Everyone is familiar with the legend of Galileo: how one of the great astronomers in history bravely stood up to the Inquisition in defense of his argument that the earth orbited the sun, rather than vice versa. In recent variations of this myth, the Catholic Church has been cast in the role of science deniers who used Scripture as a cudgel to deny Galileo’s claims and found him guilty of heresy.
Part history, part science fiction, that Galileo story is less a legend than a myth. It claims to explain what happened 400 years ago, and it looks to a future where such mistakes can never happen again. But the stories we tell ourselves are never really about the past or the future; they are about the times in which they are written. The Galileo myth reflects how we understand science and history, church and mythology in our present times of social strife and the Covid-19 pandemic.
