In other words, it's revisionism. It promotes the view that the actions of the Church were consistent with a scientifically enlightened view, and that Galileo brought the whole thing upon himself with his rash agressiveness.
I think the record of his condemnation that I cited should be enough to give anyone pause.
>>> ...it’s revisionism. It promotes the view that the actions of the Church were consistent with a scientifically enlightened view, and that Galileo brought the whole thing upon himself with his rash agressiveness. <<<
Actually, towards the end of the article we find this:
“The mistakes that were made came from Galileo’s own personality and style, the Holy Father’s anger in believing that Galileo had personally deceived him, jealous competitive scientists out to get the acerbic Galileo and, frankly, tribunal judges who erroneously believed it was scientific fact that the universe revolved around a motionless Earth and that the Bible confirmed such a belief.”
Doesn’t look so onesided to me. Once again, have you even bothered to read the article?
>>> I think the record of his condemnation that I cited should be enough to give anyone pause. <<<
Correct. However, I think that both Bernini and Lockwood would agree that his trial and condemnation are poor fodder for “science vs. theology” myth-mongers and anti-Catholic bigots.
I think the record of his condemnation that I cited should be enough to give anyone pause.
Okay. I paused.
Then I noticed the straw man. This article does NOT promote or state or imply that the actions of the Church were consistent with a scientifically "enlightened" point of view. It DOES argue that the Church did not have on the science faculty the bunch of evil, mindless, superstitious paranoids that the "enlightened" like to think she had.
Then I went back to the record. And the record is that in 1624 Urban VIII gave Galileo gifts and honors and urged him to continue his researches. In 1612 Galileo's Letters on the Sunspots espoused the Copernican hypothesis and Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (later Urban VIII) wrote him to congratulate him.
Without measurements of parallax, heliocentrism must remain a hypothesis. Galileo was urged to write about it as a hypothesis. To this day, astronomers treat the Copernican system as a hypothesis, a discredited hypothesis at that.
Reviewing the data, data acquired with the use of sensitive instruments discredits geocentrism. Data available at the time discredited regular circular motion of the planets around either the earth or the sun.
So NO data confirmed or could confirm the Copernican System or even heliocentrism without regular circular motion. Available data pointed out flaws in Copernicus. But the comparative elegance of heliocentrism meant that despite Galileo's condemnation other religious scientists, e.g. Fr. Boscovic (100 years later), continued to use the hypothesis of a moving earth in their work and continued to look for data to support the hypothesis.
When what somebody says is false, revisionism is a good thing. Kepler revised Copernicus. Newton revised Kepler. Einstein revised Newton. Lobachevsky revised Euclid. Descartes revised Apollonius. I LIKE revisionism
The next time you want to go on a Catholics vs. Science field trip, check out the Jesuits and seismology or Nicolaus Steno (a convert from Lutheranism) and geology.
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!).