cf. Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

https://aeon.co/ideas/opposition-to-galileo-was-scientific-n...

As a quick summary for those who come after, this article describes a scientist who challenged some of Galileo's hypotheses and his role in moving astronomy forward.

It does not refer to the actual incident of persecution from the Catholic Church.

Galileo did mix theology and astronomy in unhealthy ways, too. This perhaps does not justify house arrest, but there is really more than one side, more often than not.

I'm not familiar enough to criticize that claim, though I think I recall Popper saying that this was just the means by which science existed at the time. Epistemology hadn't developed to the degree that it has today. Still, it's a valid criticism of his ideas.

I did not mean to imply that there isn't another side. Only that the gulf between poor ideas (and invective) and persecution leading to conviction on grounds of heresy (and its attendant results) is so large that it is not meaningful to defend the actions of the Catholic Church on the basis that someone was impolite in their discourse with its leaders.

No one is saying that house arrest was the wrong move for the administrators who sentenced him to make. The problem is with the way you frame Galileo's house arrest (again, in the papal apartments, which by the standards of the day, when witches were being burned in Northern Europe, was mild). You are still working from within a paradigm characterized by the false dichotomy of Science vs. the Church, or enlightened Science vs. the Church as tyrannical, monolithic overlord. To say Galileo was persecuted for his ideas is saying too much; what do we make of those who actually were and are persecuted? Galileo had been announcing his ideas and squabbling with opponents for decades before it came to house arrest, with at least two discernible periods of conflict. The motive was by and large more personal than theological (and certainly not scientific). Even the idea that theological disagreement would land you on the pyre is flatly wrong. A counterexample of that is Aquinas whose ideas were condemned by the bishop of Paris. Aquinas was canonized 50 years after his death and declared a doctor of the Church two centuries later. He remains one of the most important thinkers of the Church, in philosophy and in history.

The strategy of casting oneself as a victim is a tried and tested method of gaining a politically useful yet illusory moral high ground with which to bludgeon your opponent, and the Church has no shortage of enemies.

As far as I'm aware, the unhealthy mixture of theology and astronomy was basically just him arguing what Augustine did, cf https://www.pibburns.com/augustin.htm