In light of my recent post about the priority of truth, I could not help being struck by the February 15 Quote of the Day from 2005: “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” Wikiquote shows the quote as “unsourced” – meaning that the document from which is comes is unknown, but it is apparently known to have been said by Galileo Galilei.
I have taken much interest in learning about Galileo, in part perhaps because while I appreciate his discoveries in astronomy, I cannot begin to understand the mathematics and physics needed to arrive at his conclusions. More than that, though, I think it is because nearly every discussion of Galileo seems to revolve around his conflict with the Catholic church.
Christians I know would not disagree with Galileo’s statement (in a letter to Christina of Tuscany), “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.” As there is no conflict between God and Truth, there is none between what we know by faith and what we know by our study of reality.
Of course, when I say “what we know” I mean what actually is true, not what we think we know that in fact is false. There are things we think we know that do not match reality, whether in the realm of spiritual truths or facts about the physical universe; those cannot properly be said to be things we know because they are false. But we will still say we know them because we think we do.
It’s just about impossible to talk about science and faith these days without getting into arguments about creationism vs evolution, arguments that usually convince no one of anything (except perhaps the foolishness of people with opposite viewpoints). I find the subject very interesting, and I’m currently reading another book on the subject (I’ll post a review once I finish it). But I don’t want to sidetrack my own post by getting into that right now.
With the stack of books I already have that I’m either reading or planning to read, I doubt that I’ll pick up a biography of Galileo. But I know he comes up in the book I’m currently reading on the history of the calendar, and I’m sure there must be a chapter on him in The Discoverers, one of the other books on my history shelf. And I’m sure with this being the International Year of Astronomy (in recognition of “the 400th anniversary of the first recorded astronomical observations with a telescope by Galileo Galilei and the publication of Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova in the 17th century”), I’ll be encountering more to read about Galileo.
