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To: JFK_Lib
The RCC was not a big fan of science that diverted from Aristotles model, much as todays secularists are hostile to anything that infers design in nature, thought they repeatedly use terms like 'engineered', 'designed', etc to describe what complexity they do find has evolved in nature.

Also, note that it was the RCC that finally did accept Galileo and in fact promoted his work after finally accepting that Aristotle was wrong

This is not very accurate history. The Catholic Church (it's universities anyway) invented the scientific method. The church had no real beef at all with science that strayed from Aristotle. After all, it was Galileo that insisted that orbits were round (since that was a perfect form, as defined by Aristotle). Galileo attacked Kepler unmercifully for postulating that orbits were elipses, a proposition that found immediate audiance in Catholic universities. Galileo had a long running fued with Jesuit astronomers who determined that comets traveled on eliptical orbits - Galileo rejected the existance of comets as physical objects (he argued that they were some sort of trick of light) rather than accept orbits that were not round.

The real argument between Galileo and the Church was rooted in a largely personel dispute between Galileo and the Pope which happened to occur at the time of the Reformation. It had little to do with science.

64 posted on 02/02/2005 10:37:06 AM PST by jscd3
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To: jscd3

Yes, you are right; I was giving the simplified version as I understood it.

But there was a certain defense of Aristotle as though he were some kind of pagan prophet among some of the early scholastics, at least as I recall from this end of so many years ago reading it.

Thansk for the correction.


71 posted on 02/02/2005 11:05:18 AM PST by JFK_Lib
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