I’ve been getting a little further into Cosmos, and I’m reading about Johannes Kepler and his theories of the solar system. It’s interesting to read, as we hear of these things, but never really put them in historical context.
Once again I’m left with the strong impression that the Catholic Church seems to have been responsible for the suppression of a lot of knowledge and scientific progress. I think this is one of the things that should worry us all about the rise of so-called “Creation Science” and the resistance to the teaching of Evolution in the classroom. Do we really want another lost millennium? Do we really want the scientific investigation of the universe to be modulated and limited by the unverified and adulterated writings of a bunch of near stone age priests?
When Galileo said that the Earth moved around the sun, Martin Luther said:
“An upstart astrologer …. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of Astronomy. But Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth” [1][2]
Some years ago, someone tried to tell me that it was the other way around, that the Catholic church had said the Earth orbited the Sun and Galileo that it did not. To this day, I still shake my head now as I think of that incident. My response to anyone who thinks that is to read the words of the Pope John Paul II on the issue:
“Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture….”
Remember this was followed by a formal apology in 2000 for a lot of things in the Catholic Church’s history, including what happened to Galileo.
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[1] Cosmos, Carl Sagan, page 69. ISBN 0-349-10703-3
[2] Refer to New International Version Bible. Joshua 10: 12:13.
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