Posted on 05/18/2009 9:12:37 PM PDT by bdeaner
(actually in 1600 the University of Wittenberg, as well as that of the University of Geneva, probably a couple other continental universities in northern Europe, and of course, Oxford and Cambridge too, were free of papal domination.)
Of course your point stands, as I’m sure you meant universities within Roman Catholic principalities at that time.
A whole lot of Science came from the Catholics. It shows how they were far from closed minded.
Have you?
Great book!
>>> history bears witness to the magnitude of the error — that it has allowed the Church to be unfairly stained with charges of anti-science, when in fact the Church created the very ground in which Western Science could flourish. There is a supreme irony and bitter tragedy in this reality...The cost of sin is large, and beyond imagination. <<<
Then again, there are a lot of anti-Christian and anti-Catholic bigots out there (not to mention Epicurians) who have an axe to grind. If not the Galileo Affair, then some other incident would have been elevated to mythic status to slam the Church and “Religion.” And if they couldn’t find some event that would do the job — Bruno doesn’t fit the “scientist” mold that well — they could just make it up from whole cloth: look at the case of “Columbus and the Flat Earth” myth.”
After a certain point you’re no longer talking about history, just propaganda.
On the other hand, the book was dedicated to Pope Paul III, so go figure.
“How did Protestants respond to heliocentric theories? Is there any data?”
There is information that takes a fair amount of digging. I recall that the “authorities” against Copernicus were all Protestant. Specifically the University of Wittenberg, Luther and Calvin all spoke out against the theory. An early effort to publish “De revolutionibus orbium caelestium” resulted in a rejection by Wittenberg to use their press. They did agree to publish only the chapter on mathematics.
Actually, quite so with Rome. "Rome" does acknowledge SOME changes in its powers. Vatican City is a smaller chunk o' real estate than the larger chunk over which emperors asked the Pope to assume civil authority a few gazillion year earlier.
Conservative Roman Catholics still say the Council of Trent degrees (which actually formally curse to hell all conservative Protestants) are in effect, as the Church, supposedly in council, cannot make mistakes. Oddly, when Vatican II says Muslims may go to Heaven... (and also retracts the condemnation of Protestants) nobody goes to the mat defending THAT particular infallible decree.
At least you used the word "formally". Vatican decrees can be made to say whatever you want them to say if you ignore some and overstress or misinterpret others. To someone who wants more to know what we teach than to find or to cobble up some bogus inconsistency in which to trap us, there is no contradiction between the formal anathemas of Trent and the teaching that God's extraordinary saving acts might extend further than even the Church imagines.
And on other threads I HAVE gone to the mat asserting that the Church teaches, not unreasonably, that the unbpatized can be saved.
Gallileo WAS condemned for his scientific work, precisely because the Church mistakenly believed certain things about the nature of the universe from scripture and tradition.
This is "precisely" not true. Before Galileo's condemnation, back in 1624 Urban VIII is said to have told Galileo that the Church had never declared and would never declare Copernicanism to be heretical. (So says Wood, Thomas; How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization page 73.) Heilbron, in The Sun in the Church:Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, refers to statements by Church astronomers in 1642 and 1651 that heliocentrism was not heretical, and these guys were not condemned. Before and after the Galileo disaster Catholic priests and astronomers continued to explore heliocentric hypothesis with impunity.
Those who insist that the Church was simply resisting science in general or even heliocentrism in particular should provide an explanation of how Galileo's condemnation seems to have had very little impact on the continuation of heliocentric researches OR, for that matter, why Copernicus was not condemned.
Again:Gallileo WAS condemned for his scientific work,...
No. This is not true. Galileo was feted and honored for his scientific work. He was even given papal medals! Galileo was condemned for insisting, beyond his knowledge and in the face of the absence any confirming evidence of a parallax shift, that heliocentrism was proven fact.
In history as in science, facts and data are our friends. The facts and the data show that the standard slam about Galileo ain't so.
Thanks to both of you. I did’t know the Osiander connection.
Wrong. There were mountains of scientific evidence to back up Copernicus.
Second, the popularity of his writings brought an essentially philosophical discussion into the public arena, requiring some sort of church response.
Can't have scientific matters uncommented on by a bunch of corrupt Church officials. That simply wouldn't do.
Third, by elevating scientific conjecture to a theological level, he was raising the stakes enormously
Where to start on this. It wasn't conjecture. Copernicus proved his 'theory' with solid mathematics. Second the only people raising the stakes were Church officials.
This article is bunk.
L
Like what? There was increasing evidence to weaken Ptolemy. Mountains on the moon, Jupiter with moons, and phases of Venus. But to SHOW a moving earth, you gotta have parallax, I think.
Copernicus PROVED the planets move with regular circular motion? Nope.
Not really. All you need to do is follow the sun.
L
What do you mean?
The problem is to "save the appearances," that is to put together an account which explains what one sees. The advantage of Copernicus is the comparative simplicity of heliocentrism. But if the sun is "fixed" and the earth moves, then the "fixed stars" should have apparent motion because the earth moves with respect to them.
And it turns out they do, but that wasn't detectable with the instruments of the 17th century.
Observing the sun showed the troubling phenomenon of a change in apparent diameter. My impression is that that was one of those things that made Kepler's explanation more elegant than Copernicus's
Well Copernicus didn't call the King of the Papal States (also known as the Pope) a blabbering simpleton either, which is exactly what Galileo did in his book.
Church or no church, the fact is that the Pope at that time was also a reigning monarch and in the 17th Century, no monarch took insults like that lightly.
Henry VIII would have cut his head off and then drawn and quartered him, not given him penance and house arrest in a pretty nice villa.
Galileo for all his brilliance was also an egotist who caused his own problems with his attitude, not his science.
Damn right it is.
Not only does it leave out Galileo's lifetime house arrest, but it keeps brining up a glaring inconsistency; that the church didn't accept his theory because he "couldn't prove it scientifically". Yet the Ptolemaic model was accepted as fact, even though it could not be scientifically proven either (and was WRONG!).
lew
galileo claimed the sun was stationary. FALSE
he claimed that planets revolve around the sun
in circular orbits. FALSE
Scientists knew that if the Corperican model were correct, that they would observe a parallax effect when viewing stars, yet they did not. Why was that?
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