Galileo, Sunspots, and Worshiping God

Splotches on a Cloth

"Gliding all around us, sitting in the West,

As it was in the beginning, so it shall be with the rest.

Laid on sure foundation, perfect order is our lot."

It was his kindred faith, with a differing thought:

Laws in the Book of Nature; discovering how the heavens go,

Expanding through a tool, discomforting their world view.

Oh! We around its center, giving Truth His due.

In 1993, I found this image from an online display of the Vatican Library. I was studying weather patterns and the impact of sunspots when I came across the work of Galileo and was amazed at his observations on sunspots. This sketch was made by his students on May 3, 1612. The discussion about it would appear in letters to his friend Mark Welser and eventually be used against him when he wrote the following year, "Observation on Sunspots", which advanced the prohibited Copernican cosmology.

This picture stands at a pivot in history between the historical approach to seeing the natural world as the handiwork of God and drawing scientific observations with no regard for God. Working from his observations, Galileo believed the earth was moving and the sun was fixed, which opposed the Roman Catholic Church's position. Galileo could make his observations, but he could not interpret the Bible. A century after Martin Luther had challenged the church in theology, Galileo was challenging the church with his observations and famously offered that his "observations should not be held subject to questionable interpretations." As Luther was the flash point for the beginning of the Reformation, so Galileo became the flash point for the beginning of science seen in opposition to the church.

In an attempt to pay tribute to Galileo's work and to remind me that Christians should be free in attempting to understand God's world without bias or threat of judgment, I wrote a poem which draws up the conflict in worldviews - the old and the new. The poem makes the assertion that a Christian man, through his deepest desires to study Nature, has the opportunity to see the Glory of God in immeasurable ways. By the use of scientific inquiry, God does not disappear from the world, but rather He is seen to be all the more glorious (Psalm 8 and 19 and Romans 1).

The first three lines were the worldview of the Church before Galileo. There are references to the creation of the heavens and the earth from Genesis 1; to the Psalm 104:5, which describes the immovable foundations of the earth; and the underpinning Aristotelian philosophy that everything in the world had perfect order.

As you read the poem, note the 1st personal pronouns in the first and last lines: "us" moves from the center in the first line, representing the geocentric worldview, to the outside of the line in the last one "we", representing a heliocentric worldview. The fourth line, which also contains an indefinite 3rd person masculine pronoun, is the pivot of the poem. I have inverted the pronominal positions in lines 1 and 7 around the one in four.

The last three lines of the poem describe Galileo's approach to seeing nature. He believed that Nature was God's first book of revelation. This first book could been seen for how the heavens go, but not teach someone how to go to heaven, which was what the Scriptures teach. I also included his use of technology: the telescope. The use of present tense, hanging participles is intended to show the rough process that is involved (English teachers are always wanting to fix the grammar!). Finally, the "Oh!" that "aha" moment comes and the observer learns. When a Christian goes through this process, and realizes the way things really are, he or she gives "Truth, His due" or better yet, worships God!

Interpreting the world we see is a tough business and everything hangs on seeing it properly. It is the conflict between the value of truth and the supposed equal value of opinion. It raises some important questions: "Is there truth?"; "Whose truth?"; "Does truth change?"; "If truth changes, then there are no eternal truths." "Are there objective truths?"

It asks another important question: Do we have the humility to learn from the data or do we use the data to teach our bias? That is not just a question for the Church - the Bible's value is determined by this issue: if it agrees or disagrees with someone's position it is a matter of interpretation - but is also for the modern scientific world: Science can be just as dogmatically wrong as the Church has been.

You might notice that Galileo is never referred to in the poem. Or is he?