>>> Contrast this to Calvin, who issued a religious fatwah calling for the execution of Galileo. <<<
This would have been a “neat trick” when you consider that Calvin DIED the year that Galileo was BORN (Galileo was born in February 1564 and Calvin died in May of that year).
I think that you’re confusing Galileo for Copernicus. I remember that Calvin criticized Copernicus for some reason, but don’t remember him calling for his death.
Copernicus proved that the earth was in orbit around the sun, along with the other planets, and not the other way around. This theory effectively turned the religious community upside down.
It was the Copernican theory that effectively gave agnostics and atheists the opening they needed to disclaim the church's belief that God created the earth and the heavens.
Even though Copernicus was very religious, he enabled atheism.
No, my mistake was (at least) that it wasn’t Calvin in person, but rather Geneva... Apparently there was some amount of buzz among fairly modern historians that Calvin opposed Copernicus, but I’m reading that such a tension is held at least by this one author to be mythical; that its unlikely Calvin had enough knowledge of Copernicus to disdain him.
At this time, I’m going to simply retract that statement about Calvin. I had heard it as a science major, not from any Catholic apologetics, but my first quick attempt to substantiate any truth from the matter immediately raises red flags.
It’s a little intellectual flaw I have: if an obviously interested party states something I find useful, I’ve always made sure I can back it up before I repeat it. (For instance, if I learn something from a Catholic apologist about the counter-reformation.) But as I writing serious arguments on the internet, I’ve got to be equally careful even if I learned it before I was so careful and the motivation for my source’s bias or error hadn’t been so obvious. I don’t know why I would have been taught this wrong, but I should’ve checked it out before repeating it.
On the other hand, a lot of easy-to-find references on the internet presume popular understandings. For instance, the Our Daily Visitor’s 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia (which is old enough to have lost copyright protection, so it’s what you’ll find on line) routinely simply restates the popular notions of largely Protestant middle America. So I’m not saying the inverse is true: that Geneve wasn’t hostile to Galileo.
Like Reagan said, “It’s what they know that’s wrong.” I gotta be better than them.