Split Over at Galileo Galilei there was talk a long time ago about splitting out the section called Church Controversy and rewriting the whole story as a separate article The section has long been too big putting the article as a whole over the recommended max size and too sprawling and self contradictory In spite of its already large size fair coverage of the many controversies inevitably causes the section to get longer even if handled well But no one ever had the time to do the rewrite Now that that section has been hit with a demand for cleanup we really ought to undertake the job For a basis I have copied the whole section as it stands as the text of this article This is not because the article ought to stay in its present form but to get the old text into a convenient place in the History Then I ll change the section in the Galileo article to a brief summary with a pointer to this as the Main Article More on that in the the Galileo talk page Then I m going to blank out the text of this Trial article and turn it into a stub from which the new article can be written It would be futile to try to make a good text just by patching the old one which needs massive reorganization but we ll have all the pieces of the old version from which to crib as needed Parts of it are very good The old Church Controversy text is also being copied below as part of the talk page as this might be more accessible than going back into the History page to find old text Dandrake this is a very impressive NPOV and accurate article with repect to this controversy WRT names how about something like Galileo the conflict with Rome ot Galileo s Conflict with Rome or The Church or The Inquisition etc The point is to get trial out of there as it is too resticted and expand it a broader concept like conflict or confrontation or something along those lines Usually the whole church controversy topic is known as the Galileo Affair It s actually the name of several books but I think it predates the books that use that as the title I think the commonness of the term outweighs the partisanness of it since people have written about it using that term from a wide variety of views n fact the new brief text from the main Galileo article has been pasted in forming a rough outline Let s replace this rapidly with a well organized text in which it will be impossible to recognize this first hack As to this article s name it s not really accurate as this covers far more than the trial of 1633 It is very hard to find a descriptive and neutral name The Galileo Affair could be one but it s not being the title of a book and a partisan one GalileoFor Copernicus and the Church appeals to me but that one is also taken As is The Crime of Galileo Galileo heliocentrism and the Church would be descriptive but it sounds pompous Any better ideas Please Church controversy This is the former text complete Galileo was a practicing Catholic yet his writings on Copernican heliocentrism disturbed some in the Roman Catholic Church who believed in a geocentric model of the solar system They argued that heliocentrism was in direct contradiction of the Bible Joshua 10 12 Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel and he said in the sight of Israel Sun stand thou still upon Gibeon and thou Moon in the valley of Ajalon This Bible passage could be literally interpreted as the Sun and the Moon were both objects peripheral to or a subset of Earth as opposed to a more symbolic metaphysical interpretation e g their representing a highly illuminated state of consciousness the Sun founded upon Gibeon and a phase of lower reflected intellect the Moon in the valley of Ajalon or thought At that time the most literal Biblical interpretation was prevalent with the church hierarchy especially among the Dominican Order facilitators of the Inquisition it was also in line with the highly revered ancient writings of Aristotle and Plato The geocentric model was generally accepted at the time as it had been since philosophers first considered the heavens By the time of the controversy the Ptolemaic model had a serious rival in the Tychonian model in which the Earth was at the center of the