Galileo, Science and the Church

by Jerome J. Langford

A penetrating account of the confrontation between Galileo and the Church of Rome

Genres: Science, History, Nonfiction

248 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1971

Reviews

[Katie]

I was going to give this book three stars, but then I read his postscript and he just seems like an absolutely lovely and fascinating person, so I'm going to give it four stars instead.

Langford provides a clear and readable overview of the 'Galileo affair' that mostly stays on the middle ground (which means that he's accused by people of being both anti-Church and anti-Galileo). For Langford, the basic problem of the whole thing was that both parties approached things in the wrong way. The Church was unable to realize (for a long time) that the Bible was not a science text book and that Post-Tridentine theology had hardened exegesis and frozen out a lot of its creative potential. Galileo was unable to realize that Copernicanism was still very much unproven and did not answer questions much better than other theories put for at the time. Langford sees him as brilliant and brave, but also much more hard-headed and combative than he needed to be. Too much, too soon, too stubborn.

It's a good introductory text to the subject and Langford was nice enough to add an appendix in 1992 that sums up a lot of the publications on the issue since then (and he points out some of the problems in his original work).

[~rebekah~]

shoutout to prof koss

[Emma]

interesting topic but somehow written so boringly

[Taylor]

Not as bad as I was expecting it to be.

[Davy Bennet Surf]

1966 hardback. Donating.

[A.B.]

While interesting, the author of this book could have done better. He avoids the discussion on how money had to do with what happened to Galileo and the church. And in the final chapter he makes sweeping generalizations about modern times, the future, and religion. He briefly seems like a man hunkered down in a bunker with a radio and a blog. But before that it did contain a lot of rather interesting facts and ideas about what the Galileo issue. Overall I would not recommend this book beyond basic skimming.