Galileo's theories were hard to accommodate to the plain reading of scripture but that wasn't the only problem most of his contemporaries had with him. His idea that matter was composed of atoms and behaved according to immutable laws was hard to reconcile with the doctrine of transubstantiation, and his idea that the Moon and was covered in craters and mountains - and were thus made of stuff pretty similar to ordinary earthly matter - ran counter to the prevailing idea that the heavens were some sort of perfect realm where things were made of perfect materials.
So Galileo got into trouble not so much because of people's reluctance to adopt new ideas as because of their inability to let go of old ones. The ideas he ran up against: that the Earth was the centre of the universe; that matter is of four kinds (earth, air, fire and water) and has two forms (heavy and light); that the heavenly bodies are perfect in all respects; all these ideas were false, but were popularly and firmly held because people could clearly "see" that they were true. We have a compelling need to make sense of things; to form the disparate facts of our existence into some sort of coherent whole. From the time we are born we do this, making up a world from the information presented to our senses, and from the ideas presented to us by our family, friends and culture. Even Galileo himself did this, allowing his preconceived ideas of planetary motion to blind him to the truth presented by Johannes Kepler. We all do this. All of us. We make a world that is "common sense", and scorn those who see things differently, failing to see either the provisional nature of our own worldview or the way we have cobbled it together out of the guesses and assumptions of those we live amongst. So when we look back on the Galileo controversy with the perfect view afforded by 400 years of hindsight it's pretty easy to forget that if we had been alive at the time, probably 99.9% of us would have sided with the inquisition. It's pretty easy to overlook the painful lesson that all of us, every last man Jack and woman Jill of us, glimpses the truth dimly and only through the fog of our self imposed falsehoods. It's easy to forget that the path to truth involves as much unlearning as it does learning.
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Copernican views were already widely accepted in northern Europe. You can find them in Calvin's commentary on Genesis on phenomenonal vs. literal language.
And much of northern Europe (and France and Hungary) was then Protestant, and would certainly have fallen foul of the Inquisition.
Ah, you weren't expecting that! :)
Brian
"There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must . . . invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth."
-Martin Luther, 1539
John Calvin, despite his commentary on Genesis, also denounced, in a sermon, those who "pervert the course of nature" by saying that "the sun does not move and that it is the earth that revolves and that it turns".
Heliocentrism was a common enough view by the late 17th C to be the subject of a popular book by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle - one of the first attempts to serve up a scientific theory for general consumption, but it wasn't really until Isaac Newton that Kepler's theories had the theoretical undergirding they needed to make them incontrovertible. And of course, it wasn't until Bessel in the mid 19th C that absolute proof was provided.
"The myth of the Flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.
This idea seems to have been widespread during the first half of the 20th century, so that the Members of the Historical Association in 1945 stated that:
"The idea that educated men at the time of Columbus believed that the earth was flat, and that this belief was one of the obstacles to be overcome by Columbus before he could get his project sanctioned, remains one of the hardiest errors in teaching."
"During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks."
There is an illustration of a spherical Earth in a 14th century copy of L'Image du monde (ca. 1246).
Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".
Hmmm, maybe there was a bit of common sense prevailing during the middle ages despite the controversy regarding heliocentrism.
"Moses makes two great luminaries; but astronomers prove, by conclusive reasons that the star of Saturn, which on account of its great distance, appears the least of all, is greater than the moon. Here lies the difference; Moses wrote in a popular style things which without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labor whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend. Nevertheless, this study is not to be reprobated, nor this science to be condemned, because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them."
Calvin thus distinguished between popular, phenomenal language and how things "really are". It isn't really a mistake to say 'the sun rises', but a normal description of how things appear from earth. "Common sense" tells us the earth doesn't move (pace Christchurch) but also that the world is indeed round, as anyone observed a ship's mast on the horizon can infer.
"Common sense" - or empirical science, as practiced by a Peter Singer - also tells that human beings are simply animals, and some are more equal than others.
Brian
It is a challenge to every generation and never stops. Jesus liked people who were different from himself and they liked him. God is most different from ourselves and eternal life comes from liking God. Men and women are different from each other and new life comes from that union. Gay unions . . ? Well no not really. Your blog . .? A little too comfortable with things to be real.
My point is not really heliocentrism though. It is our need to forget before we can learn anything new. In other words, another instance of our need to die before we can experience resurrection.
Of the others:
Life comes from accepting what is different from us? I think ultimately it comes from accepting, the oneness of all things. I'm not sure that God is ultimately that which is most different from us, but rather, as Meister Eckhart says, my ground is God's ground
I think Jesus's ministry was more about recognising and accepting the essential humanity of all people than in bearing with their differences.
But perhaps I have misunderstood your point here?
Absolute truth and irrational numbers have a lot in common :-)
You might enjoy this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I76lFlWT4ZI
For Being to have a presence in this universe it was indeed necessary for "me" to be distinguishable from the other bits and pieces which make up the universe - for there to be 'me' and 'not me.' But this distinction is, ultimately, also illusory - how can it be otherwise when all that is comes from God and has its being formed in God and only in God?. It seems that for purposes I can only dimly guess at, the process of my life is for me to make a great circular journey: from oneness of consciousness which I suspect I had before I was born (I suspect - who can tell? and I certainly don't remember) through the illusory but necessary stage of differentiation and back to an awareness of unity and the oneness of all. That is, I make my own personal journey from Eden through the fall and back to the New Eden. I follow my Lord and Saviour on the path he pioneered of birth, life, death and resurrection.
How much can we forget, and far do we depend on others? Michael Polanyi is interesting on this.
Brian
The two great scientific truths of the 20th century were:
1. Absolute time is a fiction (relativity)
2. The fabric of reality is discontinuous (quantum)
The application of some thought to these truths renders evolution as a product of our imagination. And yet it is the dunces of Darwinism who hold the day and folk like yourself give weight to their pronouncements.
Brian
"But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled." So now you know!
I am fascinated- and this is, I suppose the point of my post- by the way that even the best and brightest of us ( including Augustine, and in places, even Galileo) can be so wedded to a world view that the truth of the universe is hidden from us. My namesake, the great Lord Kelvin opined grandly towards the end of the 19th C that science had discovered just about everything that it was possible to discover: yeah, right.
But the point for me is not the smug feeling of superiority I can gain from noticing the faux pas of men whose intellects could, even on a bad day, knock mine into cocked hoop but the reminder of the provisionality of my own world view; that what defines me and shapes the way I relate to the universe is, overwhelmingly, not my wisdom but my ignorance.
Those atheist media scientists like Professor Brian Cox (who know what they do partly because of that great Scottish Christian Lord Kelvin) do believe themselves to be close to a grand theory of everything - and they are resolutely materialist and atheist about it. Their end vision of the cosmos (the heat death of universal entropy and the extinction of consciousness) is the precise opposite of Romans 8.
I prefer to follow Platinga on knowledge, rather than Sextus Empiricus.
Brian
Dante would likely agree: 'The Love that moves the sun and the other stars...' (Paradiso XXXIII) But he can only be loved because he first loved us, which we know because the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us in a particular time and place, and thus some historical knowledge is necessary, otherwise everything dissolves into atemporal mysticism.