by

“The Book of Nature,” wrote Galileo (d. January 8, 1642), “is written in mathematics.”

“Philosophy [i.e. physics] is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.”1

In these words from Saggiatore—his mid-career manifesto setting out the principles of the scientific method—we find one of many examples of Galileo’s genius. Everyone knows him for his adaptation and improvement of the telescope and for the astronomical discoveries he immediately began to make as he pointed it toward the sky. But he revolutionized more than just astronomy. It was Galileo who brought the promethean fire of celestial mathematics to the dark labyrinth of the Earth and physical bodies in motion here below.

Prior to Galileo, the heavenly spheres were conceived of as pure, divine substances whose motions were manifestations of an eternal, flawless, and unchanging divine realm, a hierarchy of being with the stately stars at the outermost firmament and the sun and the planets below them, all moving in intricate, mathematical precision. At the very bottom of this chain of being was the Earth, around which the providential heavens revolved and where things came into being and were destroyed, unlike anywhere else in the cosmic order of things. Here, bodies collided or moved in erratic patterns, blown about by winds or washed around by seas. Disastrous and unpredictable events like storms, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions confirmed that the Earth was a chaotic place very different from the sidereal heavens and planets. It was not expected that laws as consistent and mathematically elegant as those that described the heavens could ever apply to objects on earth, though there were efforts, of course, to measure and explain things quantitatively.

With Galileo, the gulf between the heavens and the Earth began to be effaced. He observed the Moon and reported that it had mountains and craters: it was a physical— not purely spiritual—body that was in some significant respects like the Earth. Jupiter had moons orbiting it, an observation that destroyed definitively the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic assumption that everything revolved around the Earth. And the sun itself was observed to have blemishes (spots) and a rotation. At the same time, Galileo’s revolutionary approach to physical objects on the Earth proceeded from the hypothesis that the same mathematics that described the heavens could be applied to physical bodies on the Earth, setting the stage for future advances by Descartes and Newton and further narrowing the imaginal separation between the human realm and the eternal worlds.2

Galileo brought evidence from outside the received system of knowledge of his day that disrupted what nearly everyone thought they knew about God’s creation. His discoveries were apocalyptic—revelations that seemed to portend the end of everyone’s conceptual worlds. Given the magnitude of the implications of his discoveries, it might even be surprising that he received the degree of forbearance that he did from the religious authorities of the Inquisition. With hindsight, we now see that Galileo was showing humanity how to read the Book of Nature with the same fidelity and care as we had been reading the Book of Scripture. Both books, it turned out, were needed—each in order to better understand the other. Both pointed to truths that mattered. Both were revelations, and both required interpretation.

At the end of the apocalypse, after the passing away of the Ptolemaic world, surprisingly enough, there was found a new heaven and a new earth—very much like the old ones—but viewed now with clearer, truer eyes than ever before. God was not banished nor his works degraded in this new order of things. Only our perspective had shifted and certain stories we had told ourselves had to be reinterpreted based on new information.

We lose nothing worth keeping when our errors are shown as such, and there is no truth that has any need to fear any other truth. As we celebrate the life and revelatory career of Galileo Galilei, let us ask ourselves: What is our relationship to truth today and to the evidence that sustains that truth? When new information challenges our understanding of things, what should we do? How can we manage risk as we explore truth—not only physical risk, but spiritual risk, since what we discover, we might not always be prepared to understand correctly? How can we discern when the time has come for us to change long-held views? What if others are not ready? And if the need for change comes, how can we embrace it gracefully and with respect for the faithfulness of our predecessors? How can we look on the past “with joy and not with sorrow, neither with contempt, concerning [our] first parents”?

______________________

Mormon Lectionary Project

Collect: Our Heavenly Father, we acknowledge thy hand in all things and confess the wonders of thy love as displayed in the heavens and in the Earth. We thank thee for the light and knowledge thou gavest to thy servant Galileo and through him to all humanity. We confess that thy ways are higher than our ways. Grant us, therefore, grace for the journeys of understanding that still lie ahead of us, and courage to follow wherever thy truths shall lead us. Thus we pray in the name of Christ our Lord, who is one with thee and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Scriptures:

Psalm 19:1–4

The heavens are telling the glory of God;

and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours forth speech,

and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words;

their voice is not heard;

yet their voice goes out through all the earth,

and their words to the end of the world.

Deuteronomy 10:12–15

So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being. Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the Lord your God, the earth with all that is in it, yet the Lord set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the peoples, as it is today.

2 Peter 1:16–21

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain. So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

Alma 32:21–23, 26–27

And now as I said concerning faith—faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true. And now, behold, I say unto you, and I would that ye should remember, that God is merciful unto all who believe on his name; therefore he desireth, in the first place, that ye should believe, yea, even on his word.

And now, he imparteth his word by angels unto men, yea, not only men but women also. Now this is not all; little children do have words given unto them many times, which confound the wise and the learned….

Now, as I said concerning faith—that it was not a perfect knowledge—even so it is with my words. Ye cannot know of their surety at first, unto perfection, any more than faith is a perfect knowledge. But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.

______________

Disclaimer: I’m no scientist and so make no claim to authority on the facts I’ve tried to lay out here. I have made an effort to state things accurately as best I can judge them from reliable sources, but if I’ve missed a nuance somewhere, I’m happy to be corrected.

1. Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, translated by Stillman Drake in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957), 237–38.

2. Here’s how the Encyclopædia Britannica puts it: “Galileo was the first man who perceived that mathematics and physics, previously kept in separate compartments, were going to join forces. He was thus able to unify celestial and terrestrial phenomena into one theory, destroying the traditional division between the world above and the world below the Moon. (New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1989), Macropædia, s.v. Galileo).