The Galileo Case

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twinc:
not at all - the Church admits no such thing nor can it for it would have to admit that the Bible and God got it wrong when in fact Galileo got it wrong - just chech it out as advised at www.galileowaswrong.com also try the other website again at www.scripturecatholic.com - twinc
 
Then there was Neils Bohr’s comment that perhaps the Church was right to chide Galileo as it very much depends from the ‘measurable observer persective’ and it depends on who is doing the measuring. :o)

But perhaps that’s a bit too pedantic. :rolleyes:
 
twinc said:
not at all - the Church admits no such thing nor can it for it would have to admit that the Bible and God got it wrong when in fact Galileo got it wrong - just chech it out as advised at www.galileowaswrong.com also try the other website again at www.scripturecatholic.com - twinc
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Did you read Post#32; did you see that the church leaders admitted to being in error for holding to the position that the earth is the center of the universe? While God is certainly infallible man certainly isn’t, we all make mistakes even those whom are of his most dedicated servants.
 
No two versions of the Galileo case are the same. There are those written by people who wished to see the Church discredited and undermined as a divine institution, and those presented by Catholics who, in their belief that Galileo was proven right after all, rewrite and revise history retrospectively in a desperate attempt to try to minimise the damage they perceive was done to the credibility of the Catholic Church. We see then both sides had good reason to distort the facts and different accounts of the case are a result of this, but more so by those composed over the centuries by the Catholic apologists, all trying hard of course to expurgate the Church from the responsibility and consequences of having defined and declared by papal decree the proposition of a fixed sun as formal heresy and for condemning Galileo accordingly. Such pathetic delusion and denial desperately tries to avoid the fact that the Catholic Church, according to its own teaching, does not indulge in pert, frivolous, or erroneous decrees when deciding on matters of faith or morals; yet one could well believe it did such a thing were one to believe the stories put out these past centuries.

The galileo case was one of Catholic exegesis and hermeneutics, not science wherein the Church has no divine authority or responsibility. Galileo challenged the exegesis of the Fathers and theologians of the Church. Galileo swore he did not hold the condemned interpretation of the Scriptures. Nevertheless he was found ‘suspect of heresy’ because of his book Dialogue. He then abjured, said he was sorry and made his peace with the Church. He was never excommunicated by the Church but was confined to house arrest for the rest of his life to prevent him from relapsing.

But there is a problem glossed over since churchmen thought Newton and Bradley had proven Galileo right in his exegesis. The Church defined and declared that a heliocentric belief was contrary to Scripture so a heresy. Galileo swore under oath that he did not hold the H belief. Scholars however, record he died a heliocentrist in 1642. If this is true then he died a heretic. Only God knows what was in his heart.
 
Asbury said:
Did you read Post#32; did you see that the church leaders admitted to being in error for holding to the position that the earth is the center of the universe? While God is certainly infallible man certainly isn’t, we all make mistakes even those whom are of his most dedicated servants.
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The Bible and God etc do not make mistakes,only humans,including Galileo,do - twinc
 
CHRISTINE77 said:
Pope John Paul II regretted the treatment which Galileo received, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1992. The Pope declared the incident to be based on a “tragic mutual miscomprehension”. He further stated:

Cardinal Poupard has also reminded us that the sentence of 1633 was not irreformable, and that the debate which had not ceased to evolve thereafter, was closed in 1820 with the imprimatur given to the work of Canon Settele. . . . The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.

Let us recall the celebrated saying attributed to Baronius “Spiritui Sancto mentem fuisse nos docere quomodo ad coelum eatur, non quomodo coelum gradiatur”. In fact, the Bible does not concern itself with the details of the physical world, the understanding of which is the competence of human experience and reasoning.

There exist two realms of knowledge, one which has its source in Revelation and one which reason can discover by its own power. To the latter belong especially the experimental sciences and philosophy. The distinction between the two realms of knowledge ought not to be understood as opposition.
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Pope John Paul II was the Catholic apologist supreme. There was no ‘miscomprehension’ at all. The Church of 1616, stated clearly that it came to their decision based on the interpretation of all the Fathers. What ‘miscomprehension’ is there here?

Note Cardinal Poupard did not say the 1616 decree was not irreformable, only the trial of Galileo in 1633. In other words, only a retrial of Galileo has any authority to reform the ‘sentence.’ The Pontifical Academy of Sciences has no such authority. Why then did the Church not give Galileo a retrial? Because the Church does not contradict itself.

It was the Protestant Rheticus not Baroneous, who conjured up the idea that the Bible does not concern itself with natural things, only spiritual things. The Bible is without error no matter the subject matter.

Faith and reason cannot be opposed to one another. So all good Catholics claim for centuries. But then they make sure that the ‘truth’ of science determines the truth of faith, never the other way around after the Galileo case. Surely anyone calling themselves Catholic should know that the truth of faith is the real truth and that science or human reasoning is prone to error as the history of science proves, with science changing all the time.

The problem today is that science is the new infalibile teacher, not the Fathers.
 
Science has veered away from certain things. It is incomplete. This web site gives a good account of the Galileo case but it’s almost certain that this will be brought up again. Why? Science is the new, mostly infallible teacher, and, on occasion, the claim is made that the Church stands in the way of science in some cases.

Peace,
Ed
 
I agree with Brendan The earth revolves around the sun, that it all depends on your original reference point.The earth revolves around the sun and the sun revolves around the galaxy and the galaxy goes where? Suppose you are in another galaxy looking at us- what would you say about the movement of the planets around the sun?
 
rdscheirer said:
I agree with Brendan The earth revolves around the sun, that it all depends on your original reference point.The earth revolves around the sun and the sun revolves around the galaxy and the galaxy goes where? Suppose you are in another galaxy looking at us- what would you say about the movement of the planets around the sun?
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You would certainly not get an answer to that question from the bible or the church. You would have to rely on people like Neil Tyson to help you there. Even kids get answers from him. Does the pope answer questions from children?
 
Brendan said:
Classical motion and Relativistic Motion are very similar at low speeds, but Classical breaks down at higher speeds.

But the point of relativity was that there are no real absolute reference frames. Galileo did lay the foundation for that, it showing that the mathematics are a whole lot easier to describe planetary motion if one uses the Sun as the reference frame.

(As I mentioned earlier, his mathematics were actually WAY off, in that he used circles as his model for planetary motion. They orbits are really eliptical relative to the sun)

But in ‘real’ terms, any reference frame is equally valid. All the Galilean model indicated was the mathematics of planetary motion is easier if you consider the sun to be stationary. That allowed for Kepler and Newton to develop their equations, which are excellent approximations given the low speeds involved.
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Relativity notwithstanding, the Earth still orbits the Sun, no matter which reference frame one uses.

Relativistic reference matters only:
  • When considering relative time between two frames
  • When considering relative space between two frames
  • AND when approaching a considerable speed close to the speed of light.
The actual velocity of the Earth, or any other planetary body for that matter, for which velocity accounts for the direction and so would tell us which body orbits which, does not change with relativity. In fact, the relative velocities of two frames are the only vectors which do not fluctuate in a relativistic framework!

In other words, Galileo and Kepler were right about heliocentrism, and the fools in the 21st century who use the internet (which depends on satellites which wouldn’t work if the Earth were stationary) to argue for a Ptolemaic universe are quite laughable, given the irony.
 
Should we consider all these different world views and theories to be true with a capital T, or are they convenient fictions? Useful models that help us get the right answer? Do we care?

Actually, this philosophical question did play an important role in the Galileo affair.
 
xixxvmcm85 said:
Relativity notwithstanding, the Earth still orbits the Sun, no matter which reference frame one uses.

Relativistic reference matters only:
  • When considering relative time between two frames
  • When considering relative space between two frames
  • AND when approaching a considerable speed close to the speed of light.
The actual velocity of the Earth, or any other planetary body for that matter, for which velocity accounts for the direction and so would tell us which body orbits which, does not change with relativity. In fact, the relative velocities of two frames are the only vectors which do not fluctuate in a relativistic framework!

In other words, Galileo and Kepler were right about heliocentrism, and the fools in the 21st century who use the internet (which depends on satellites which wouldn’t work if the Earth were stationary) to argue for a Ptolemaic universe are quite laughable, given the irony.
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The last laugh it seems,as I read it,that NASA makes all its space calculations as if the earth were stationary and the results have been bang on target etc - twinc
 
twinc said:
The last laugh it seems,as I read it,that NASA makes all its space calculations as if the earth were stationary and the results have been bang on target etc - twinc
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Yep, as long as our useful model gives us the right answer, do we care if it is True or not?
 
xixxvmcm85 said:
Relativity notwithstanding, the Earth still orbits the Sun, no matter which reference frame one uses.

Relativistic reference matters only:
  • When considering relative time between two frames
  • When considering relative space between two frames
  • AND when approaching a considerable speed close to the speed of light.
The actual velocity of the Earth, or any other planetary body for that matter, for which velocity accounts for the direction and so would tell us which body orbits which, does not change with relativity. In fact, the relative velocities of two frames are the only vectors which do not fluctuate in a relativistic framework!

In other words, Galileo and Kepler were right about heliocentrism, and the fools in the 21st century who use the internet (which depends on satellites which wouldn’t work if the Earth were stationary) to argue for a Ptolemaic universe are quite laughable, given the irony.
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Ah, but Galileo didn’t get in trouble for saying the earth revolved around the sun, did he? Copernicus had already stated that decades before with no fanfare. No, Galileo was in trouble for playing theologian.

The irony is that it is almost always Protestants who argue this case about heliocentrism and that the Church was wrong for condemning it, when it was Catholic scientists using Catholic research funding who developed the idea and it was Protestants of the time who were the ones most vigorously opposing the idea of heliocentrism.
 
white_sheep said:
Ah, but Galileo didn’t get in trouble for saying the earth revolved around the sun, did he? Copernicus had already stated that decades before with no fanfare. No, Galileo was in trouble for playing theologian.

The irony is that it is almost always Protestants who argue this case about heliocentrism and that the Church was wrong for condemning it, when it was Catholic scientists using Catholic research funding who developed the idea and it was Protestants of the time who were the ones most vigorously opposing the idea of heliocentrism.
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I wonder how Galileo would have fared in the hands of Protestants. Instead of house arrest would he have been burnt at the stake? Drawn and quartered?
 
mackbrislawn said:
Should we consider all these different world views and theories to be true with a capital T, or are they convenient fictions? Useful models that help us get the right answer? Do we care?
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But you’re begging the question: Do both hypotheses render the same result? No they do not. A geocentric model of the solar system cannot explain paralax. A geocentric model of the solar system cannot explain how massive bodies can orbit smaller ones while simultaneously factoring in gravity, unless you invoke some mysterious ‘aether’ which is neither well defined nor observed. A geocentric model of the solar system requires invoking more geometrically convoluted ‘epicycles’ to explain our observations from Earth of retrograde motion such as that of the outer planets and the Sun, so as parsimony would have it the heliocentric model of the solar system is indeed the better hypothesis, and both hypotheses are not equal.
twinc said:
The last laugh it seems,as I read it,that NASA makes all its space calculations as if the earth were stationary and the results have been bang on target etc - twinc
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Really? Could you provide some citation for this then? I don’t believe this is true at all.
white_sheep said:
Ah, but Galileo didn’t get in trouble for saying the earth revolved around the sun, did he? Copernicus had already stated that decades before with no fanfare. No, Galileo was in trouble for playing theologian.
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Oh indeed! My post was concerning the science behind the cosmology, not particularly the history of the Galileo affair. While we’re at it, Copernicus wasn’t truly the first heliocentrist. Granted he was the first to put some math behind the concept, but like most advances in science, our model today is a patchwork of different concepts which came together over a long period of time by different scientists “standing on the shoulders of giants”, as it were. The Pythagoreans were the first to propose a mobile Earth which rotates on its axis, but which remained at the center of the universe. Hericlides Ponticus was the first to propose that Mercury and Venus orbited the Sun while the rest of the planets orbited Earth. Aristachus of Samos was one of the first to ever propose a truly heliocentric view of the solar system. And we must not forget that the big names whom we tend to revere here in the 21st century, while getting much correct, got a lot of it wrong. We know today that celestial bodies do not orbit in perfectly concentric circles, unlike what Galileo thought. We know today that the Sun isn’t actually stationary, unlike what Kepler thought. We also know today that the gravity of smaller bodies can in fact affect the motion of more massive bodies, howbeit at a nearly undetectable level.

My point was that geocentrism is folly and that anyone who espouses it today is quite intellectually lazy. As far as the actual ecclesiastical affair with Galileo, I admit I don’t know the history as well as I know the science. From what I’ve read Galileo was a bit of an egoist and had a bad habit of spouting his mouth off. I know he and Pope Urban VIII were on fairly good terms, even up to and past his publishing his hypotheses. I know he was never excommunicated, as is so often taught in elementary schools, and that he remained a Catholic in fairly good standing throughout his life.
The irony is that it is almost always Protestants who argue this case about heliocentrism and that the Church was wrong for condemning it, when it was Catholic scientists using Catholic research funding who developed the idea and it was Protestants of the time who were the ones most vigorously opposing the idea of heliocentrism.
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Oh absolutely. As I understand it, while many of the Catholic Bishops were supportive of Copernicus’ early work, Martin Luther had this to say:
Martin Luther:
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.
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astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Unit3/response.html
 
xixxvmcm85 said:
But you’re begging the question: Do both hypotheses render the same result? No they do not. A geocentric model of the solar system cannot explain paralax. A geocentric model of the solar system cannot explain how massive bodies can orbit smaller ones while simultaneously factoring in gravity, unless you invoke some mysterious ‘aether’ which is neither well defined nor observed. A geocentric model of the solar system requires invoking more geometrically convoluted ‘epicycles’ to explain our observations from Earth of retrograde motion such as that of the outer planets and the Sun, so as parsimony would have it the heliocentric model of the solar system is indeed the better hypothesis, and both hypotheses are not equal.

Really? Could you provide some citation for this then? I don’t believe this is true at all.

Oh indeed! My post was concerning the science behind the cosmology, not particularly the history of the Galileo affair. While we’re at it, Copernicus wasn’t truly the first heliocentrist. Granted he was the first to put some math behind the concept, but like most advances in science, our model today is a patchwork of different concepts which came together over a long period of time by different scientists “standing on the shoulders of giants”, as it were. The Pythagoreans were the first to propose a mobile Earth which rotates on its axis, but which remained at the center of the universe. Hericlides Ponticus was the first to propose that Mercury and Venus orbited the Sun while the rest of the planets orbited Earth. Aristachus of Samos was one of the first to ever propose a truly heliocentric view of the solar system. And we must not forget that the big names whom we tend to revere here in the 21st century, while getting much correct, got a lot of it wrong. We know today that celestial bodies do not orbit in perfectly concentric circles, unlike what Galileo thought. We know today that the Sun isn’t actually stationary, unlike what Kepler thought. We also know today that the gravity of smaller bodies can in fact affect the motion of more massive bodies, howbeit at a nearly undetectable level.

My point was that geocentrism is folly and that anyone who espouses it today is quite intellectually lazy. As far as the actual ecclesiastical affair with Galileo, I admit I don’t know the history as well as I know the science. From what I’ve read Galileo was a bit of an egoist and had a bad habit of spouting his mouth off. I know he and Pope Urban VIII were on fairly good terms, even up to and past his publishing his hypotheses. I know he was never excommunicated, as is so often taught in elementary schools, and that he remained a Catholic in fairly good standing throughout his life.

Oh absolutely. As I understand it, while many of the Catholic Bishops were supportive of Copernicus’ early work, Martin Luther had this to say:

astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Unit3/response.html
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Thank you! Finally someone who makes sense! I was wondering when someone was going to mention GRAVITY!!!
 
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