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To: bdeaner
The Church was not, is not, will never be anti-science.

Galileo certainly didn't think it was, but how do you explain the words of his condemnation?

58 posted on 05/18/2009 11:52:55 PM PDT by dr_lew
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To: dr_lew

he tried to turn it into a religious doctrine (as 18 other people have tried to point out.)

“DOCTRINE”, see that word in there?


59 posted on 05/18/2009 11:58:30 PM PDT by campaignPete R-CT
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To: dr_lew

are you aware of some scientific evidence that existed at the time that showed the copernican model to be correct? Explain that part to us and then explain how the anomolies in the Copernican model were finally resolved.


60 posted on 05/19/2009 12:00:51 AM PDT by campaignPete R-CT
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To: dr_lew
Galileo certainly didn't think it was, but how do you explain the words of his condemnation?

The problem with Galileo is that he was not living up to the ideals of a good scientist -- contrary to the myth we have been told about him. He was a great man, and his contributions to science are immeasurable, but he lacked the virtues of patience and humility that are necessary for truly great scientists. He wanted to rush forward with his findings -- outstanding findings, and many of his conclusions would turn out to be true, but not competely accurate either -- and apply them to fields in which he did not have authority or expertise, into the realm of theology and biblical studies. The latter situation was his major mistake.

If Galileo had not been so adamant about exactly what the implications of his findings should be for biblical studies and theology, he would not have raised the ire of the theologians and biblical scholars--an especially insensitive thing to do politically when Protestant reformers were making the Church feel vulnerable to attack on biblical grounds. He did not yet have the empirical evidence to draw such conclusions, and he did not have the expertise in scripture in order to properly engage in a hermeneutic procedure to integrate what he was finding with biblical truth. That is something that takes lifetimes to accomplish, and we are STILL attempting to understand these problems.

I don't think any of the above justified the Church's actions toward Galileo. It was perhaps one of the biggest errors of judgment in the history of the Church, and history bears witness to the magnitude of the error -- that it has allowed the Church to be unfairly stained with charges of anti-science, when in fact the Church created the very ground in which Western Science could flourish. There is a supreme irony and bitter tragedy in this reality...The cost of sin is large, and beyond imagination.

But what if Galileo had turned out to be wrong? He would be considered a fool and would be forgotten to history. He was fortunate that his conjectures turned out to be mostly correct -- but he was still wrong about a lot of things, as others have pointed out in this thread. He was wrong about the heliocentric view and so was Copernicus. The sun is not the center of the universe, as we obviously now know. And the more we have come to understand the universe, the more it conforms to the Christian cosmological worldview, but a more sophisticated one that could not have been anticipated by the man of the Middle Ages. For an examination of that issue, I would recommend, for starters, Stephen M. Barr's outstanding book, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.
83 posted on 05/19/2009 6:39:53 AM PDT by bdeaner (The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? (1 Cor. 10:16))
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