In The Galileo Affair, George Johnston quotes Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 19th-century assessment of Galileo’s 16th-century “crusade” to establish the veracity of the heliocentric Copernican idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Writing long after Galileo was forced to repudiate that thesis while kneeling before church authorities, Newman observed that “had I been brought up in the belief of the immobility of the earth as though a dogma of Revelation, and had associated it in my mind with the incommunicable dignity of man among created beings, with the destinies of the human race, with the locality of purgatory and hell, and other Christian doctrines, and then for the first time had heard of Galileo’s thesis … I should have been at once indignant at its presumption and frightened at its speciousness, as I can never be, at any parallel novelties in other human sciences bearing on religion.”
In 2014, evangelical columnist Cal Thomas raised similar difficulties confronted by Christians attempting to offer “a moral and biblical argument” challenging court decisions that made same-sex marriage legal in multiple states. Thomas asked how conservatives might “persuade people who don’t believe traditional marriage was God’s idea and should remain as He intended?” “They can’t,” he concluded, caught in “a political power play with one side quoting Scripture or history and the other side demanding ‘equality.’”
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