Drs. Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder have an interesting refutation of two assertions made in the Ron Howard/Tom Hanks movie “Angels and Demons.” The movie alleges that the Catholic Church executed four scientists and that Galileo was condemned as a heretic for claiming the Earth revolved around the sun. Both are untrue, they say:
First, as Professor Thomas Lessl of the University of Georgia notes in “The Galileo Legend,” history records only one scientist put to death by a public authority before the 20th Century – chemist Antoine Lavoisier, executed during the French Revolution. The secular, anti-clerical leftist tyrants of the French Revolution also closed the nation’s Academy of Science.
Second, several major historians, including David Lindberg, Stillman Drake and Jeffrey Burton Russell, as well as Prof. Lessl, have proven that Galileo was put under house arrest by church officials for theological and political reasons, not because of his scientific theories and research about the earth revolving around the sun. Until Galileo started ridiculing and mocking people (including Pope Urban VIII) who did not accept all of his theories, the Catholic Church did not try to officially condemn him, as long as he kept out of the fields of theology and biblical hermeneutics. Thus, it wasn’t until Galileo began talking about theology and the Bible in a mean-spirited way that some church officials decided they had had enough
