“Not the Sharpest Knives in the Drawer” – A Creationist Understanding of the Galileo Affair

Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition
Christiano Banti (1857)

In The Fundamental Mistake of Theistic Evolutionists (published by Christian Ministries International), Jason Carlson and Ron Carlson offer encouragement to Christians who feel that by adhering to Creationism “the church is in danger of looking like fools to the more enlightened ‘scientific’ community.”  They’ve noticed that many Christians believe that by “holding onto a literal reading of the Genesis record … [Christians] are in danger of making the same mistake that they made with Galileo back in the 17th century.”   The Carlsons, however, assuage their fears with an uplifting history lesson, one that places the blame for geocentrism on the seductions of nasty pagan philosophers rather than on biblical literalism.  They write:

Unfortunately, theistic evolutionists have gotten their history of Galileo all wrong. The problem with the Church during the time of Galileo was not that they were using the Bible to help them interpret the scientific evidence of the day, but rather, the Church had allowed the dominant philosophies and science of the day to influence their reading of scripture. Prior to Galileo, the dominant scientific viewpoint regarding the universe was that the earth was the center of everything; and thus, the sun, planets, and stars all revolved around the earth. This theory was first developed by pagan philosophers like Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Ptolemy (AD 2nd century); and later was adopted as the most plausible scientific explanation throughout academia and the Church. Thus, the Church had allowed their reading and interpretation of scripture to be influenced by the false theories of pagan philosophers, which had been adopted by the scientists of the day.

The real point of the Galileo story is not that science made the Church look foolish, but rather, the Church looked foolish because they had given up a correct reading of scripture for the sake of accommodating the dominant pagan theories of the day. The Galileo story is actually an indictment against Christian evolutionists. Christian evolutionists have abandoned the literal history of God’s creation account in Genesis for the sake of accommodating the popular, man-made theories of today. In doing this, they are the ones who risk making the Church look foolish; for abandoning the biblical record of creation will never get one closer to true science.

For the record, Cardinal Bellarmine, who played a major role in the condemnation of Galileo and Copernican astronomy, knew his bible and ecclesiastical wisdom very well – quite unlike Jason and Ron Carlson.  Bellarmine noted that placing the sun at the center of the universe “is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.”  He continued:

[The] Council [of Trent] prohibits interpreting Scripture against the common consensus of the Holy Fathers; and if Your [Reverence] wants to read not only the Holy Fathers, but also the modern commentaries on genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will find all agreeing in the literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world.

Here are some of the pertinent biblical scriptures that the Inquisitors took quite literally indeed:

Psalm 93:1 --  “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.”

Psalm 96:10 – “The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved.”

Psalm 104:5 --  “He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.”

Ecclesiastes 1:5 – “The sun rises and the sun sets and hurries back to where it rises.”

1 Chronicles 16:30 --  “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.”

Joshua 10:13 --  “The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since ….”

Jason Carlson, by the way, happens to be the Vice-President of Christian Ministries International, and has advanced higher education throughout “28 countries on 6 continents, speaking and teaching in numerous churches, high schools, universities, and seminaries.”  But if Creationists follow the advice he offers here, then they’ll not only look “like fools to the more enlightened ‘scientific’ community,” they’ll also look like complete idiots to anyone with an understanding of history.  At the same time, they’ll reveal how little they actually read their Bibles.