The gripping story of Galileo's trial before the Roman Inquisition is one of the defining narratives of Western civilization. The spectacle of the aging astronomer being forced, under the threat of torture, to recant his belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun has seemed to many to mark the moment when the Age of Faith gave way to the Age of Reason and to embody the Catholic Church's enduring hostility to unfettered inquiry and expression.

Not for Wade Rowland. In "Galileo's Mistake" he contends that just as it is the victors who write the history of wars, so have anti-Catholic writers produced an authorized version of this event, portraying Galileo "as a lonely champion of enlightenment and the church as a blind, despotic power." In fact, Mr. Rowland maintains, in this epic confrontation between scientist and church, it is the church's position that seems more defensible.

Even in the field of revisionist history this is an audacious position. In 1992 the church itself admitted that it had erred in condemning Galileo. As headlines mockingly put it at the time, the Vatican had finally acknowledged that the Earth revolved around the Sun. But to Mr. Rowland such descriptions trivialize the real issues at stake in the conflict, namely the essential nature of the universe and which sphere — science or faith — can better grasp it.

Central to Mr. Rowland's case is that the church, while persecuting Galileo, let Copernicus alone. Decades before Galileo was born in 1564, Copernicus had concluded that the Earth revolved around the Sun, a position that contradicted the prevailing geocentric system as well as the church's teaching, based on Scripture, that the Earth anchored God's creation. Wary of provoking the church, Copernicus refrained from publishing his findings, and it was only in 1543, as he lay dying, that he allowed his manuscript to appear. Written in Latin, "De Revolutionibus" was immensely influential with astronomers but remained largely unknown to the public.

Galileo made his initial mark as a physicist and mathematician, but in 1609 he developed a crude telescope. With it he made a series of astounding discoveries that confirmed for him the accuracy of the Copernican thesis.

The initial response was rapturous, and when Galileo went to Rome in 1611 to show off his new device, even church officials applauded. Thus encouraged, Galileo in 1615 published his "Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina," in which he argued (in Italian) that not only had the Copernican thesis been conclusively demonstrated, but that the new scientific method had shown its clear superiority over Scripture as a guide to the universe.

By then, however, the mood in the church had hardened. In the throes of the Counter-Reformation, it had little tolerance for such bold assertions. In conventional accounts it was Galileo's insistence on the Copernican worldview that riled the church. Mr. Rowland demurs. For him it was Galileo's insistence "that there is a single and unique explanation to natural phenomena," based on observation and reason, that made all other explanations, including those based on biblical revelation, useless.

This in Mr. Rowland's view was Galileo's mistake. Mr. Rowland puckishly argues that science is no more reliable than religion in describing the universe. Scientific observations, while commonly thought to be based on empirical reality, he writes, are actually "filtered through layers of subjective impression"; scientific "facts" about nature are not "pre-existing truths" but "human constructs."

That is why there are revolutions in science in which one set of assumptions is overthrown and replaced by another. Galileo, by denying the value of divinely inspired interpretations of the universe, posed an unacceptable threat to the authority of the church, and it responded by warning him to stop promoting the Copernican system.

For many years, he did. In 1632, however, he published his "Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems." In it an advocate for the heliocentric system soundly trounces a proponent of the geocentric one. Furious at this seeming violation of its order, the church accused Galileo of heresy and summoned him to Rome to appear before the Inquisition.

In describing the trial Mr. Rowland depicts Galileo as vain and egotistical and the church as embattled and lenient. While traditional accounts stress the threat of torture Galileo faced, Mr. Rowland dismisses this as a mere formality. Yes, he writes, Galileo was placed under house arrest, but at least he wasn't burned at the stake. As for Pope Urban VIII, Mr. Rowland asserts, his papacy faced extraordinary challenges, and "it would be an unfair commentator who would not concede that he had acquitted himself reasonably well in the circumstances."

Mr. Rowland finds it paradoxical that the key issue in the trial — Galileo's insistence on the mechanistic interpretation of the universe — went unmentioned. Yet perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it wasn't really central. From Mr. Rowland's own account, it seems clear that the Vatican went after Galileo and not Copernicus because the church had grown more repressive and because Galileo had more aggressively sought to promote his views.

It's true, as Mr. Rowland notes, that the idea of free expression was alien in Europe in those years. But he fails to convey the lengths to which the church would go to protect its hold on knowledge. During the Middle Ages it denied laymen access to the Bible, lest they learn to read it for themselves. When the invention of the printing press made that impossible, it set up the Index of Forbidden Books. The Inquisition was its barbaric apparatus of enforcement.

In "Galileo's Mistake" Mr. Rowland is, in essence, arguing for a kinder, gentler Inquisition. He doesn't pull it off. In belittling Galileo and extolling the church, he seems simply to be trying to replace one authorized version with another.

Michael Massing is writing a book about the Protestant Reformation.