Science And The Bible

[Purple Rabbit]

Galileo didn't interpret scripture to come up with the heliocentric view, he simply followed the evidence. He then argued against a literal reading of scripture, since the scripture was literally wrong.

What I said was that Galileo supported his heliocentric concept with a more accurate interpretation of scripture. He wrote to a pupil: “Even though Scripture cannot err, its interpreters and expositors can, in various ways. One of these, very serious and very frequent, would be when they always want to stop at the purely literal sense." The scripture was not literally wrong it was taken literally wrong.

The point is that the information which lead to the heliocentric view was empirical and not derived from scripture. There is no science in scripture. There is no empirical basis in scripture that matches the information Galileo used. Scripture does not mention the moons of Jupiter. Scripture is a really bad source for knowledge on the universe in general. This is mainly because it is fabulation of iron age tribes. There is no basis for the authority of scripture on the state of the universe whatsoever. You cannot fly to the moon on basis of the bible, you cannot predict or explain the motion of the planets from it, you cannot cure diseases with it. It basically has the same authority on knowledge of the universe as a bunch of fairy tales. To assert that the bible holds any information on the constitution of the cosmos is completely ridiculous and the confrontation of the church with Galileo made this very painfully clear.

Galileo was forced by the church to try to reconcile scripture with his evidence based findings. The ambiguous character of the bible at some points left some room for this. This is not a strength of the information in the bible but a weakness rather that he tried to use in his advantage. There was no other option for Galileo in his time than to embark on the reconciliation path. This was a matter of life and death.

Also observe that the ambiguous character of scripture did not bring him in conflict with scripture itself but with self-acclaimed authorities on bible interpretation. These authorities demanded an explanation from early scientists to reconcile their findings with scripture, not the other way around. It was the church who prior to Galileo had cuddled up with the best knowledge on the universe around (Aristotle's view) that with Galileo's findings was confronted with a problem and sought to stick to the old interpretation. It was dogmatic religion who sought confrontation with the emerging scientific method. For your information: religion lost the battle right there with Galileo's case.