Galileo and the Heavens

It has been almost 400 years to the day that Galileo Galilei fist observed the moons of Jupiter and other astronomical phenomena, which would change the world forever. His findings resulted in a solar system instead of an earth system formerly believed. He was tried and found to be a heretic, a title he held until October 13 1992, when Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the Galileo affair was handled, and officially conceded that the Earth was not the center of the universe. In March 2008 the Vatican proposed to complete its rehabilitation of Galileo by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls. Why was this finding so controversial? In today’s world if we discover something new we all are marveled, but at that time such knowledge was seen as a direct contradiction to the scriptures. If the bible was right, then Galileo must be wrong; if Galileo was right, then the bible must be wrong.
Of course, we now know that Galileo was right. This knowledge is beyond question. Therefore, people’s view of the bible had to change. Either, they had to accept that the bible was wrong or they had to change their view on hermeneutics and exegesis. Nevertheless, why were Galileo’s findings so controversial?
I have been doing some thinking and I believe it primarily rests not on a verse or two but on the overall view espoused in the bible. This view was spoken repeatedly that the space above the clouds is where the Heavens are. The Heavens was a physical place. Elijah road a chariot of fire into the heavens – this was not a spiritual event, this was a spacecraft heading into the clouds where God was thought to reside. When Jesus ascended, he did it in a physical body. He went into the air and up to God. The rapture is another example. Jesus, in his super physical body, will come down from heaven and our physical bodies will rise up to meet him in the clouds. This is a physical ascension and resurrection.
Now, I see why the church was so threatened by Galileo’s findings. His telescope should have found God, and he was nowhere to be found. Galileo not only didn’t see God or his angels around the earth, he also discovered that the earth was not the center of the world. If the earth was not special, then maybe Mankind wasn’t either. Later, with Isaac Newton’s findings, the world now did not even need God to control it. Prior to Newton, God was busy making everything happen. While Galileo and others took away God’s direct involvement on the earth, with rain, earthquakes and other “acts of God”, Newton found the universe, as a whole, as self-regulating. God wasn’t supernaturally keeping the planets and stars in the heavens anymore, there was physical laws that accounted for that phenomena now. These revelations and the emerging scientific method would bring about the deism movement espoused by many of our nation’s founding fathers. Deism is a philosophical belief in the existence of a God on the basis of reason, and observation of the natural world alone. Deist held that God made the world then left it to handle itself through natural laws. They did not believe in special or divine revelation of God believed by Christians.