ABSTRACT
The attempt to characterize the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and science has often suffered from two broad assumptions: first, that the Roman Catholic Church has been monolithic in regard to its institutions and opinions; and second, that there has existed a fundamental-perhaps inevitableconflict between the aims and methods of the Catholic faith and those of modern science. These assumptions are nowhere more strongly in evidence than in the literature on the trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), in which the Church is portrayed as a univocal, authoritarian, and dogmabound institution that invoked the inviolability of Scripture to suppress an essentially correct theory of the world (heliocentrism) and the mathematical and empirical methods upon which it rested. Although this reading of the Galileo affair has gained wide acceptance, there are several difficulties with the conflict thesis as a general characterization of the last four hundred years of Roman Catholic interaction with science. First, the Catholic hierarchy has rarely been of one mind regarding controversial scientific theories. Second, the Church’s strong tradition of conservatism has not precluded accommodation to novel astronomical, evolutionary, and cosmological theories. Third, despite the implication of a “fundamental conflict” found in the Galileo affair, post-Galilean episodes fail to reveal evidence of a uniform, deliberate, and sustained attack on the methods of modern science. And, finally, an unqualified conflict thesis is difficult to reconcile with the long tradition of support of scientific activity within the Church itself. Perhaps most surprising in this regard is the fact that the greatest levels of clerical activity in science are to be found in the two hundred years following the Council of Trent.
