8/1/09

Scientific Cenobites - Some notes on Skepticism, part 6 of 6

FYI: this post has been moved here.

5 comments:

  1. mariano wrote The anger and outrage these scientists are feeling as they are trying to come to terms with the cognitive dissonance generated by the Benveniste results is palatable.

    The word you're looking for is palpable, not palatable.

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  2. Is this writer a Christian, a consoiricy theorist, or a bigfooter?
    This article leaves me wondering just what the author is trying to defend.

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  3. "The church fathers who refused to look through Galilei's telescope could hardly have been any more irrational than the highly educated scientists who produced these outbursts of scientific bigotry."

    Actually, there were no church fathers who refused; a lot of churchmen, up to and including the Pope, were quite interested in Galileo's discoveries. The people (two that scholars have named being Libri and Cremonini) who were unwilling even to look were — that's right... university professors. Go figure.

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  4. Believing that Galilei would probably be burnt at the stake, that was probably a most expeditious decision.

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  5. The myth that people simply refused to look at Galileo's evidence is simply that at myth. He had no evidence.

    Much like Washington cutting down the Cherry Tree it's still a myth.

    The fact is Fr. Copernicus taught his heliocentric theory & his writings where around for a hundred years after his death and the Church didn't say boo about it. Indeed Fr. Copernicus even received honors from the Pope.

    Galileo OTOH made fun of the Pope & quite possibly plagiarized his work from a prominent Jesuit Astronomer Christopher Scheiner. So I have no sympathy for this boob.

    Also Galileo simply didn't prove his claim. Indeed it wouldn't be till the 19th century that science definitively proved the motion of the Earth using the Foucault Pendulum (invented by Leon Foucault a Catholic Physicist).

    Based on the Scientific Evidence the Church naturally removed the ban in 1824 on teaching Heliocentric theory as a fact(one was allowed up until that point to teach it as a theory).
    The Church has ALWAYS followed the Augustinian principle of interpreting scripture according to Natural Science & not the other way around.

    Galileo wasn't a great scientist or hero. He was at best an imprudent idiot who made a lucky guess & at worst he was a plagiarist.

    http://www.ips-planetarium.org/planetarian/articles/mythofgalileo.html

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