Galileo

            
             Galileo was born February 15, 1564 in Florence and educated in Padua. His family belonged to the nobility but they were not opulent. Galileo was an Italian physicist and astronomer who discovered the law of falling bodies and the law of the pendulum. He also perfected the first telescope which he used to identify the moons of Jupiter and the lunar surface. Galileo also ascertained that the Milky Way was made of stars. The contributions made by Galileo to mechanics and science as a whole remain fundamental and extremely accurate to this very day. Galileo was strongly and thoroughly influenced by the Church but his beliefs contradicted those of many Catholics. In a letter to the the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo defends his theories against scholarly and religious speculation and the ongoing conflict they had with Christianity (The Muse of irrationality, Kalen Jordan, csp 30).
             Galileo writes to the Grand Duchess Christina to defend his position. Galileo's clear and persuasive answers raise the suspicion of the Catholic Church whose answers were very logical at the time based on purely observational data. Galileo believes that by saying the holy bible can never speak untruth is very discreet. He does however say that the Bible's clear words are quite often very contrastive of what they seem to signify. Lastly, Galileo tries extremely hard to convince Grand Duchess Christina that his findings are not just false accusations but proven facts.
             The Copernicus system states that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Solar system. The Copernicus system can be seen as controversial because the Bible's view on the Solar system is different. The Copernicus system states that the earth moves and that the sun stands still. The Bible states that the sun moves and the earth stands still. Many Christians and Catholics at the time saw Galileo and his theory of the Copernicus system to be completely out of line because it went against the word of the Bible.