Posted on 02/10/2015 2:06:38 PM PST by NYer
It took a century and a half for the "educated" Romanists to slink off, tails between their legs, and quietly remove his book from the Index.
By then, of course, they were nothing more than a laughing stock. It took 3½ centuries for the highly "educated" Church of Rome to [sort of] apologize. Unfortunately, during all of those three hundred and fifty years, the "fool" was correct and the highly "educated" clerics of the Vatican, who believed mumbojumbo was a substitute for mathematics, science, and reason were ... completely, utterly, and, dare I say infallibly ... WRONG.
If Galileo was a "fool" what does that make the Magisterium?
But the “clerics” were following the conclusions of the established science of the day, which was the ancient Greek science. Galileo could not, given the evidence available to him at the time of his trial, persuade educated men to abandon the ancient cosmology. You seem to be attributing to Galileo knowledge of theories later to be developed by the likes of men like Newton and Leibnitz. He and Kepler had indeed strongly contested the Ptolemaic model, even though it went against “commonsense.” Simple questions, such as why a earth spinning could go noticed by us? Galileo could not answer this. The atmosphere certainly does not behave as if the earth were moving at 1000 mph. It took something like Newton’s theory of gravitation to make this plausible. This went far beyond Galileo’s research. Galileo set his own hypotheses against the accumulated knowledge of the scholars of Europe —and guess what? He lost. Not only that, he tried to interpret the Bible to fit his theory. But the Bible was on the side of common sense, and he was not.
Galileo was the one who had common sense, a much simpler and more logical theoretical framework, and astronomical observations on his side. The "church" had bupkus. Except for a history of intimidation, torture, and murder.
The writers of the Bible reported what they saw, and I defy you, departing from authority and relating only on what YOU can discern through YOUR own experience,to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth moves around the sun. You cannot do that anymore than you can prove that the bar of soap you hold in your hand is made up of atoms. As for commonsense, that can be no more than what you and the people you know hold in common about things. It can be mistaken, but it is the place where we all must start. As for the sun standing “still in the heavens,” you seem a victim of the same literalism the many people hold to, forgetting that men cannot always explain what they are seeing or report it accurately afterwards. As for the pi being equal to 3, that i the number used by the Egyptians to build the pyramids, that seems to have come out well. To use 3.14159265... would not change much.
Galileo had a telescope. Anyone, including you, me, the pope, or his murderous minions, flunkies and stooges with a telescope can quickly confirm that "every object in the Heavens" does NOT revolve around the Earth.
The Egyptians did not use the number three for π. They used a ratio that comes out to about 3.1605. That is an error of about 6 parts in 1000. The pagan Archimedes of Syracuse used a primitive form of integral calculus that could be extended to arbitrary precision. He quit iterating after establishing that 3.140 < π < 3.142. God apparently didn't let his "chosen people" in on much by way of mathematics. [Let me note as an aside how preposterous and ironic is the claim that 3 = π is "close enough" in an article which purports to show that Romanoids aren't anti-science.]
There are simple tests I can show you to prove that atoms exist. Brownian motion for example. Don't know what soap has to do with anything [except maybe that's what clerics have their altar boys drop in front of them] but someone with "common sense" can extrapolate the kinetic theory of gases, Brownian motion and the apparently limitless divisibility of matter to infer that atoms exist, and that if they exist, their existence extends to a bar of soap as easily as anything else. That sort of "common sense" was, of course, not accessible to the would-be torturers of Galileo.
As for common sense, a person with genuine common sense will ask the following question: Why did the ignorant peoples of the past stop seeing miracles at exactly the same time that their explanation and refutation became possible?
The answer is quite obvious to anyone with "common sense." Something which neither you, the pope, nor the church's medieval forebears can lay any claim to.
In order to arrive at her conclusions, she has to make assumptions about the diameter(s) of the bowl, not even the slightest hint of which are stated in the biblical passage in question. By fudging the inside diameter of the bowl, [which we do not know, and which she does not have any reason to use, speculate about, or guess at] she miraculously arrives at 3.14 as the value of π.
This is preposterous. It's akin to the ridiculous rationalizations that Commie mathematicians used to publish from time-to-time justifying an absolutely incorrect "proof" that Marx once published that "demonstrated" that continuous sequences of functions must converge to continuous limit functions. No, they don't. Marx became an "economist" because he was a failure as a "mathematician" and no amount of retrofitting makes him a decent one.
And similarly, no amount of fudging makes The Bible a truthful mathematical or scientific guide.
PurpleMath's tortured attempt to salvage The Bible's reputation requires no less than 1400 words, two diagrams, and numerous silly assumptions all of which are demolished with a very simple observation: No real bowl produced in the ancient world would be uniformly circular. Furthermore, that point is mooted anyway by the fact that no measurement performed using hand measures [spans, cubits, etc.] would have been accurate to more than one significant digit even if the bowl were hand-thrown on the Potter's Wheel of Yahweh Himself. Therefore, the idea that a measurement of it would yield a value even near π let alone one with three significant digits[!] is pure jury-rigged horse manure.
So the bowl wasn’t round?
Is your head round?
No. Why so rude?
PurpleMath makes a very artificial, contrived effort to show that the biblical value of π given in this passage is correct to three significant digits. That simply isn't possible unless your bowl is extreeeeeeeeemely precisely made. The point is that her efforts to make The Bible correct are as tortured as the efforts of Galileo's Inquisitors to persist in the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe.
The Bible isn't a science book. It isn't a book of mathematical tables. We can't really talk about a Christian denomination being pro (or anti-) science until we get that issue off the table.
Ah, I see your point. As a practical matter, given the description in the Bible, how would a laver like that be made? I mean, if you and I were only given the vague description could we create it and how would we?
I don’t believe the Bible to be a guide to science. I’m just curious and appreciate your insights.
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