Why was Galileo charged with heresy?

Answer 1

He spread Nicolaus Copernicus's ideas about the universe where the planets orbit around the sun. His development of telescopes led him to see, among other things, that the moon was not flat. This was contrary to the Aristotelian views of physics touted by the Church.

Answer 2

Galileo of Galilei was charged with heresy because he was trying to tell people about how the sun behaved as a stationary object. He also noticed that the planets all revolved around this stationary sun.

Answer 3

Galileo was accused of being a heretic for his new theory ...a heliocentric (sun centered) universe rather than a universe with the earth at its center. The Roman Catholic church labeled him a heretic and did not "officially" accept Galileo's sun centered theory until 1993.

Answer 4

Galileo stated that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than the sun revolving around the Earth (he wasn't the first to say so, that observation was originally made by Copernicus) and the church did not agree, and ordered him to retract the assertion. When Galileo refused to do so he was therefore found guilty of disobedience to the authority of the church, and was placed under house arrest - a very lenient sentence, given that another astronomer, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake for the same offense. It should be noted that 400 years later, the church reversed its ruling on Galileo.

Answer 5

Galileo defended his views of heliocentrism in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated him and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo's theory up until this point. The theory that the Sun is at the centre and the Earth orbits round it was first put forward by Copernicus and then taken up by Galileo, who asserted that it was the truth rather than just a theory, which got him into trouble with the church.

In court Galileo was asked for proof of the heliocentric theory and he could not produce any, and recanted. But he had made an important discovery with the moons of Jupiter, which orbit round Jupiter. Therefore objects had been discovered which do not orbit the Earth. In the centuries after Galileo's death further scientific discoveries were made that support the heliocentric theory.

Finally after Bessel's discovery of stellar parallax in 1838 no-one (including the church authorities) doubted that the Sun is at the centre of a local system known as the solar system, and the Earth revolves round it. This was formally acknowledged by Pope John Paul II in 1993.

Answer 6

He said that the earth orbited around the sun (as did the other known planets and moons). The catholic church said that it was heresy because they believed the earth was the center of the universe and the sun and all others moved around it. He had to retract or be killed.

Answer 7

He was charged because he claimed that the Sun was at the centre of universe while the church's teaching was that the Earth is at the centre. He had been told not to proclaim that the Sun isat the centre.

Copernicus produced a model with the Sun at the centre some years before Galileo was born. This was the theory that Galileo adopted, and the church told him that he could teach it as a theory to explain the planets' movements in the sky, but he would not be allowed to say it was the absolute truth. When he went against this instruction he was taken to court and the lack of evidence for the claim was exposed.

However, modern astronomy uses Kepler's model which has the Sun at the centre after all. In this theory the planets move in elliptical orbits according to the law of gravity and the laws of motion, and it is generally accepted.

Answer 8

Galileo was charged with heresy by the Catholic Church for promoting the heliocentric theory that the Earth orbits around the Sun, which went against the accepted geocentric view that the Earth was the center of the universe. This contradicted the teachings of the Church, leading to his trial and eventual conviction in 1633.

Answer 9

He wrote an offending book called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems, Ptonius and Capricornius.