Hmm. Sounds like disengenous apologetics to me.
That’s your opinion.
No - I am not talking about action - I am talking about **BELIEFS. **It is never legitimate to kill, torture or otherwise persecute people for their beliefs.
Yes, gratuitous violence is wrong. That is not what I am taking about and you know it.
And I very much respect you for saying that.
I disagree. Galileo was a great scientist, a man who changed the the pardigm of our perception of ourselves in the cosmos to a truer basis. He was one of the greatest astronomers and physicists who ever lived, and the founder of dynamic mechanics, now known as Galilean mechanics. He was worth 50 of any one of the cardinals arraigned against him.
Of course he didn’t. Neither has anyone before or since. Science doesn’t do ‘proof’
Nothing is proven in science.
Good for him. He was the one of the first to point out that Scripture has no authority in scientific matters. Pity there weren’t more like him. If there is anything that the Pope and the Church need in every age, it’s a damned good ridiculing. The pope was a buffoon in this matter as many popes have been in many matters before and since. Popes are no more immune to buffoonery than you or I.
Bellarmine had Bruno’s blood on his hands. Bellarmine delivered the Church’s admonition to Galileo not to teach heliocentrism. Bellarmine died in 1621, 12 years before all this came to a head. How come he’s suddenly a defender of heliocentrism? You are very mixed up in this view.
No-one has *proved *geocentrism. Science doesn’t do proof.
So by your reckoning it’s OK to silence people, to threaten them with torture, and to imprison them for life for a ‘bad attitude’. PAH!
Why is this relevant?
Alec (hecd2)
No, you’re not. You’re being disengenuous. It’s called bait and switch. Galileo wasn’t persecuted for his beliefs. He was persecuted for his actions.
Because he did defend Galileo’s “right” to research heliocentrism. So did Pope Urban VIII. The Inquisition order to Galileo in 1611 was an order to not teach (an action) heliocentrism.
Yes, science does do proof. Or do you think that heliocentrism is merely a hypothesis that future research may undo? I guess Kepler’s laws of planetary motion are due to be repealed?
More disenguity. There seems to be a quite a bit of intellectually dishonest false attribution spewing from your fingertips. For the third time, the Church’s treatment of Galileo was not justified. Galileo’s treatment of the Church was also not justified. Something about two wrongs and what they don’t equal pops into my head.
Alec,
I respect the fact that Galileo is ‘one of your all-time favourite scientists’, however there are a number of aspects of the Galileo affair that are very important in the social, political, scientific and religious domains. One is, that despite the wriggling on this board, all the evidence points to the fact that Galileo was condemned for holding and teaching an idea that ran counter to the Catholic cosmology of the day. He was an important influence in moving from a world in which truth was dicated by those in authority to a world in which the truth stands on its own foundation. And, of course, those in authority, then and now, hate that transition, because they are no longer able to dictate what other people think. People are liberated to think whatever the evidence supports, whether that truth runs counter to scriptiure, or the authority’s interpretation of scripture, or religious doctrine, or not.
My answer is that between 1478 and 1834, between 3,000 and 300,000 executions took place under the authority of the Spanish Inquisition. I know that this is a huge range, but that is the range that various historians put on the numbers killed. I am not a good enough historian to take an informed view about where the truth lies within these limits. In fact, I am not a historian at all. However, whether the number is 300, 3,000, 300,000 or 3 million is irrelevant to anything that I have posted.
No this is absolutely not correct. The disingenuous excuse for the wrongful actions of the Holy Office in the case of Galileo is to claim he was supressed for actions. But what do his actons amount to? Teaching his beliefs and discussing highly technical astronomical matters with German protestant scientists - the kind of interactio that modern scientit take for granted. So the pronouncements of the Holy Office were designed to suppress the holding and teaching of beliefs - this whole issue is about beliefs and a world view; it is all about the source of truth and where should the authority with regard to the scientific, cosmological (and actually social and moral) beliefs lie. The Church was loath to be challenged on any matter where she felt that she had authorirty. But Galileo correctly challenged the Church’s authority on matters of natural truth and demonstrated that she deserves no ultimate authority on matters of natural truth and no special route to that truth. That is is one of his many lasting legacies.
This an ‘action’ which is about beliefs. The church basically banned Galileo, under pain of the Inquisition, from ridiculing the errors of the Pope and the errors of literally interpreted Scripture and from teaching a much truer cosmology than the Church taught.
Science does NOT do proof, which if you were a scientist you would realise. Scientific models are always subject to further refinement. Heliocentrism is much more correct than geocentrism but is not abolutely correct. The sun is not the absolute centre of the orbit of the planets, but sun and planets orbit around each other, the centre of mass of each following an elliptical path around a common focus. The sun has a proper motion within the galaxy, the galaxy is rotating with the respect to the universal frame and the galaxy has proper inter-galactic motion. In fact Kepler’s laws failed to explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit that was not explained until Kepler’s ‘laws’ were refined by relativitic considerations . So you are plumb wrong here.
Well I agree that the Church’s treatment of Galileo was not justified. Just how was Galileo’s treatment of the Church not justified?
Thanks for replying, I do appreciate it. The most accurate numbers from recent academic historians are less than 10,000 deaths during the period of the Spanish Inquisition.
Alec,
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So say you. That is your claim. I have yet to to meet anyone who can present an argument that is neither self-referential nor circular for the inerrancy of scripture (by which I take you to mean the catholic bible). Furthermore, any claim of inerrancy depends on accuracy of translation, maintenance of the original writings, and so on, none of which are assured.