"It's funny where you find great events" "Today one of the more forgettable squares in Rome is the Campo Di Fiori" "Place of Flowers" "Flower market, except for that ominous statue" "Giordano Bruno" "He was burnt here in this Place of Flowers, for heresy by the Inquisition on February 17 1600" "The heretic's fork was jammed through his jaw" "The other end was buried in his breast bone so that he should not spread the word" "The Church believed God's earth and God's children were the center of the universe" "And the Catholic Church the unquestioned voice of God who spoke from Rome" "Bruno denied all that So they set him on fire" "There was to be no effusion of blood, they said" "Soft tissue drips away quickly" "Bones fall like dry sticks" "There's no blood there" "It boils away and the soul goes tidily to Hell" "Fire marked the century" "The fire of Protestant Reformation raged and so the fire the Church feared most was of new ideas, heresy" "Bruno's Inquisitor was the Reverend Robert Bellarmine" "Remember him" "Later he will be concerned with another heresy in the form of a book" "The book is all but forgotten but the events around it shook the world, literally" "It said that the earth moved on its own axis and it circled the sun" "So what, you say?" "So then, that was the biggest revolution in thought the biggest, it changed everything" "Everything!" "We often cry harder when they burn books than when they burn people" "The best books rest still and silent in ivory towers" "And yet they change worlds literally" "In the case of Galileo's Dialogue it moved this world from the center of the universe the first and crucial act of the scientific revolution" "These are the three books that bridged the scientific revolution" "Copernicus's De Revolutionibus" "Isaac Newton's Principia and in between" "Galileo's Dialogo or The Dialogue" "Now it's not the greatest scientific book" "It doesn't rank with these other two and yet this is the book that won the war" "This gave the arguments as to why it was reasonable to be on a moving earth that it was reasonable to accept this much more beautiful aesthetic system in which you have the sun in the middle the planets nicely arranged" "and the earth just being one of the planets And for the first time a broad public could begin to think that may be this is how God made it" "The transition from a believing that the earth stands still at the center of the universe to believing that the earth is a planet that moves in various ways two ways primarily spinning around its own axis every twenty-four hours and going around the sun in" "uh, an orbit once a year" "That transition in thinking is probably the greatest intellectual revolution or upheaval in the history of mankind" "I, I think it's without a doubt true that Galileo introduced the first new observations of our understanding of the universe in two thousand years" "Galileo unwillingly and unknowingly did frankly introduce a whole period of history where there was an increasing conflictual attitude between science and religion" "The Galileo Affair, as it came to be called would involve the betrayal of a pope a file held in the secret archives of the Vatican in it a document which may be a forgery which changed history and sealed the fate of Galileo" "before the most feared court of the time the Holy Office of the Inquisition" "He will tell the truth; otherwise we will have recourse to torture" "The line is taken from the record of the Inquisition" "Twenty first of June, 1633" "It is spoken by Cardinal Melculano the Inquistor of Galileo about the book The Dialogue published in 1632" "What sort of book brings a man to torture changes the world?" "Surely it is apocalyptic" "No." "It's like witty, mannered" "It has three characters" "It's written in zesty Italian not priestly Latin" "The setting is very theatrical" "A somewhat eccentric and rundown palace on the Grand Canal in Venice" "The characters, Segredo a Venetian nobleman elegant, dispassionate who fears only boredom and therefore loves Salviati a barrel of a man, passionate vital a new thinker, Galileo when young" "He baits fools, and in his opinion there are many fools" "For instance the well-named Simplicio a round pompous pudding of a man an old thinker" "If Aristotle said it, it's true" "I ask you, oh foolish man" "Do you imagine some magnitude of the universe which you judge to be too vast?" "Why do you pass judgment of things you do not understand?" "God could have created the heavens even thousands times larger than it is but nothing is created in vain" "This beautiful order is for our benefit" "Would anything be created that is superfluous?" "Hum!" "For the use and convenience of whom?" "Merely taking care of us is adequate work for God, you say?" "We take too much upon ourselves if we believe that, Simplicio" "I should not like to tie God's hands so than that He has no other cares to attend to than those of the human race alone" "Galileo called the old strutting Aristotelian conservatives" "The Pigeon League" "A wise man did not likely insult these philosophers" "But Galileo's wisdom was in science not in human relations" "The Pigeons would have their revenge on the iconoclast Galileo Galilei" "He has the look of a headstrong man" "A proud Tuscan" "In the hills above Florence the capital of Tuscany some would say the capital of the Renaissance" "is a place called Archetri the last home of Galileo" "From its window you can see any day a local gardener tend the hillside trees" "Some things don't change" "It reminds one of a story" "A group of priests came to see Galileo towards the end of his life" "He was tending the trees" ""I am ashamed that you see me in this habit" "I'll go and dress myself as a philosopher, he said" "Why not have this work done by someone else," they asked" "To which Galileo replied" ""it's more pleasure to do than to have done by others."" "Galileo was a man of the earth a philosopher by instinct but a mechanic, a doer, a maker" "He was the father of experimental physics" "He invented the science of motion" "The apple fell on Newton's head but it was Galileo who planted the tree" "Galileo liked good living" "But about living with people he was not that good" "Born 1564 near Pisa to a musician father an unloving mother a parasitic brother family was not his forte" "He treated his commonlaw wife as a possession" "She bore him a son and two daughters" "Both women sought solace as poor nuns just over the hill from his house, in that convent" "Solace there was not" "Poverty and hardship there was" "Probably the true love of his life was for the elder daughter" "Sister Maria Celeste" "She died at thirty-three" "He was seventy, and only then did he realize how little he had done" "and how much he had cared" "But his real love was abstraction ideas, numbers" "The book of nature is written in mathematics, he believed" "Galileo formalized messy nature into forces and laws" "There were many inventions an early pendulum clock an early slide rule an early thermometer, but above all he was an early Newton because especially he analyzed motion and force" "Falling, rising, floating and so on" "He dabbled with gravity but never really understood it" "Too occult, he said" "Galileo's deep contribution to science was not really that many proofs" "It was in seeing the simple coherence in a system" "The way things hang together" "The whole picture" "Galileo combined common sense with mathematical formulae" "Yet sometimes one seemed to fight the other" "That bodies of different weights fall at the same speed is not common sense, then or today" "That the earth spins on its axis is not obvious" "And then why doesn't everything not tied down fly off into the sky?" "Oceans?" "Boats?" "Everything?" "In Segredo's palace in Venice by the way a real palace, now a private home" "Galileo's Dialogue sets an elegant answer" "Shut yourself up inside the main cabin below decks on some large ship and have some flies, butterflies bowl of water with some fish" "Hang up a bottle so that it empties drop by drop into vessel beneath it" "Ship standing still." "Observe" "How the fish swim indifferently in all directions" "Drops fall into vessel beneath" "Throwing something to your friend you throw it no more strongly in one direction than in another their distances being equal." "Jumping with your feet together you pass equal spaces in every direction" "When you have observed all these things have the ship proceed with any speed that you like so long as the motion is uniform" "You will discover not the least change in all the effects nor could you tell from any whether the ship was moving or standing still" "The cause of all these effects is the ship's motion is common to all the things contained in it" "And to the air, also" "Whoever thought it more reasonable to make the whole universe turn to keep the earth motionless was more unreasonable than someone who went up the top of your cathedral to look at the city and its surroundings and demanded that they turn around him so" "that he would not have to bother turning his head" "The important point is that the earth be able to move without a thousand inconveniences" "All the inconveniences will be removed as you propose them" "The inconveniences were just about to start" "A little way down the Grand Canal in the Piazzo San Marco is where the man who wanted to be a philosopher would venture into the realm of the priests" "The heavens" "In 1609, hearing of a Dutch spyglass power of three, Galileo, the mechanic almost overnight, improved it to this" "Power of ten" "This is a faithful replica of his telescope and it changed the course of history" "He pointed this tube to the heavens and that was the defining moment in the history of science" "Galileo was ambitious, determined to sell it to the highest bidder" "He came like any tourist to the Piazzo San Marco to show off his big lens" "and the Venetian senators scrambled to see it" "The philosophers flocked to him" "It was magic" "In fact, some loyal followers of Aristotle thought it black magic and refused even to look" "No-no, they said." "Blasphemy they said" "The first blasphemy in the sky" "The moon was not pure and white" "It was rough and rocky as we know it" "These are Galileo's drawings" "There were black spots on the pure heavenly surface of the sun" "Our pictures?" "Galileo" "And then if the telescope was the turning point for science" "Jupiter was the turning point for Galileo" "Suddenly he saw a little solar system a sort of sun and moons going round it and the whole thing moving" "Not a proof, but a coherent system which worked" "Copernicus was alive and well and living on Jupiter" "In January of 1610, by chance he turned to Jupiter and he found the little points of light next to it" "And we can follow it day by day when he sees that those little points of light are moving around and suddenly he realizes after about a week that wait a minute, these are being carried as little moons with Jupiter" "Now one of the reasons people worried about the Copernican system was it seemed awfully silly that the earth could be whizzing around the sun and yet carry the moon and not have the moon get lost" "As soon as Galileo realized that Jupiter was also moving everyone agreed that Jupiter was moving carrying those moons with it a great stumbling block against the Copernican system was removed" "Galileo immediately saw the power of that argument" "He doesn't make a big deal of it but he says it in passing" "This should put to rest the worries of those people who think the earth can have a moon with it" "Now this may not have converted the world into Copernicans but it certainly converted Galileo because up to that time he was probably just a timid Copernican, if at all" "And suddenly the wonderful things he found with the telescope required new patterns of thinking" "To avoid the new thinking of Copernicus that the sun is the center and the earth moves around it once a year and turns on itself once a day" "to keep the old thinking of Ptolemy earth at the center you need this complicated system of interlocking spheres and gears" "It seems a madness to us and yet systems evolve and evolution we know, is not always reasonable or even tidy" "A strain on reason, of holding up an earth-centered universe was beginning to show" "However reason was never a difficulty for the Dialogue's Simplicio" "The first and greatest difficulty is the repugnance and incompatibility between being at the center and being distant from it" "For if the terrestrial globe must move within a year around the circumference of a circle that is, around the Zodiac then it is impossible for it at the same time to be at the center of the Zodiac" "But the earth is that center as is proved many times by Aristotle" "Ptolemy and others" "Aristotle has given us a hundred proofs that the earth is finite bounded and spherical" "Which are all later reduced to one and this one to none at all" "For if I deny him his assumption that the universe is movable all his proofs fall to the ground since he proves it to be finite and bounded only if the universe is movable" "Now, if it true that the center of the universe is that point around which all the orbs and world bodies that is the planets, move, then it quite certain that not the earth, but the sun" "is to be found at the center of the universe" "How do you deduce that it is not the earth, but the sun which is at the center of the revolutions of the planets?" "We find all the planets closer to the earth at one time and farther from it at another" "The differences are so great that Venus for example, is six times as distant from us in the one state as it is in the other" "And Mars soars nearly eight times as high in the one state as in the other" "But what are the signs that they move around the sun?" "Mars, Jupiter, eight times as high!" "Very distant." "Sixty times as large" "It is certain that six times this distance approach and recession must revolve around the sun" "Perhaps I should understand it much better from the drawing of a diagram" "Simple, isn't it?" "Well, to us, yes" "But then, it was revolutionary" "All the song and dance about numbers and positions of planets really comes down to this reasonable system" "Like Galileo's work on motion it hangs together" "But presume the earth is the center and not the sun" "Then this is what the planets have to do to satisfy the senses as seen from earth" "You can see the gyrations they have to make" "Why would God do it this way asked Galileo" "Well, God's Church had that well-known parental answer because we say so" "They conceived order included a kind of ecclesiastical geography in which Hell was in the bowels of the earth" "You could see the brimstone and fire spurting up occasionally in volcanoes" "And then you went out through the spheres of the heavens and beyond that was God and heaven" "And moving to a Copernican system was a great threat to this kind of sacred geography uh, which was tacitly accepted but wasn't really honestly part of scripture" "And this was a threat to the whole doctrinal basis of the Church's teaching on the sacraments on the nature of the Church itself and so it was a philosophical issue" "If Copernicanism won out the Church felt Aristotelianism was going to go and therefore the basis of their doctrinal statements was going to go" "It's very strange because many people feel that if they give up a literal belief in one point it's going to undermine the whole thing" "And frankly I think you have to approach scriptures in a much more thoughtful way" "That's what Galileo was prepared to do" "He said God has made the book of scripture and the book of nature and they shouldn't be contradicting each other" "And Aristotle's pigeons went with the Church" "They had flocked to praise Galileo to the skies now they begin to peck him to death" "It will take a number of years for them to crucify him" "Galileo the ambitious, the impetuous helps their cause" "He offends people" "He makes two major mistakes" "First he leaves the protection of Venice for Florence to be Chief Mathematician and Philosopher to Prince Cosimo" "Now Rome can get to him" "And second, he becomes fascinated with the tides as proof of the Copernican system" "In 1611, he is first mentioned by the Inquisition" "1614." "In Florence there is a rabble-rousing sermon against him by Tomas Accocinni of the Dominicans the guarddogs of church dogma" "1615." "Rome, the center" "Another priest, Lorini, scuttles to the Inquisition with a formal complaint over Galileo's Copernican views" "Now the Church's instrument against heresy can act if it chooses" "Galileo is summoned to Rome" "Then, as now, the fountainhead" "The engine" "The guarded heart of the Catholic Church" "A paradox of grandeur and humility" "The collective will and individual dissent" "The pride and the prejudice of Holy Mother Church" "lts guiding spirit in heaven is the Holy Ghost but on earth it is a single priestly conscience" "In Galileo's time it was that of Bruno's Inquisitor the Jesuit, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine" "To this day, Bellarmine is a guiding light in the Church a ghost in the machine" "In 1616 he was the literal personification of the Church's dilemma" "How to move this leviathan from the closed and fixed world of the Middle Ages into the open and changing world of the scientific revolution?" "On the roof of the Collegio Romano the old Jesuit headquarters" "Galileo and his supporters the Jesuit astronomers and Bellarmine, used to observe the stars" "Some remnants of the observatory are still here" "And in the mists of a Roman night the dilemma also remains" "On the one hand, Bellarmine bureaucrat, defender of the Church believed the Bible was the literal word of God" "On the other hand, Bellarmine the intellectual admired Galileo's science" "A paradox." "And one that will even today, not drift away" "In his portrait, Bellarmine stares into one's very soul and in February, 1616 he solemnly warns Galileo the Copernican doctrine is not to be held or defended" "Galileo agrees" "The meeting was at Bellarmine's residence but there were present some unnamed rather shadowy Dominican aides" "Later Galileo asked for and received a letter recording the meeting and its warning" "It is an important document and to find it you must enter the Vatican State" "Go through the old streets to the Belvederi Palace" "Open a safe." "Take out a file Codex 1181" "Proceedings against Galileo Galilei" "The file must only be handled by an official of the Vatican" "Through the corridors, past the old scholar's archives through an old wooden door and into a new world of steel and concrete called the bunker" "Here are the secret archives of the Vatican an immensely secure controlled environment" "Open the file" "And there is the document" "Twenty-sixth of May, 1616 not to hold or defend signed Robert Cardinal Bellarmine" "But there is another document, twenty-sixth of February, 1616 which says that he must not hold or defend or teach in any way whatsoever" "Now some scholars say it is a forgery inserted later" "Some say it is a minute prepared by those shadowy Dominicans in case Galileo did not agree but it was never given to him" "And it seems to be different handwriting within the letter" "It is not signed by anybody" "Galileo knows nothing of this last document" "But he will." "And it will be in the presence of his enemies" "Meanwhile his file at the Holy Office of the Inquisition grows" "Galileo and Copernicus need a miracle" "The miracle happens. 1623 Galileo friend, poet intellectual and mystic fellow Tuscan and fellow egotist" "Matteo Barbarini, is elected Pope Urban VI I I" "Like Galileo, he is not given to false modesty" "I know better than all the cardinals put together" "A word of a living pope is worth more than the sayings of a hundred dead ones" "Galileo has six audiences with the new pope happily discussing The Dialogue" "But becoming pope changes a man" "Suddenly you are CEO of the biggest multinational head of an empire an empire under attack from Protestants without and dissenters within" "Barbarini tomb is only yards away from that of St. Peter" "The center of the center" "This is a pope who will defend the Church against any foe or friend" "The Pope's instrument against heresy was the Inquisition" "And it still is" "Just to the left of St" "Peter's is the Palace of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" "New name, same purpose" "Visitors and cameras are not welcome" "Behind the doors proceedings are closed" "A modern victim is Father Charles Curran" "I was informed originally in 1979 that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was investigating my writings" "The content issues dealt primarily in the area of human sexuality contraception, sterilization masturbation divorce, homosexuality" "Those were the primary issues that were involved" "I was taking positions that a lot of other people were taking around the world" "I mean I was in enough communication with other theologians in Europe to know what they were saying" "I wasn't saying all that much different from others" "And to that extent, therefore I figured that in the end this probably wouldn't go very far" "In the very beginning" "I thought it was sort a shot across the bow" "Behind the specific issues, however was the deeper theological question of the possibility of dissent within the Roman Catholic Church" "I realized things were were getting serious when Cardinal Rothsinger the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith published a famous interview in the Italian magazine Jesus" "He was talking about a crisis of faith in the world and when he got to North America he said the crisis of faith in Nor" "North America is primarily in the area of moral theology" "And the reason is because the ethos in the United States is opposed to the Gospel ethos" "And that too many or that theologians must make a choice between one or the other and that too many Catholic theologians have dissented from the hierarchical magisterium rather than from the American ethos" "It became obvious to me then by '84, also, or by '85" "I had a letter saying you know, we have finished reviewing your work" "We find errors and ambiguities there and now we give you this opportunity to rescind or change your positions" "And, well I knew then that the game was up" "I wrote back and said that I can" "I mean, these are the positions I've taken" "These are the positions I believe in." "I think they've very legitimate for a Catholic and, uh, they then determined on the basis of that, that, uh there were errors in my writings and I could no longer be a Catholic theologian" "Father Curran is forbidden to teach theology at Catholic University" "He's still a Catholic priest but now teaches at Southern Methodist University" "As with all dissenters from Galileo to Charles Curran the offense is having different ideas and writing them down for others to see" "Books are the threat!" "Galileo wrote a number of books but The Dialogue is the problem" "More specifically, one scene the last scene" "It offended the Church and deeply hurt his friend" "Pope Urban VI I I How did it offend the Church?" "It became sort of a social issue with the Church that it was kind of a forbidden book this kind of thing like the forbidden fruit" "It's always more interesting to read something that authorities think you shouldn't read" "And I think there's something to the fascination of The Dialogue that way" "Did Galileo actually disobey the orders that were given him in 1616 by writing The Dialogue?" "Now he held he didn't" "But I'm certain he did" "And he purposely did" "And that's a fascination about the book" "He tried to conceal that he was really trying to prove the Copernican system but The Dialogue overwhelmingly moves us in that direction" "What the fascination really comes down to in that context is that Galileo actually wanted to save the Church from getting into trouble over taking positions when it didn't have to" "He wanted the Church to stay open with respect to a system of Ptolemy and the system of Copernicus" "Heliocentrism and geocentrism" "Yes, he tried to convince the authorities there was no need to take a position" "Let's let it mature" "Let's let science do its thing" "And how did he manage to offend the Church and his friend, the Pope?" "Eh, the subject is the tides" "You cannot limit God" "His ways are beyond our understanding" "God can make the tides and anything else for that matter in any way He likes says the Church and the Pope" "Galileo stuffs this argument into the last pages of the book" "And he puts it in the mouth of Simplicio our resident buffoon" "For anybody but the Pope it's a humorous scene" "Now it is time to put an end to our discourses" "I thank you, Segredo for a most courteous motivation just as I ask pardon of Simplicio if I have offended him sometimes with my too heated and opinionated speech" "Be sure that in this I have not been moved by some ulterior purpose but only by that of giving you every opportunity to introduce lofty thoughts so that I might be the better informed" "You need not make any excuses" "They are superfluous" "Especially so to me having been accustomed to public debate" "And here comes the biggest mistake of Galileo's life" "The central doctrine of the Church" "The favorite doctrine of the Pope in the mouth of a fool" "Indeed keeping always before my mind eye a most solemn doctrine which I once heard from a most eminent and learned person before which one must fall silent" "Guess who?" "I know that if I ask whether God in his infinite power and wisdom could have conferred upon the watery element its observed reciprocation motion using some other means than moving its containing vessels" "Translation." "If God wanted the tides to do a particular thing" "He could have!" "And that He would have known how to do this in many ways unthinkable to our minds" "From this I forthwith conclude that this being so, it would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit or restrict the divine power and wisdom to some particular fancy of his own" "An admirable and angelic doctrine" "Salviati ends the book with more grand and contradictory platitudes" "Oh, by the way, to add insult to injury" "Galileo's proof of the Copernican system the tides, is wrong" "Both mistakes scientific and political are huge and inexplicable and the political mistake will be fatal" "Word that the Pope's argument has been put in boco di encioco in the mouth of a fool, gets back to Rome and the Pope" "His anger at what he sees as a gratuitous insult will never be assuaged" "The Tuscan ambassador attempts to intercede on Galileo's behalf" "There are the usual pleasantries and diplomatic folderol and then the ambassador says the name" "Galileo." "The Pope explodes!" "Your Galileo has ventured to meddle in things he ought not and with the most grave and dangerous subject that can be stirred up in these days" "Urban is implacable" "Galileo will come to Rome and will appear before the Holy Office of the Inquisition" "By what means and how long ago did he come to Rome?" "Despite illness and age he is seventy, and an outbreak of plague" "Galileo is brought to Rome" "Did he come of his own accord or was he called or was he ordered by someone to come to Rome, and by whom?" "In Florence, the Father Inquisitor ordered me to" "The proceedings of the Inquisition are icily formal and unremitting" "The trial will stretch over some months" "Did he know or can he guess the reason why he was ordered to come to Rome?" "I imagined that the reason why I was ordered to present myself to the Holy Office in Rome is to account for my recently printed book" "What is the character of the book on account of which he thinks he was ordered to come to Rome?" "It is a book written in dialogue form and it treats on the constitution of the world that is of the two chief systems and the arrangement of the heavens and the elements" "If he were shown this book would he be prepared to identify it as his?" "I hope so" "Was he then notified of the said decision and if so, by whom?" "I was" "I was indeed notified of the said decision of the Congregation of the Index and I was notified by Lord Cardinal Bellarmine" "What did the most eminent Bellarmine tell him about the said decision?" "And did he say anything more about the matter?" "And if so, what?" "Lord Cardinal Bellarmine told me that Copernicus' opinion could be held suppositionally as Copernicus himself had held it" "His Eminence knew that I held it suppositionally" "In conformity with this" "I keep a certificate by Lord Cardinal Bellarmine himself dated the twenty-six May" "1616, in which he says that Copernicus' opinion could not be held or defended being against Holy Scripture" "I present a copy of this certificate and here it is" "The document is a shock to the Inquisition" "This is not a trial as we know it" "There is no counsel" "The Inquisitor is judge and jury" "It proceeds in secret" "You are guilty until proved innocent" "But about documents the Inquisition is meticulous" "Galileo's letter from Bellarmine is an upsetting surprise" "Remember the secret archives file?" "This is the letter from Bellarmine" "A surprise to the Inquisition" "Do not hold or defend" "But they have a surprise for Galileo" "The suspect and unsigned injunction" "Do not hold, defend or teach in any way whatsoever" "I do not recall that this injunction was given me any other way than orally by Lord Cardinal Bellarmine" "I do remember that the injunction was that I could not hold or defend" "And maybe, even that I could not teach" "I do not recall further there being the phrase in any way whatever But maybe there was" "In fact, I did not think about it having received a few months thereafter" "Lord Cardinal Bellarmine's certificate dated twenty-six May, 1616 which I have presented and in which is explained the order given to me not to hold or defend the said opinion" "Regarding the other two phrases in the said injunction now mentioned namely not to teach and in any way whatever" "I did not retain them in my memory" "I think because they are not contained in the said certificate which I relied upon and kept as a reminder" "Given the confusion the Inquisitor proposes a plea bargain" "But the Pope is adamant" "Galileo will face the full process of the Inquisition" "Has he anything to say?" "I have nothing to say" "Did he hold, or has he held and for how long that the sun is the center of the world and that the earth is not the center?" "I do not hold this opinion of Copernicus" "And I have not held it after being ordered by injunction to abandon it" "For the rest, here I am in your hands" "Do as you please" "He will tell the truth" "Otherwise we will have recourse to torture" "I am here to obey" "But I have not held this opinion after the determination was made" "Galileo, an old and sick man badly frightened knows very well the instruments of torture" "No effusion of blood, remember?" "So for instance, the rack" "Or massive distention of the body by water" "And so on" "However, Galileo was not tortured" "He was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life" "And he was to be publicly humiliated in the grand hall of" "Santa Maria Sopraminerva in Rome where he was to recant" "I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galileo of Florence seventy years of age have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy" "mainly of having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and motionless and the earth is not the center and moves" "I abjure, curse and detest the abovementioned errors and heresies and in general, each and every other error theresy and cite contrary to the Holy Church" "And I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert orally or in writing anything that might cause a similar suspicion about me" "So help me, God and these Holy Gospels of His which I touch with my hands" "Galileo Galilei who saw further than anyone before him goes blind." "In 1642, he dies" "On Christmas Day on that very year" "Isaac Newton is born." "And today?" "Is there a new Galileo Affair?" "A new dialogue?" "We are at a big turning point today" "Let's take a serious look at the way the Church confronts this very rapid growth in the biological sciences and explorations of the origins of life of the evolution of life of the meaning, the very nature of the human being" "in this whole evolution of the universe" "Uh, the Church always seems to and I'm not going to pinpoint any one person or any one thing seems to want to always concentrate upon a magic moment when a human being comes to be" "Somehow or other they feel that God's place in this whole process is better assured" "There's a magic moment where He comes in" "Let's give it the traditional phrase of and creates the human soul 'cause I think that traditional phrase carries a lot of meaning and it shouldn't be thrown aside" "But nonetheless it forces the Church's hand in saying you know, there's a magic moment when God intervenes" "And I think that's bad science because, um, I mean" "I'm not an expert in the field but, the, the the coming to be of a human being is a continuous process" "In, in fact the marvel, the magic the beauty of this whole thing is the continuity of it" "We, I'm evolving now as a human being" "I not a static thing, and there's not a magic moment when God is dealing with me" "There's not a magic moment when He made me" "The whole thing is magic" "That's the better science" "In 1997 a spacecraft named Galileo found traces of what could be the building blocks of life on Europa a moon of Jupiter" "That moon was discovered in 1610 by the scientist Galilen" "The dialogue continues"