[Aquinasfan]

Don't forget that it was Galileo's arrogance and refusal to swallow Aristotelian physics (as filtered through Aquinas, mostly) that really started modern physics.

But don't forget Galileo's contemporary Copernicus, whose research several cardinals were funding.

You're right about Aquinas promoting some of Aristotle's errors. But it's important to remember that Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history, at least up to St. Thomas' time, so Aquinas' adoption of some of Aristotle's flawed theories regarding the natural world is understandable.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" But don't forget Galileo's contemporary Copernicus, whose research several cardinals were funding."

But none of them really thought the Copernican system was REAL; they just saw it as useful fiction that enabled better calculations of certain orbits. If Copernicus had ever insisted that his system was more than a mathematical model, he would have been silenced.

[sauropod]

mark

[snarks_when_bored]

...it's important to remember that Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history, at least up to St. Thomas' time...

Now you've stepped in it! I'm going to have to drag out one of my favorite Alfred North Whitehead quotes:

"Aristotle dissected fishes with Plato's thoughts in his head."

Whitehead had a real gift for the apposite (slight) exaggeration. Here's another famous one which is relevant in the present context:

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

I stand with Whitehead on this question.

[grey_whiskers]

But it's important to remember that Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history, at least up to St. Thomas' time, so Aquinas' adoption of some of Aristotle's flawed theories regarding the natural world is understandable.

Somewhere in the mix here is the murky and ill-defined transition from scholasticism to empiricism. And it is empiricism which gives science its strength and reliability. But the politicization even of science by the left (from global warming to embryonic stem cells) threatens to replace empiricism by argument from authority, and undo the hard-won gains of the last several hundred years.