Atheist
Doesn't the Galileo affair prove the Church is anti-science?
The Galileo affair was a real and regrettable episode of ecclesiastical overreach and personal conflict, not evidence of a general Church hostility to science, since the Church had funded and produced astronomers for over a century before and after it.
Catholic teaching
The Church acknowledges that the tribunal that judged Galileo in 1633 acted wrongly, as Pope St. John Paul II formally stated in 1992, while also affirming that a proper understanding of faith and reason, rightly practiced, never opposes true scientific discovery.
Biblical foundation
Scripture itself uses phenomenological, everyday language about the sun 'rising' (Eccl 1:5) without intending to teach technical astronomy, a point Galileo himself made using St. Augustine's principle that Scripture teaches 'how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.'
Scripture references
Historical evidence
The Vatican itself had funded and staffed astronomical observatories since the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582, and many prominent astronomers of the era, including several Jesuits, worked to confirm and extend heliocentric-era discoveries, showing the conflict was not simply science versus religion.
The Church Fathers
“The Holy Spirit... did not intend to teach men these facts that would be of no use to their salvation.”