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To: Ichneumon
"And let's not forget that it was Galileo, a scientist, who disputed that "other planets rotated around the Earth", and it was the *church* which "said all the other planets rotated around the Earth" and persecuted Galileo for his "heresy"... Did you "forget" about that, or are you just hugely ignorant of the history of science, but quite willing to slander it anyway? "


Ok I can't let this nasty little spin go.
First off by "The Church" you are referring to The Catholic Church of the 15th century, which one can say was less then Biblically based or scientifically enlighten. But your assumption that Galileo was "against religious theory is incorrect.
The conflict was not between a progressive scientist and a backward clergy, in fact, Galileo’s defense was that scriptures were not wrong, only the Catholic Church interpretations of the scriptures were wrong.

Galileo said nothing he held was in conflict with Scripture. Accordingly, he reasoned that Scripture deals with natural matters in such a cursory and allusive way that it appears as though it wants to remind us that its proper concern is not about them but about the soul of man. It is willing to adjust its language about Nature to the simple minds of ordinary people. He argued that it is not the business of Scripture to validate science, and defended this point by quoting Cardinal Baronius who had remarked that, "The Holy Ghost intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."(35)

The Holy Office finally issued a decree in 1616 declaring "the Pythagorean doctrine of the motion of the earth" to be "false and altogether opposed to Holy Scripture." Galileo's name was not mentioned in the decree, nor were his works prohibited. The incident ended on a decorous note with Pope Paul V gracefully receiving Galileo in a long audience in which the Pope assured Galileo that any rumors and calumny directed against him would be ignored by the Vatican.
360 posted on 11/15/2004 1:21:45 AM PST by Pacothecat
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To: Pacothecat
The incident ended on a decorous note with Pope Paul V gracefully receiving Galileo ...

Uh, not quite. There's another act to that play. In 1632, after having written a book about the solar system, describing his telescopic discoveries which supported the heliocentric model of Copernicus, Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition, threatened with torture, and forced to renounce the "heresy" of the solar system. His book was banned, and he was placed under house arrest for the last 7 years of his life.

Recently (after 3 centuries of scorn and ridicule over the Galileo affair) the Church has, however, adopted Galileo's attitude about scripture, and has decided that if science and scripture appear to conflict, they must re-examine their understanding of scripture.

361 posted on 11/15/2004 3:31:01 AM PST by PatrickHenry (The all-new List-O-Links for evolution threads is now in my freeper homepage.)
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