They put him under house arrest for making definitive theological statements - rather than scientific statements, or asking theological questions - on their dime.
Galilei, Galileo
Galileo was arrested for his statements about the solar system, charged with heresy. The church made him make a public statement that the earth stands still and the sun revolves around the earth not the other way around.
God save me from illiterate twits who hear half-baked rumors and legends and think that finding a short blurb on a website for little kids constitutes "evidence".
First of all, the prevailing belief in Galileo's time that the Sun, moon, stars, and planets revolved around the Earth had nothing to do with the Catholic Church's religious beliefs insisting that Earth and mankind were the center of the universe. It came from the 2nd-century work of Ptolemy. It was, basically, the best scientific theory then available.
When Copernicus (I hope you actually have some idea who these people are, or this explanation will make no sense to you at all) published "De Revolutionibus" in 1543, the Catholic Church endorsed the book. In fact, it was scientist-priests (you DID know that astronomy was called "the Jesuit science" because so many astronomers were also Jesuit priests, right?) who were friends of Copernicus who convinced him to publish it.
When Galileo and his telescope arrived on the scene, it wasn't the Church that initially balked at his theories. It was scientists at the University of Pisa who objected, because he was challenging the ancient Greek thinkers such as Aristotle, who were idolized at that time.
Galileo's writings were first challenged within the church by a Dominican friar, Caccini, who sent a mangled copy of his privately-published pamphlet that argued that the Bible should be interpreted in light of increasing scientific knowledge off to the Vatican. Galileo heard about it and sent them a complete copy, and Caccini's superior actually sent Galileo an apology.
Caccini apparently had a hard-on for Galileo, though, and he gave a deposition to the Inquisition about him. The Inquisition ruled that Galileo had to use Copernican concepts as theories only, and not claim that they had been literally proven true. That was actually pretty reasonable, considering that they HADN'T been prove true. As a matter of fact, developing astronomical science showed us that Copernicus was wrong about several things.
The Inquisition did go too far in ruling that heliocentricity and the movement of the Earth were heretical, but that was partly Galileo's own fault because of how much he overstated the case for heliocentricity and because he took the argument onto theological grounds in the first place. After all, most of the best minds in Europe at that time, including the Vatican's own mathematicians, believed that heliocentricity was a fact, although they were not able to truly prove it.
The Vatican gave Galileo approval for his book, "Dialogue on the Tides", provided he dealt with both the Ptolemaic AND Copernican systems, and treated Copernicanism as the theory that, in fact, it was. Galileo instead chose to write his book in such a way as to be a clear slap at the Catholic Church. Given that the Catholic Church was in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, there wasn't much else they could do about his open defiance and utterly false claim that he had Church approval of his entire work but to punish him. It must be noted that the actual crime he was accused of was misrepresentation of the Church's position, and disobeying its authority.
Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, in his own house, and allowed to continue his scientific studies there. Before he died, he received the Pope's personal blessing.
1) Johnston, George Sim. The Galileo Affair. (Princeton, NJ: Scepter Press).
2) Charles E. Hummel, The Galileo Connection (InterVarsity Press, 1986), pp. 27-29.
3) Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 173-216.
4) Galileo, 1632, in Janelle Rohr, editor, Science & Religion--Opposing Viewpoints (Greenhaven Press, 1988), p. 21.
5) Rikva Feldhav, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 15-16; Condemnation of Galileo, etc.
It's amazing how layered and complex the world becomes when you look at it with adult references, rather than children's.
What did you expect people who were too primitive to know anything beyond the borders of their own continent, let alone outside the atmosphere of their own planet, to think? Nevertheless, while God almost certainly has other things going on besides this planet and its population, He did still indicate that we were quite important to Him, so I suppose we're going to have to take His word for it, if we're going to accept His existence at all.
Continent? When Leviticus and Exodus were written, they didn't even know much further than their own horizon. The distance between the Pyramids and Solomon's Temple is about 270 miles. About the same distance as between Ft. Lauderdale and Tampa, Florida or Boston to New York. That's all they knew.
A God capable of creating the entire Universe, and probably Multiverses, certainly has the capability of monitoring much of what goes on within it.
Who said anything about just Leviticus and Exodus?
