Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!laura From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Re: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Message-ID: <4952@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Fri, 18-Jan-85 14:26:07 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.4952 Posted: Fri Jan 18 14:26:07 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 18-Jan-85 14:26:07 EST References: <202@decwrl.UUCP>, <528@mhuxt.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 43 People, go out and read history. Go out and read the chapter on Galileo in Koestlers *The Sleepwalkers* if you don't have time for a lot of history. Galileo was a blighted, pompous fool. He was also a genius, but that hardly excuses a lot of his behaviour. The Church was perfectly willing for him to teach his thoery *as a theory*. The Church was not willing to let him hold parties where he made fun of the Pope, and called all the religous scientific minds of the time names. At the time they placed Galileo under house arrest (the stories about the time in prison are just so much BS) *there* *was* *no* *evidence* *that* *Galileo* *was* *correct*. In many aspects, there was evidence that he was wrong. He never understood about tides, for instance, which Kepler had already figured out. The neat stories you hear about Galileo's experiments -- like dropping cannon shot off the tower of Pisa -- were almost all done by Church members who wanted to test his theories. (Guess what? You drop a big cannon shot and a little cannon shot off the tower and the big one lands first. Some churchmen used this to demonstrate that all things do not fall at the same rate. It sounds pretty reasonable to me -- too bad they didn't know about air resistence.) If Galileo had been able to accept that he had to find evidence that the Ptolemic model of the universe was incorrect, and if he had not meddled in politics, not swindled the Pope out of a great deal of money (who do you think financed Galileo? In part it was the Church.) he would have been fine. Let's get this straight -- the Church did a fantastically large number of terrible, evil, and totally abhorant things. If you wind me up I can give you a long history of the treatment of witches, heretics, and non-believers all through the middle ages, but I could probably post a hundered lines a day for about a year... and it would all get pretty boring. But their treatment of Galileo is *not* what they should be damned for. If you want a real scientific hero who was treated badly by the Church, try Kepler. Kepler had to keep wasting precious time trying to keep the local authorities from burning his mother. . . . Laura Creighton utzoo!laura