--- Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
On Monday 10 March 2008, Leo Mauler wrote:
--- Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
On Friday 07 March 2008, Leo Mauler wrote:
While "it's traditional!" often leads to bad things like the burning of astronomer "heretics"
You say that like it's happened, or that it would be a bad thing if it did.
Well, I don't know if its actually happened (though Galileo definitely got lifetime house arrest over "heretical astronomy").
I'm sure his arrest was merely "until he repented of his heresy" and quite justified. The heresy, of course, has little to do with the astronomy and rather was his add-on claim that his findings proved Holy Scripture to be errant.
The astronomy proved the Holy Scripture to be errant. Without the astronomy Galileo had committed no heresy. The heresy had *everything* to do with the astronomy.
Heresy can be undocumented, as in a claim of geocentrism "just because you feel like it's true", but there's every indication that Galileo wanted to follow all the Christian dogma up until the point where his astronomy forced him to break geocentrism to avoid breaking a Commandment ("thou shalt not lie").
Our difference of opinion is that I'm saying *any* astronomy which contradicts a dogma is "heretical", be that dogma the Galileo astronomy which proved that the Earth moved around the Sun, or the more recent Venus astronomy which challenged the notion that Uniformitarianism Geology could be applied to planets other than Earth (I saw an old documentary recently on the Magellan probe), or even the very recent astronomical opinion which stripped Pluto of its status as a planet, something which has made me very unhappy about astronomers in general.
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