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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