Was Galileo Right and the Catholic Church Wrong?

Abstract

Galileo is an iconic founder of modern science, but his career and his contributions were far more complex than his reputation. He, too, championed a scientific method, but his thinking differed greatly from Bacon’s and Descartes’. Galileo’s method was based on Archimedes’ combination of experiment, mathematics, and deduction. This method allowed Galileo to claim certain knowledge of reality derived from mathematical accounts of natural phenomena. But he also claimed certain knowledge of reality derived directly from observation, as in his assertion that the Earth moved around the sun. While Galileo’s predictions were sometimes correct, he had no criterion for distinguishing between correct and incorrect inferences or for connecting his mathematical deductive reasoning about phenomena to the way they really were.