in a plane, nor whether the earth is located at its center or off to one side, then so much
the less was it intended to settle for us any other conclusion of the same
kind. And the motion or rest of the earth and the sun is so closely linked with
the things just named, that without a determination of the one, neither side
can be taken in the other matters. Now if the Holy Spirit has purposely neglected
to teach us propositions of this sort as irrelevant to the highest goal (that is,
to our salvation), how can anyone affirm that it is obligatory to take sides on
them, that one belief is required by faith, while the other side is erroneous?
Can an opinion be heretical and yet have no concern with the salvation of
souls? Can the Holy Ghost be asserted not to have intended teaching us
something that does concern our salvation? I would say here something that was
heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: "That the intention of the Holy
Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes."