Debunking the Galileo Myth

CERC ^ | DINESH D'SOUZA

[djf]

The book in question:

[thefrankbaum]

The Church was clearly in panic mode throughout this time as it saw its stranglehold on thought being loosened on all sides by the inquiries of clear-sighted men.

See above the quote from the Archbishop of Capua to Copernicus. Doesn't look like the Church was all that scared.

There is no question that the Church attempted to stem the tide of scientific inquiry.

Prove your proposition. I believe there is a very real question as to such.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Credit is due to Galileo for at least three important advances:

1.) He was the first person to seriously study the heavens with a telescope. He made a number of perceptive observations: That Jupiter had moons, that the surface of the moon was rough and Venus had phases. (He also recorded an observation of Uranus 180 before Herschel. He didn't recognize it as a planet, though.)

2.) Although he badly muffed tides, Galilean Relativity explained why a rock thrown up vertically landed where it was thrown.

3.) He more or less invented the science of dynamics and incidentally invented the pendulum to assist his researches. He didn't drop cannon balls off the tower of Pisa, but used inclined planes and rolling balls to stretch the time scales of his experiments to match his instruments. He completed refuted Aristotelian mechanics and was the first to base dynamics on observations. He is created with the law x = kt^2, k = a/2 when Vo = 0.

Galileo was guilty of pigheadedness and insufferable arrogance. He relished controversy when tact was called for. He was, all in all, more of a coddled pet who bit the hand that fed him than a martyr on the altar of Truth slain by Superstition and Ignorance.

[mckenzie7]

Obviously it was a DIFFERENT type of Catholic school than I went to!

[IrishCatholic]

I read your link.
Did you?
From the link your reference indicated he was burned for heresy and not for any connection with the Heliocentric model.
Of course, the guy still burned. But that isn't the point now, is it? Your premise is the church flamed him because of science when your own link showed he was burned for theology.
I see no support for your anti-Catholic view that the Church suppressed science and “clear-sighted” men were responsible for enlightenment. “There is no question that the Church attempted to stem the tide of scientific inquiry. It failed, fortunately.” is completely without support by your statement. You only have your opinion.

Admit it, you are simply a militant atheist or Catholic hater looking to score points.

I would respect honesty. Also, thanks for the link. It was interesting to read about the man.

[Coyoteman]

I could care less about your petty scientific theories, it's the deaths that disturb me.

Scientific theories at least are based on evidence.

And deaths disturb me too:

[wagglebee]

I see you still aren’t acknowledging your anti-FReeper site.

I won’t disagree that Christian religious wars were wrong, but what you seem to overlook is the fact that they ended centuries ago. Darwinists are still murdering at a rate of OVER ONE MILLION PEOPLE A WEEK.

[Coyoteman]

And “Darwinists” are defined as anyone wagglebee disagrees with?

[Jacquerie]

Always. A$$hole. Cunningham, a constant.

[djf]

Why does every single thread at FR these days seem to turn into a street fight?

It’s getting old.

[wagglebee]

And “Darwinists” are defined as anyone wagglebee disagrees with?

Nonsense.

Are you saying that Charles Galton, Leonard Darwin, et al WERE NOT Darwinists?

I assume you figure if you continue to ignore my question about your anti-FReeper site you can pretend FReepers don't know about it. Oh well, I was delighted to participate in getting several of your Darwinist ilk zotted, I think my favorite was the pro-Hitler troll who went crying to your forum and called me the "Grand Inquisitor" of FR.

[wagglebee]

Why does every single thread at FR these days seem to turn into a street fight?

Perhaps because of a small group of anti-Christian secularists?

[Coyoteman]

I assume you figure if you continue to ignore my question about your anti-FReeper site you can pretend FReepers don't know about it.

If you are referring to DarwinCentral.org, at least you could give the url so folks can check it out for themselves. I think they'll find that the site is far more than an "anti-FReeper" site.

A lot of the pro-science posters who were banned here ended up starting their own site. Why do you have a problem with that? Or do you expect that folks who are banned from here are banned from the internet forever?

[wagglebee]

I think they'll find that the site is far more than an "anti-FReeper" site.

ALL anti-FReeper sites have their little niches in addition to anti-FReeping.

A lot of the pro-science posters who were banned here ended up starting their own site. Why do you have a problem with that?

I don't have a problem with that at all, people who want to blame Christianity rather than Darwinism for Hitler certainly need someplace to go.

[Radix]

"In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; ..."

I guess that the differences of opinions that we likely hold is dependent upon just which Jesuits we have met and known.

A bunch of smart guys who dwell in secret lairs speaking Latin among each other while denying Biblical assertions.

Those are the type of Jesuits that I met and congregated with in my University days.

Not a one among them will defend such things as the virgin birth, or the gifts of the Spirit, but they will indeed go along with the Baltimore Catechism and other such nonsense.

See you at the Judgment Day.

[wagglebee]

Not a one among them will defend such things as the virgin birth, or the gifts of the Spirit, but they will indeed go along with the Baltimore Catechism and other such nonsense.

Please show us that portion of the Baltimore Catechism that denies the Virgin Birth or Gifts of the Spirit.

[Matchett-PI]

“..the Church believes science and religion cannot co exist.” ~ SoftwareEngineer

Not so.

What were Galileo’s scientific and biblical conflicts with the Church?
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/galileo.html

“..It was not a simple conflict between science and religion, as usually portrayed. Rather it was a conflict between Copernican science and Aristotelian science which had become Church tradition.

What is the lesson that Christians should learn from Galileo?
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c007.html

[Coleus]

The Catholic Church has been the standard bearer of science and scientific research since the first millennium. 

Catholic cathedrals in Bologna, Florence, Paris, and Rome were constructed to function as solar observatories. No more precise instruments for observing the sun’s apparent motion could be found anywhere in the world. When Johannes Kepler posited that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular, Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini verified Kepler’s position through observations he made in the Basilica of San Petronio in the heart of the Papal States. Cassini, incidentally, was a student of Fr. Riccioli and Fr. Francesco Grimaldi, the great astronomer who also discovered the diffraction of light, and even gave the phenomenon its name.

There are about 35 craters on the moon named after Jesuit priests who were at the time scientists and mathematicians. Fr. J.B. Macelwane, wrote the book Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first seismology textbook in America, in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Fr. Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

Fr. Giambattista Riccioli was the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body.

Fr. Roger Boscovich has been referred as the father of modern atomic theory.

By the eighteenth century, the Jesuits had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity.

They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn’s rings.

They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. 

Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics – all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents [Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189].

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In seventeenth-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible.

[Radix]

"Please show us that portion of the Baltimore Catechism that denies the Virgin Birth or Gifts of the Spirit."

You deliberately ignore the real point.

Jesuits are certainly not interested in what the Bible has to say about anything.

Apparently you are in accord with that.

I gave a good rebuke to one of those geniuses some 30 years ago.

He attempted to explain to me that because man is made in God's image then God must be a female. Pure idiocy pronounced by that particular fraud.

I challenged his stupidity and he was left scratching his head and silly looking beard.

You likely will not buy what I say at any rate, but I can assure you that I do not bullshit concerning such things.

I'll let you know when my book is ready.

[tpanther]

Why does every single thread at FR these days seem to turn into a street fight?

It’s getting old.

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Because secular humanist godless liberals try in vain every single day to undermine FR with their endless lies?