The Galileo Syndrome

Yes, I made that up, but it’s bonafide. Also, even though I’m not a diagnostician, I’m ready to diagnose a great many people with it. Those afflicted with Galileo Syndrome believe the powers-that-be in the past unjustly persecuted scientists who wouldn’t stick to the mainstream narrative, while simultaneously believing that the modern-day criminals are those scientists who won’t stick to the mainstream narrative.

There are multiple levels to this psychotic delusional state, one of the most hopeless being those lost souls who believe that Galileo was executed by the Catholic church for conducting science™ and forwarding a true heliocentric narrative. I don’t know who started that rumor, but it’s quite absurd. In fact, he wasn’t executed at all but put under house arrest. Like most of history, the story is not as straightforward as some would like it to be.

It would be good to backtrack a little and remember that the mainstream scientific narrative in Galileo’s time didn’t agree with a heliocentric model of the solar system. Clinging to the geocentric model was not merely a case of religion pitting itself against the scientific experts of the day. In fact, the great Aristotle had already debunked heliocentrism because of the absence of detectable parallax. All those many centuries later to Galileo’s day, the equipment necessary to detect parallax still didn’t exist. Because neither Galileo nor anyone else had proven heliocentrism, it wasn’t widely accepted. Mostly, this was because it violated what scientists of the day could observe. The stars did not appear to shift.

So, what exactly happened to Galileo? Well, he grew arrogant. I suppose that’s my opinion. But it’s likely that if he hadn’t pronounced his theory to be truth with a capital T, mocked people who might have aided him, and insisted on his own interpretation of biblical passages, his soft sentence might never have happened. By “soft,” I mean being forced to stay home with a servant attending him (a far cry from execution). One thing the church authorities didn’t like was being told what capital T truth was or how to interpret the Scriptures. Or mockery, apparently. You might find that to be small-minded, but it was mostly meaningless when viewed from a broader perspective because Galileo’s case didn’t involve papal infallibility; the Pope declared no dogma regarding models of the solar system (or universe, for that matter). Ultimately, that’s as it should be. What if the church had endorsed Galileo’s theory of the universe? Well, wouldn’t it be considered foolish now, since we don’t hold to a Galilean model of the universe? The poor persecuted Galileo was not correct … according to modern scientific knowledge.

Let’s return to mainstream science because our modern reflections on Galileo can be quite muddled. The Catholic church did not control all scientific thought, albeit religion and politics were intertwined. Like the government today and the government-controlled media, the political world at that time had their own reasons for controlling the narrative and pushing an official story. And there were people assuredly who had no desire to control others, but rather believed they were right. They were experts, see — they had done their due diligence. Perhaps you could fault the Catholic and Protestant churches for holding too tightly to the official scientific narrative of the day, under the misapprehension that it would help to solidify the truth of Christianity, when it had little to do with the Gospel, nor even with the truth of Scripture.

Essentially, as I already stated, the Galileo Syndrome finds fault with the experts of the past for making martyrs of out-of-the-box thinkers like Galileo, snidely siding with a man who had only a small part of the truth, meanwhile considering the entirety of modern-day mainstream thinkers to be martyrs of a few out-of-the-box Galileo types. I guess simpler terms for this would be hypocrisy and cowardice. It’s so much easier to believe the experts of your day. It just makes life simpler. Also, people like Galileo can be hard to take. They can likewise be humble and well-spoken … and still hard to take.

In conclusion, try to avoid delusion. The Galileo Syndrome is not a good look. Suppressing ideas that don’t fit the most popular ones of your day just means you will be viewed 500 years from now as a foolish religious nut, even if you pretend not to adhere to any religion at all. The future humans won’t believe your pretenses. They will be like most of their ilk, ready to declare that if you crack like a nut and bounce like one too — you’re a nut. Because that’s science.