Let's not dilute the term "scientific". Scentific method is relatively recent, and consists of very specific sets of steps. So no, Galileo's opposition was not scientific.
Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
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Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
#32There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable exceptions. José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo, so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools. Moreover, when Galileo fell in dis…
Also worth mentioning: Galileo himself was "within the Catholic Church".
Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
#33The idea that science and religion are distinct spheres, or even things that might be in opposition to each other, has been so thoroughly established in our modern consciousnesses that it's easy to forget that in the past they didn't really make such a distinction.
Science and Religion aren't at odds with each other, they never have been.
What has been at odds is religion and scientific discoveries that contradict or disprove the religious story. Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the problem.
Bruno was burned alive for holding fast to the idea that there are more solar systems than just our own, and that the universe is basically infinite, both ideas that contradict the church's story
To say that religion is anti-science would be disingenuous, but to say that religion isn't often at odds with science or that it hasn't stifled scientific progress in the name of maintaining the myths of its teachings would be equally so...
Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
#34To be fair, the Church's influence in what we would call science back then was incredibly powerful. I think its unrealistic to see 17th century science as this secular institution like we have today. Of course the 'scientists' of the age followed a church friendly narrative. It was in their interests to do so. I think we will never really understand the chill on speech and research the Church had during the medieval…
That's really a lot of nonsense, though I'll grant you that "progress-stifling, working-against-science church" is a long-entrenched meme[+].
[+] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progr...
Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
#35There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable exceptions. José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo, so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools. Moreover, when Galileo fell in dis…
Also worth mentioning: Galileo himself was "within the Catholic Church".
"Also worth mentioning: Galileo himself was "within the Catholic Church"."
Also worth mentioning: not being in the Catholic Church during that era was called "excommunication" and was banishment from public society all together
Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
#36Earth-Centric model was actually scientifically better at that time. With Occam's razor you would prefer it. - Even church agreed that Earth is not static, but is rotating. - Nobody observed star parallax, major proof for Copernican model was missing until 19th century. - Ptolemaic model with its epicycles provided better predictions. - Copernican model is also wrong, planets are orbiting around center of gravity, wh…
>planets are orbiting around center of gravity, which is outside of sun.. The only planet with a barycenter with the sun outside it's radius is Jupiter. And that only slightly. (with an altitude of 0.07 of the sun's radius) The earth-sun barycenter is 0.0006 times the sun's radius from it's _center_
Even then the definition of the surface is different than the definition of the surface of, say, the Earth, so I'm not sure what "outside" the Sun means precisely.
Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
#37The amazing thing about the entire discussion is how it really was a scientific discussion that evolved over time.
There are clearly scientific ideas that we take as simple truths now that will be disproved in the future. They are clearly going to be a little more nuanced than planetary motion but it's great to see how the scientific community has and will evolve.
Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
#38The idea that science and religion are distinct spheres, or even things that might be in opposition to each other, has been so thoroughly established in our modern consciousnesses that it's easy to forget that in the past they didn't really make such a distinction.
Science and Religion aren't at odds with each other, they never have been. What has been at odds is religion and scientific discoveries that contradict or disprove the religious story. Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the problem. Bruno was burned alive for holding fast to the idea that there are more solar systems than just our own, and that the universe is basically infinite, both…
Bruno was burned alive for being a complete prat, and pissing off all the wrong people, actually. Formally, he was condemned because:
> In the spring of 1599, the trial was begun before a commission of the Roman Inquisition, and, after the accused had been granted several terms of respite in which to retract his errors, he was finally condemned (January, 1600), handed over to the secular power (8 February), and burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome (17 February). Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.
He also has the interesting distinction of being excommunicated by three major denominations (the church of rome, the lutherans, the reform church, and elizabeth/CofE didn't like him much either) which is possibly a unique distinction for his time.
tl;dr: bruno had a seriously abrasive personality, heterodox and incoherent theological views, and the result wasn't pretty. His science, such as it was, had little to nothing to do with it.
Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
#39Earth-Centric model was actually scientifically better at that time. With Occam's razor you would prefer it. - Even church agreed that Earth is not static, but is rotating. - Nobody observed star parallax, major proof for Copernican model was missing until 19th century. - Ptolemaic model with its epicycles provided better predictions. - Copernican model is also wrong, planets are orbiting around center of gravity, wh…
The Ptolemic model was not better at the time, but it wasn't really worse. The Copernican model provided roughly the same observational accuracy, and was very slightly simpler. Occam's razor would probably prefer the Copernican model in a vacuum, but the differences were too slight to prefer unseating the incumbent.
> Copernican model is also wrong, planets are orbiting around center of gravity, which is outside of sun..
Well, a bigger shortcoming is that Copernicus still insisted that orbits be circles instead of ellipses.
> Ptolemaic model with its epicycles provided better predictions.
Not only did the Copernican model include epicycles, it actually included more epicycles than the Ptolemic model (modern myth notwithstanding). Both models could improve accuracy by adding more epicycles, and for the same amount of computation, both models produced predictions of roughly equal accuracy.
The one improvement the Copernican model provided, was that it removed something called the equant (and replaced it with more epicycles). The equant allows for non-constant orbital velocity around an epicycle, by instead having constant angular velocity around a point that is not the center of the circle. When Copernicus' work was published, the removal of the equant was considered by many mathematicians to be the main argument in favor of heliocentrism (although some considered it just a computational model, with geocentrism still being correct with respect to reality).
Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
#40Let's not dilute the term "scientific". Scentific method is relatively recent, and consists of very specific sets of steps. So no, Galileo's opposition was not scientific.
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