This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Nov 2006, by Maxim.
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27 May 07
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29 Apr 07
indraadnanCathoic.net says: faith and science, properly understood, can never be at odds.
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26 Nov 06
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There is no question that if the debate over heliocentricism had remained purely scientific, it would have been shrugged off by the Church authorities. But in 1614, Galileo felt that he had to answer the objection that the new science contradicted certain passages of Scripture.
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Galileo's other problem was that he insisted, despite the discoveries of Kepler, that the planets orbit the sun in perfect circles.
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Such proof, however, was riot forthcoming. Galileo's belligerence probably had much to do with the fact that he knew there was no direct proof of heliocentricism. He could not even answer the strongest argument against it, which was advanced by Aristotle. If the earth did orbit the sun, the philosopher wrote, then stellar parallaxes would be observable in the sky. In other words, there would be a shift in the position of a star observed from the earth on one side of the sun, and then six months later from the other side. Galileo was not able with the best of his telescopes to discern the slightest stellar parallax. This was a valid scientific objection, and it was not answered until 1838, when Friedrich Bessel succeeded in determining the parallax of star 61 Cygni.
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But Galileo was intent on ramming Copernicus down the throat of Christendom. The irony is that when he started his campaign, he enjoyed almost universal good will among the Catholic hierarchy. But he managed to alienate almost everybody with his caustic manner and aggressive tactics. His position gave the Church authorities no room to maneuver: they either had to accept Copernicanism as a fact (even though it had not been proved) and reinterpret Scripture accordingly; or they had to condemn it.
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Galileo was a gifted tinkerer, and when he heard about the invention of the telescope in Holland, he immediately built one for himself, characteristically taking full credit for the invention.
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Copernicus had delayed the publication of his book for years because he feared, not the censure of the Church, but the mockery of academics. It was the hide-bound Aristotelians in the schools who offered the fiercest resistance to the new science. Aristotle was the Master of Those Who Know; perusal of his texts was regarded as almost superior to the study of nature itself. The Aristotelian universe comprised two worlds, the superlunary and the sublunary. The former consisted of the moon and everything beyond; it was perfect and imperishable. The latter was the terrestrial globe and its atmosphere, subject to generation and decay, the slagheap of the cosmos.
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Ptolemy's methodizing of Aristotle to explain the motion of the stars was part of this academic baggage. And it made perfect empirical sense; by using it, ships were able to navigate the seas and astronomers were able to predict eclipses. So why give up this time-honored system for a new, unproved cosmology which not only contradicted common sense (as no less an authority than Francis Bacon averred), but also the apparent meaning of Scripture?
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But in reality Copernicus's book marked a sea change in human thought, one that caught the universities even more off guard than the Church. Owen Barfield, in his fascinating book Saving the Appearances, calls it "the real turning-point" in
the history of science: "It took place when Copernicus (probably--it cannot be regarded as certain) began to think, and others, like Kepler and Galileo, began to affirm that the heliocentric hypothesis not only saved the appearances, but was physically true ....
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Copernicus, a good Catholic, published his book at the urging of two eminent prelates and dedicated it to Pope Paul III, who received it cordially.
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The almost universal belief that the purpose of science was not to give a final account of reality, but merely to "save appearances," accounts for how lightly the Church hierarchy initially received Copernicus's theory. Astronomy and mathematics were regarded as the play things of virtuosi. They were accounted as having neither philosophical nor theological relevance.
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To the Greek and medieval mind, science was a kind of formalism, a means of coordinating data, which had no bearing on the ultimate reality of things.
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The modern age of science began in 1543 when Nicholas Copernicus, a Polish Canon, published his epochal On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs. The popular view is that Copernicus "discovered" that the earth revolves around the sun. Actually, the notion is at least as old as the ancient Greeks. But the geocentric theory, endorsed by Aristotle and given mathematical plausibility by Ptolemy, was the prevailing model until Copernicus.
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Since the Galileo case is one of the historical bludgeons that are used to beat on the Church--the other two being the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition--it is important that Catholics understand exactly what happened between the Church and that very great scientist.
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- it was perfectly acceptable to maintain Copernicanism as a working hypothesis; and
- if there were "real proof" that the earth circles around the sun, "then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary......"
In April 1615, he wrote a letter which amounted to an unofficial statement of the Church's position. He pointed out that:
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In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council taught that the universe had a beginning in time--an idea which would have scandalized both an ancient Greek and a 19th century positivist, but which is now a commonplace of modern cosmology.
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In Jaki's vivid phrase, science was "still-born" in every major culture--Greek, Hindu, Chinese--except the Christian West. It was the insistence on the rationality of God and His creation by St. Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic thinkers that paved the way for Galileo and Newton.
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