Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, but he built the best one in his day. 

Galileo turned his fancy new telescope toward Jupiter and made a shocking discovery: four moons! Four moons orbit the giant planet! It was the seventeenth century equivalent of headline-making-break in-news. 

Today, Jupiter has 95 officially recognized moons, so why all the excitement about four?

Those four moons landed Galileo in big trouble with the Church. 

The official position of the Church was an earth-centered universe: all stars, all moons, all planets orbit the earth. After all, the Bible clearly says that the earth is fixed and cannot be moved. And, more importantly, if earth is not the center of it all, then humans are not the center of God’s attention . . . and Christian theology falls apart.

Galileo set his telescope up in public and invited critics to look for themselves. See the evidence with your own two eyes, he said. 

But opposition to Galileo was never about the evidence. Opposition was so much NOT about the evidence that some people simply refused to look through the telescope.

Hard pass, they said. I’m good, they said. Nothing to see here.

This past spring, the board of the third largest school district in Texas, Cy-Fair ISD in the Houston area, voted overwhelmingly to ban thirteen chapters in approved science textbooks for the 2024-2025 school year. 

The banned chapters cover topics deemed “controversial” by the board: climate change, vaccines, and human impact on the earth and its ecosystems. 

No science teachers or science administrators were involved in the decision. 

State Representative Jon Rosenthal has kids in Cy-Fair. Here’s Rosenthal: “They’re choosing to not prepare them for the possibility of entering the scientific community or even understanding some of the stuff that drives our modern science and medical profession now.”

The textbooks can be used, but we must pretend the banned chapters aren’t there. Nothing to see here – just ignore that evidence. 

The Sci-Fair school board simply refuses to look through the telescope.

 And sadly, the students aren’t allowed to look, either.