Answer to the moderator

gkell2

PDN wrote: »

What has this thread got to with Christianity? Boards.ie has an Astronomy & Space Forum. Is there any reason why this should be discussed here rather than there?

The big bangers own the education system so when students hear the history of Galileo as a scientist and the Catholic Church as a group that desperately clung to the idea of the Sun moving around the Earth,you end up going to Church with a very elderly congregation

Let me see -

"The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference -- the possibility that space- time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!" [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 115-16.]

The entire paragraph is fiction,the Pope in Galileo's time had a better grasp on the issues than any of the 'big bang' bozos here and his objections were well founded.It had nothing to do with the Sun moving around the Earth but the limitations of the procedure that proved the Earth moves and I assure you it still is an outstanding issue due to the adoption of Ra/Dec by empiricists following Newton.

I challenge any reader to up the standard of discussion by considering genuine history rather than fiction designed to put Christianity in the worst possible light -

"In 1623 Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, a Florentine who had praised Galileo’s achievements, was elected Pope under the name of Urban VIII. Galileo had recently helped his nephew, Francesco Barberini, obtain his doctorate at the University of Pisa, and the Cardinal had written to express his appreciation. The postscript to his letter, which is in his own hand, leaves no doubt about his feelings. ‘I am much in your debt,’ he writes, ‘for your abiding goodwill towards myself and the members of my family, and I look forward to the opportunity of reciprocating. I assure you that you will find me more than willing to be of service in consideration of your great merit and the gratitude that I owe you.’ 4 Events moved rapidly, and less than two months after writing this letter, Maffeo Barberini had become Urban VIII, and was about to appoint his nephew, then only twenty-seven years old, to the College of Cardinals. Francesco became the Pope’s right hand.

Two close friends of Galileo, Giovanni Ciampoli and Virginio Cesarini, were also named to important posts. Cesarini was appointed Lord Chamberlain, and Ciampoli Secret Chamberlain and Secretary for the Correspondence with Princes. Under these favourable auspices Galileo thought the moment had come to renew his campaign for Copernicanism, and in 1624 he set off for Rome where he had the rare privilege of being received by the Pope six times in six weeks. Although the 1616 decree of the Index against Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus was not suspended, Galileo felt that he could now argue for the motion of the Earth as long as he avoided declaring that it was the only system that fitted astronomical observations.

Here lurked the danger of serious misunderstanding. Maffeo Barberini, while he was a Cardinal, had counselled Galileo to treat Copernicanism as a hypothesis, not as a confirmed truth. But ‘hypothesis’ meant two very different things. On the one hand, astronomers were assumed to deal only with hypotheses, i.e. accounts of the observed motions of the stars and planets that were not claimed to be true. Astronomical theories were mere instruments for calculation and prediction, a view that is often called ‘instrumentalism’. On the other hand, a hypothesis could also be understood as a theory that was not yet proved but was open to eventual confirmation. This was a ‘realist’ position. Galileo thought that Copernicanism was true, and presented it as a hypothesis, i.e. as a provisional idea that was potentially physically true, and he discussed the pros and cons, leaving the issue undecided. This did not correspond to the instrumentalist view of Copernicanism that was held by Maffeo Barberini and others. They thought that Copernicus’ system was a purely instrumental device, and Maffeo Barberini was convinced that it could never be proved. This ambiguity pervaded the whole Galileo Affair."

http://www.unav.es/cryf/newlightistanbul.html

Does that answer your question or not ?.

gimmebroadband

PDN is not a Catholic!