Galileo and Religion
From a theological perspective, it matters not at all whether the earth moves around the sun or vice versa, since the Bible hardly deals with any of these scientific questions at all. Galileo was correct that the purpose of the Bible was to teach certain religious and spiritual truths, not to provide scientific information on chemistry, physics or biology. Even if its authors had been aware of these subjects, they were basically irrelevant to the stories they intended to tell. In Genesis, for example, the Bible asserts that God created the universe out of nothing in the very distant past, but never mentions whether the earth or other planets are moving. Among those few people in the ancient world who gave any thought to these matters, the views of Aristotle and Ptolemy had been officially accepted by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, and therefore it had difficulty in changing its views when Galileo disproved these two philosophers. Even in the ancient world, though, other scientists had concluded that the sun was stationary, so Galileo and Copernicus deserve credit for rediscovering and proving their views. The fact that one or another ancient Greek philosopher was disproven on some issue is of no religious significance at all, although the Catholic Church condemned Galileo's work as heretical and the Inquisition threatened to burn him. They later apologized for this, of course, but as Galileo wrote at the time they would have done better to simply leave these scientific questions to the scientists.
Section 2: Galileo's Primary Contribution to Scientific Knowledge
In Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany in 1615, he defended the New Science against is conservative critics in the universities and Catholic Church, who were claiming that he had simply falsified his results. They had also sprinkled their arguments with "passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly, and which were ill-suited to their purposes."[footnoteRef:1] These narrow-minded critics were using the Bible to defend the false and outdated theories of Ptolemy and Aristotle, and claiming that he was a heretic. All the opponents of Nicholas Copernicus had attacked him on the same grounds,...
Religion does not necessarily need to be considered to be something spiritual, as it can also teach people in relation to moral values and about how they can distinguish between good and bad. A modern school system needs to be fair towards everyone and this can only be made possible by school authorities allowing children to express themselves without restraint. Parents should have the right to decide what their children will
Technology has now reached such dizzying heights that it attempts to give us here and now the Empyrean that Galileo's telescope neglected to find. How has it worked? Perhaps that should be the subject of another discussion. All the same, it is interesting to note that modern science is still attempting to explain the mysteries of the universe that in the medieval world were simply accepted on faith as
As Spong has closed his career as a formal minister, retiring from the bishop position in 2000 have has become even more controversial than ever before: Spong believes in a transcending reality at "the very heart of life" that presses toward life and wholeness. He describes God as the "Ground of Being" and "universal presence" that undergirds all life and is present in all that is. He regards heaven as
The similarities between the two perspectives - the Vedic and the Transcendentalist ones - start with the stress over the virtues of intuition when it comes to both social and spiritual knowledge. Truth must agree to an individual intuitive notion of truth, seem to say the Transcendentalists, and part of this truth can be found within nature. Maintaining a Christian approach (which means that the doubts they were expressing were
The universe viewed through a telescope looked different, and this difference in itself played into the Protestant argument that received truths may be fallible. In fact, the notion of truth outside empirical evidence became unsteady: For most thinkers in the decades following Galileo's observations with the telescope, the concern was not so much for the need of a new system of physics as it was for a new system of
A favorite target for conspiracists today as well as in the past, a group of European intellectuals created the Order of the Illuminati in May 1776, in Bavaria, Germany, under the leadership of Adam Weishaupt (Atkins, 2002). In this regard, Stewart (2002) reports that, "The 'great' conspiracy organized in the last half of the eighteenth century through the efforts of a number of secret societies that were striving for
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now