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mackbrislawn
Guest
This helps clarify things. Of course a pint or two might help as well, so, I’ll call you down on the offer to stand me for one, or two. I’ll let you know.Ok Mac, I will buy you a pint of Smithwick if you prefer that. And thank you for your council on how to debate. You are right, I should separate the idea from the person and deal with it that way.
Today, with the Church’s records of the ‘secret archives’ in the open, what exactly happened in the Galileo case in 1616, 1633, 1664, 1741, 1820-1835, is known, what people said and did, who said it and did it.
In essence the Galileo case was one of Catholic exegesis and hermeneutics. These theological sciences are those that were used by the Church to extablish and develop all the Dogmas and doctrines of the Church. If these hermeneutics were shown to be flawed, then no dogma based on them could be guaranteed free from error. Galileo, lest the Bible rob him of a great scientific discovery, attacked the geocentric interpretation of the Fathers of those passages that describe the relationship of the earth, sun and stars. To halt such attacks the Church declared and defined the heliocentric interpretation as formal heresy, thus dogmatising the Scriptural revelation of a fixed earth and moving sun. Such was the Church’s confidence in its interpretation it had no concern about its ever being proven wrong by science.
When Newton and Bradley’s science was perceived as proving the sun is fixed relative to the earth, the whole Galileo case SHIFTED, or more correctly, was SHIFTED to one of cosmology, not biblical exegesis. Papal decrees, the judgement of the Holy Office against Galileo, the decision to grant imprimaturs to a one time formal heresy, none of this could be done if the true nature of the Galileo case was left in its proper place as a matter of Catholic hermeneutics. Read up most posts on the Galileo case and see them state the matter was one of cosmology so did not come under the auspices of the infallible magisterium of the Church. How convincing this sounds, and with 150 years of repitition the lie now sounds like the truth.
But let us return to the truth. A papal decree on a matter of faith, and the correct hermeneutics of the Scriptures are a matter of faith, a serious matter of faith, according to the Church carries an infallible promise to be free from error. So if Newton and the boys rerally did prove the earth moves, then the dogma of infallibility is itself in error. Many such theses were written using the Galileo case to dismiss the dogma of infallibility from 1870. This problem was solved by Catholics using the false accounts of the matter, inventing a cosmological status for the 1616 decree which makes it a matter of astronomy not hermeneutics so carries no infallibility.
So, for those Catholics who discovered the true nature of the Galileo case, a proof for heliocentrism was a Catholic nightmare. Our faith was proven false.
But a further search into history showed there were philosophers in the church, in Catholic universities, who rejected the proofs for heliocentrism, even after the Holy Office granted an imprimatur to a book offering H as a thesis in 1820. Why this doubt? Well they understood the phenomenon of relativity, just as Copernicus did, and they knew science proved no such heliocentrism.Then in 1905 Einstein reminded the world relative movement in space prevents empirical science determining the movements between the earthg, sun and stars. It seems Bellarmine was correct again, there was no proof, never could be proof to show the Fathers’s exegesis was wrong.
But the damage was done. Churchmen had rejected the Church’s decree so there was no going back. That is the nightmare now, separating the errors of the churchgmen from the infallibility of the Church. But those who had loosed the heresy into the Church were not for correcting their error and rehabilitating the popes of 1616 and 1633 whom they had labeled the ones in error. That situation continues to this very day.
I have studied the matter with a fine tooth comb looking to see if the Church contradicted itself after the supposed proofs were accepted by the Holy Office, for that would have been a double error. Nowhere is to be found any contradiction. No abrogation, no retrial of Galileo, no pope ever touched the 1616 decree. Why in 1820 I found the same Holy Office that granted an imprimatur, would not reject the 1616 decree as papal and thus immutable.
No they did not. They granted it was set in stone. What they did was admit the heliocentrism condemned as formal heresy was indeed a heresy, but that the new heliocentrism of Newtons differed from the heliocentrism of Galileo’s. In any court of law, their bypass would have been thrown out as nonsense.
One last clarification. the hypothesis ‘ploy’ as I call it. It was one of the reasons given by Catholics to say the 1616 decree was not, could not have been a dogma. They said if the Church allowed heliocentrism to be used as a hypothesis, then it could not possibly have meant it to be a heresy. But an investigation of the ‘hypothesis’ allowed by the Church was the ‘instrumentalist one’ of Copernicus. The Church allowed heliocentrism as a tool for calculation, not as a theory awaiting clarification. But if the hypothesis used by the Church could be made look like a hypothesis in waiting, that would change the very nature of the 1616 condemnation from a permanent one to a temporary one, and that would get the Church off the hook. When the Church needs perversions to ‘save it’ we are all in trouble.