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Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

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Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#121

Post by acqq »

c3534l wrote: post #110
acqq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The church thinkers actually believed what was in the Bible: Augustine, Saint Basil, St. Thomas Aquinas. And the scriptures were made by the people who understood very little about the world, compared to what the current science knows. Therefore the creation is described using the concepts that we today know for sure don't exist. Specifically, in the creation myth: "And God made the firmament, and divided the wat…

No one is saying that the bible has a physically accurate account of the world, only that the church at the time based their understanding of the physical universe primarily on Aristotle, and I don't think you'll find many historians arguing otherwise on account of us having writings from them arguing and justifying their positions.

Absolutely not true that "the church at the time based their understanding of the physical universe primarily on Aristotle."

We talk about the religious view. For the religious view the Bible was actually relevant for the Church:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament

"Augustine wrote that too much learning had been expended on the nature of the firmament.[9] "We may understand this name as given to indicate not it is motionless but that it is solid." he wrote.[9]

Saint Basil argued for a fluid firmament.[9]

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the firmament had a "solid nature" and stood above a "region of fire, wherein all vapor must be consumed."[10]"

1475:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament#/media/File:Scheme_o...

Before the Christians, the Jews also had such interpretations:

"According to The Jewish Encyclopedia:

The Hebrews regarded the earth as a plain or a hill figured like a hemisphere, swimming on water. Over this is arched the solid vault of heaven. To this vault are fastened the lights, the stars. So slight is this elevation that birds may rise to it and fly along its expanse.[8]"

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#122

Post by camelNotation »

baldfat wrote: post #64
edko wrote: post #6

There 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: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back in those times. Here is the article on Artistole's…

Aristotle won in the west. In Eastern Christendom, Plato won.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#123

Post by smallnamespace »

kevinwang wrote: post #115
smallnamespace wrote: post #112

Stupid question: given General Relativity, and in particular that all reference frames are equally valid , including rotating and accelerating ones, in what sense is heliocentrism more 'true' than geocentrism? E.g. you can pick a geocentric reference frame and all the math works out (albeit you'd need to define large fictitious forces, etc., but again, they are only 'fictitious' from the perspective of a different re…

I think most simply, the entire solar system revolves around the sun and not the earth.

Isn't that simply begging the question though?

If you adopt a geocentric reference frame, then the Sun appears to rotate around the Earth, and all the other planets also appear to follow epicyclic paths around the Earth. You can predict the motions of every planet and star equally well, the equations are just different.

So again, why is one more 'correct' than the other, besides calculational simplicity?

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#124

Post by nsxwolf »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #113
nsxwolf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it to be incredibly dismissive when presented with a list of great Catholic scientists throughout history, detractors brush that aside by essentially saying "Well, they had no choice but to pretend to be Catholic back then!" What these scientists thought about their religion is often documented, but the detractors don't care to read any further as it might hurt their argument. In reality, the enthusiasm for sc…

I'd argue that curiosity that leads to science predates all religion and is built into our dna via evolution. I think projecting cultural motivators for natural motivation is questionable. In another culture you'd say Islam was a motivator for science and you'd be just as wrong. The evidence we have shows that this is a natural part of being human and would come about in any culture- and has! Our most innovating cult…

Islam at times has been a motivator for science and other intellectual endeavors. I don't need to be from another culture to say that, and I'm not wrong.

What actually bothers me is that what I said was true, yet some people are unwilling to take even a superficial look at the evidence.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#125

Post by jcranmer »

eric_the_read wrote: post #79
michaelsbradley wrote: post #23

Many persons who were very serious about religious faith in that time period, e.g. Catholic priests, also had great enthusiasm for rigorous mathematics and scientific advancement. For example, Fr. Paul Gudin, a Jesuit priest, was a mathematician and astronomer. He was interested in and supportive of the work of Johannes Kepler and provided him with a telescope when Kepler was experiencing financial difficulties[+]. […

In fact, Kepler, a Lutheran, was named Imperial Mathematician of the Holy Roman (i.e., Catholic) Empire.

After the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the HRE effectively sanctioned the ability of princes to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism. It should be noted, though, that the Emperors tended to be fanatical Catholics, which leads to the Thirty Years' War (tl;dr: Protestant King of Bohemia dies, gets inherited by Catholic Emperor, Bohemia rebels). At the end of that war, the Peace of Westphalia effectively guarantees freedom of religious worship for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, independent of the religious beliefs of rulers.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#127

Post by jostmey »

jkot wrote: post #4

Earth-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…

Occam's razor is not science, but it is rational. Science is about running physical experiments to verify your understanding, and to include proper controls to validate the experiments.

A lot of research does not have a component of science to it, but the studies are rational. Rational != Science

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#128

Post by cfmcdonald »

eternalban wrote: post #54
bbctol wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

OP thinks the assumption of "epicycles" tips the balance of "least assumptions" to the contending theory. (He did not elaborate the full count of assumptions of either.)

Both systems (Copernican and Ptolemaic) had epicycles.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#129

Post by sofal »

contravariant wrote: post #120
sofal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientists do not generally have faith in their hypotheses in the same way that religious believers have faith in the claims of their holy book or their religious leader. That would be an equivocation on the usage of the term 'faith', one usage being merely confidence or trust, which can be apportioned to the available evidence, and the other usage being a religious belief in doctrines regardless of available evidenc…

It sounds as if you've taking your conclusion that religious faith must be blind and ignorant and worked backwards from there. I remain unconvinced that people who consider themselves religious are any worse at adjusting their world view to scientific evidence than people who do not.

I'm only describing how the term faith is used by religious believers. They take a certain set of claims "on faith", and when contradictory evidence comes along there are various reactions, like outright denial, shelving of the issue entirely in the hope of getting answers later (like after you're dead), reinterpretation of the religious claims to better fit the existing models or to be completely unfalsifiable and therefore out of reach of investigation, and full on apologetics.

I've been a religious believer for decades, and have been surrounded by religious believers my entire life. I enjoy talking with them about what they believe and why (when they're willing to engage of course). They can be completely rational and skeptical, appropriately adjusting their worldview according to the evidence with no problems in any other realm except when it comes to the religious claims they have been brought up to believe. The psychology of it is fascinating to me.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#130

Post by milcron »

camelNotation wrote: post #122
baldfat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth mentioning: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back in those times. Here is the article on Artistole's…

Aristotle won in the west. In Eastern Christendom, Plato won.

In the pre-Crusades 'dark ages', Europeans were by-and-large ignorant of Aristotle. Christianity was popular, and the philosophic framework was predominantly Neo-Platonic.

Fortunately, Aristotle's work was preserved and commented upon by Islamic scholars. Averroes and Avicenna are two important Islamic scholars who commented on Aristotle. After the Crusades, this was reintroduced to the West.

As Aristotelianism was reintroduced to Europe, there was actually an intellectual crisis of sorts, ultimately resolved by St. Aquinas. See 'Scholasticism' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism

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