Galileo to GPT-4: The Catholic Church's 500-Year Relationship with Science

Everyone knows the story. Galileo looks through his telescope, sees that the Earth moves around the Sun, and the Catholic Church throws him in jail for it. Science vs. religion. Reason vs. faith. The smart guys vs. the guys in funny hats.

It's a great story. It's also, in most of its popular tellings, deeply wrong.

Understanding the real history between the Catholic Church and science matters a lot right now — because that history is the context for everything the Vatican is doing on artificial intelligence today. If you think the Church spent five hundred years fighting science, its current AI ethics work looks like a strange anomaly. If you understand the actual history, it looks like exactly what you'd expect.

The Church That Built the Observatory

Before we get to the conflict, it helps to know what the Church was actually doing with science for most of its history.

The Vatican Observatory — one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world — traces its roots back to 1580. It was formally established by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 specifically to demonstrate that the Church supported science. Its founding document stated plainly that the Church wished to show that it "embraces, encourages and promotes" true science. That observatory still operates today with active research scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals. It is not a museum.

The history goes deeper still. Consider just a few names:

The Jesuits in particular have been extraordinary contributors to science for centuries — developing star classification systems, foundational seismology, and some of the first thermometer descriptions. This is the same institution that put Galileo on trial. Both things are true.

What Actually Happened with Galileo

The real story of Galileo is more complicated — and more interesting — than the myth.

The Church didn't oppose heliocentrism because it was anti-science. In 1610, when Galileo first presented his telescopic discoveries, the Jesuit astronomers at the Pontifical Gregorian University largely confirmed his observations. The Church had been a patron of astronomy for decades. Copernicus had dedicated his heliocentric model to a pope.

The problems started when the debate moved from astronomy into theology, and when Galileo's manner of making his arguments made it politically impossible for Church authorities to accommodate him. In 1632, Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He had been given permission on the condition that he treat the subject hypothetically. Instead, he wrote a dialogue where the character defending the Church's position was named "Simplicio" — Italian for simpleton — and assigned arguments that sounded suspiciously like Pope Urban VIII's own words. The patronage evaporated overnight.

The trial that followed was a political and theological crisis as much as a scientific one. Heliocentrism was never declared a formal heresy by an ecumenical council. Galileo was treated with considerable deference — housed with a personal servant in a Vatican apartment rather than a prison cell. None of which made his condemnation right. But it complicates the simple narrative considerably.

The rehabilitation of Galileo began long before John Paul II's famous 1992 speech. By 1758 the Church dropped the general prohibition on books supporting heliocentrism. By 1822 the Holy Office explicitly approved books treating it as physical fact. What John Paul II did was acknowledge formally that the theologians had made an error — and use that to call for a new relationship between faith and science. That's not an institution that reflexively opposes science. That's one capable of saying, four centuries later, that it got it wrong.

Evolution, the Big Bang, and the Pattern That Emerges

The relationship with Darwin's theory of evolution followed the same arc — initial suspicion, decades of debate, then accommodation that went further than most people expect.

Pope Pius XII, in a 1950 encyclical, opened the door to Catholics accepting that the human body might have evolved through natural processes. Pope John Paul II went further in 1996, calling evolution "more than a hypothesis." The current Church position is that evolution and Christian faith are fully compatible.

Georges Lemaître's Big Bang is the most striking case. When Lemaître proposed his expanding universe theory in 1927, some secular scientists rejected it partly because they suspected a Catholic priest was smuggling divine creation into cosmology. Pope Pius XII, meanwhile, tried to claim the Big Bang as scientific proof of Genesis. Lemaître pushed back on both fronts. Science and theology, he insisted, were separate magisteria. The Church should not use science to prove doctrine, and scientists should not dismiss theories based on who proposed them.

The pattern is consistent: resistance, accommodation, embrace. The Galileo affair was the exception, not the rule — which is why it gets told over and over while the contributions of Mendel and Lemaître don't.

From the Printing Press to GPT-4

The printing press deserves a moment, because the parallels with AI are striking. When Gutenberg's press arrived in the mid-15th century, it was simultaneously the most democratizing and the most destabilizing technology in human history. It put the Bible in ordinary people's hands — and also put heresy, propaganda, and misinformation there, contributing to a century of religious warfare. The Church's initial response, the Index of Prohibited Books, was a failure. But the longer arc was to build institutions, develop literacy, and navigate a world where information was no longer controlled.

GPT-4 and its successors are doing something structurally similar. They democratize access to expertise and creativity in ways that are genuinely wonderful. They also enable misinformation and manipulation at a scale that is genuinely alarming. The institutions built to control information flows are struggling to adapt.

The Vatican's instinct, consistent with its history, is not to build a new Index. It's to insist that human beings remain accountable, that dignity remains central, and that the most vulnerable receive the most protection.

What History Actually Teaches

The popular narrative — that the Church and science are natural enemies, that religion always resists what reason discovers — doesn't survive contact with the actual history.

What the history shows is an institution that made real mistakes and learned from them; contributed extraordinary scientists; built institutions dedicated to scientific inquiry; and developed a framework for thinking about technology that asks human and moral questions first.

That framework is exactly what the Vatican brings to artificial intelligence. Not reflexive resistance — the Rome Call's signatories include Microsoft and IBM. Not naive enthusiasm — the Vatican raised alarms about AI risk before most governments took it seriously. But a sustained insistence that technology must serve human beings, remain accountable to human values, and protect those most at risk.

Five hundred years of wrestling with the relationship between faith and science turns out to be decent preparation for wrestling with the most consequential technology in human history. Galileo would probably appreciate the irony.