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To: PatrickHenry
From my perspective, even granting the all intemperate behavior that you attribute to Galileo, it's still pretty black and white. I guess we're not going to agree about this one.

Well, I think we agree more than you think.

I probably should not have used the words "black and white." Clearly, the Galileo case is black and white in the sense that Galileo suffered a clear injustice, and that the actions of Church authorities was morally wrong.

However, what's not black and white was the Church leadership's position on geocentrism as well as their motivation for persecuting Galileo. Let me give you my interpretation of events and see how much you agree with them.

The historical record is clear that Church authoriteis did not hold geocentrism to be irreformable dogma. This is clear from Bellarmine's letters, as well as their tolerance of Copernicus and Kepler prior to the Galileo affair. However, they were reluctant to revise the official interpretation of the seemingly geocentric scripture passages, and would not do it unless they there was a definitive refutation of geocentrism, which had not come yet. They were also very annoyed that a layman, with virtually no theological training, was disseminating literature to the masses telling the Church to reinterpret the Bible on the basis of what they deemed to be insufficient proof.

Their egos could not tolerate this affront, and so they condemned Galileo and censored other heliocentric works to express the Copernican theory as a hypothesis. Again, this is not because they were dogmatically unwilling to abandon geocentrism. They just didn't think it was warranted, yet, and could not tolerate uppity laymen jumping the gun. If there was going to be a reinterpration, it should come from the Church leadership, not the masses, in their view.

You also have to remember that all this is happening with the Protestant reformation in the background, one of whose central tenants the Church was fighting was the notion that every layman is competent to interpret the Bible for himself.

60 posted on 02/05/2006 11:38:22 AM PST by curiosity
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To: curiosity
Well, I think we agree more than you think.

We agree on some facts, but I don't know about the rest. I'm sure the churchmen who forced Galileo to renounce the solar system and confess heresy had what they felt were sufficient reasons for their actions. But it doesn't matter if he had dropped trou and mooned the entire College of Cardinals; I don't believe what they did to him can ever be justified. I have no interest in any attempt to whitewash the affair. Whatever their motivations -- the result speaks for itself: The Crime of Galileo: Indictment and Abjuration of 1633.

61 posted on 02/05/2006 12:08:23 PM PST by PatrickHenry (Virtual Ignore for trolls, lunatics, dotards, scolds, & incurable ignoramuses.)
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