I was not using the link to justify everything, merely the part about Galileo not proving his theory before trying to spread it. Nor was I saying that the Church was right in what it did…I was just stating that a lot of folks believe that Galileo had absolute proof of his assertions and the Church went in and beat him down, whereas, in reality, the whole thing was a bit more complicated.
Are you sure you read the page, JDeMobray? The entire thing is about how the strength of Galileo’s science wasn’t that strong when it comes down to the heliocentric theory.
Funny how he concocts unbelievably convoluted explanations for geostationary satellites and the Earth’s equatorial bulge, and never once mentions the existence of stellar parallax…
I did mention in the OP that “I did find a bunch of Catholic appologetica saying that the whole problem is anti-Ctholic propaganda,” so don’t say I didn’t warn you guys.
Actually, the theories that Darwin brought up had nothing to do with God either way. His claims and subsequent theories say nothing about God being dead or otherwise.
I’m sure you just used this as a set-up of a joke (which is much better when used with Nietzsche, who actually did say the quote), but since so many Fundamentalist Christians seem to think that Darwin is a threat to their beliefs, we can’t have you furthering this misinformation lest someone take you seriously. Hence this disclaimer.
And tracer? Nice Chick tract. Hadn’t seen that one yet. I like how they nicely sanitize the fact the the Anglican (not the Puritan) church was formed so Henry VIII (the “defender of the faith”) could get a divorce, which Rome only turned down b/c Charles V, a secular authority, didn’t want Henry to divorce his aunt.
Except Galileo didn’t get in trouble because of his science. Other Catholics, like Copernicus and a bunch of Jesuit astronomers were heleocentrists, and they were able to publish and debate freely. Galileo got in trouble because he was rude, because in one of his dialogues, he made a figure that everyone thought was the pope look like a fool, because he refused to debate some promenent geocentrists, and because he said that, by proving the heliocentric theory, he had proven the bible to be not divinely inspired. In a Europe that was in political and religious turmoil because of the Protestant reformation, the church authorities weren’t in the mood to tolerate someone they saw as deliberately provocative and heretical in his religious views.
Is there actually anything in the Bible (or any religious scripture) that actually says “Man (or the Earth) is at the center of the universe”? It seems like pure interpretation & hubris to me. (If you know of any, I’d be interested in seeing any quotes from the Bible, etc. that actually say something to that extent.)
When the astronomical evidence came in, then it was just a matter of re-interpretation. Therefore, holy text remains “true” in the eyes of the believers.
The same may be possible for evolution. Sure, there is the “God created Man” thing, but even the RCC already reinterpreted that to mean “guided evolution”.
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Well, everything from the Bible (or almost any decent literature for that matter) is “pure interpretation.”
That interpretation can be found at WHY GEOCENTRICITY? by our friend the Clevland-based Biblical Astronomer:
I think everyone is aware that the RCC has been able to reconcile evolution with their beliefs. However, there is still a decent sized minority of people who fall into the Creationist camp.
When I started this thread, I didn’t think anyone subscribed to the views of this Biblical Astronomer anymore, which is why I was asking if maybe eventually Creationism would vanish.
Given the new evidence (and why was I surprised that someone somewhere will believe in anything for almost any reason? You’d have thought I’d have learned by now…), I will amend my OP to ask if the rejection of evolution might one day reach the level of rejection of heliocentrism, which is, even in light of our new evidence, negligible and relegated to a few crackpots.
It is just a matter of time before we quit hearing “I ain’t come from no monkey”
As noted before by others, the RCC and as noted here the UM churches have come to realize that science is harmonious with faith. That’s a fairly good chunk of people.
Shaky Jake provided some good answers to the OP’s basic question, “When did religious opposition to heliocentrism die out?” Here are some amplifying comments from Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution (ch. 6, pp. 226–227 in the 1957 ed.):
Andrew Dickson White’s work of a century ago, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, although it is highly biased against religious opponents of new theories and tries its hardest to make them look as bad as possible, does have some interesting factual tidbits, and it’s available in an online version. White shared your interest in comparing anti-heliocentric arguments to anti-evolution ones, Satan:
As for “geocentrism science,” though, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for “researchers” trying to come up with new, scripturally-orthodox theories that would fit the known facts. Of course, the geocentrists had the old theories available to them for that purpose, and could perfectly well go on teaching Ptolemy and Aristotle if they objected to Kepler and Newton. White does mention one John Hutchinson, a Cambridge professor who wrote in 1724 an anti-Newtonian system of physics called Moses’ Principia. (He is kind of cutely memorialized in his home parish of Spennithorne.)
Hmmm, so if we allow that it took about 250 years from the first really coherent formulation of geocentrism in Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus for it to become pretty solid religious orthodoxy by the end of the nineteenth century, then if we consider that the Origin of Species came out in the middle of the nineteenth century…well, according to that timeframe, popular Christian theology should be almost entirely reconciled to evolution by, oh, 2100. All right! Only one more century to go!
Bah humbug. Geocentrism doesn’t go nearly far enough in its biblical literalism! According to http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm, the bible says that the Earth is flat. (That article was written by a biblical Geocentrist.)
And I can take it one step further: The bible also says that the Earth is square! Or at least quadrilateral. Revelation 7:1 (NIV translation) states, “After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth to prevent any wind from blowing on the land or on the sea or on any tree.”
I scrolled through the posts and took a quick glance around to see if anyone had mentioned the fact that the Pope has already accepted evolution as “more than just a theory”. I didn’t see any such reference so I thought I’d take this time to post a few links:
Seems that if those a Catholics won’t accept evolution in the slightest they would be wandering from their religion. After all, what the Pope says, goes, right? But Johnny boy wasn’t even the first Pope to give credence to the theory of evolution. Fifty years ago Pope Pius XII said almost the same thing. Check it out.
How much modern technology do you believe one needs to examine a process? The use of the verb discover regarding Darwin’s proposition as to the process of evolution, while not a “normal” mode of expression, is certainly valid in that his observations allowed him to perceive what had not been perceived before–thus “discovering” them.
Hiya, j-fan! There is a very nice site with electronic texts of several of Darwin’s works available; you can find out in his own words how he developed his ideas of evolution.
Basically through a lot of deep thought combined with a great deal of observation of the natural world. Darwin served as a naturalist on a five-year, round-the-world voyage ("…exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations"–well, sort of) by the H.M.S. Beagle. This voyage made a staggering number of observations and collections of specimens of living things and fossils of extinct forms. Among the most famous fauna observed by Darwin were the finches of the Galapagos, now often known as Darwin’s finches. Darwin was also influenced by the work of other 19th Century scientists and thinkers, especially Malthus and Lyell–Malthus instilled in Darwin the idea that “[a]s many more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or conditions of life…”, which is key to Darwin’s conception of natural selection; the findings of Lyell and other geologists that the Earth is vastly more ancient than Europeans had suspected was crucial in allowing for the great expanses of time which are required for evolution to work. Incidentally, evolution was “in the air” at that time–as they say, “when it’s railroad time, someone will build a railroad”. If Darwin hadn’t discovered it, someone else would have; in fact, Alfred Russel Wallace independently discovered most of the same ideas that Darwin did.
Modern technology, as in radioisotope dating and the techniques of molecular biology, has of course done much to confirm and extend Darwin’s basic ideas.
