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>There's nothing Christian about it My point was maybe this had something to do with why it "didn't really catch on." Given how viciously the idea was attacked

>There's nothing Christian about it My point was maybe this had something to do with why it "didn't really catch on." Given how viciously the idea was attacked by the Roman Inquisition as being heretical it was probably not the first time the church encountered the concept. IIRC, monks were the predominant scribes in the western world pre-printing press. If intellectual ideas didn't conform to religious canon they could've theoretically been nearly completely erased via censorship only to be "newly discovered" by Copernicus etc.

jsrjenkins 5y ago
Copernicus himself was a Catholic priest and a Canon. The first opposition to his works was actually from Protestant thinkers.
- TheBlight 5y ago
  Right. So he would've been acutely aware of the implications of his work and how it might be received. Maybe that's why he didn't publish his book until 2 months prior to his death over a decade after completing the first manuscript. AFAIK Protestants are Christians.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, I think on that you're probably right. See what they did to Gallileo, after all (and maybe also Giordano Bruno, though that's not clear). I don't reckon it was an easy job to be an astronomer in those days...
ogogmad 5y ago
It's more complicated than that. The Church didn't so much "attack" it, as not accept it as a proven fact, and not allow it to be presented as such. They favoured the mathematically equivalent model of Tycho Brahe (which is just a coordinate change from the Copernicus model, unlike earlier geocentric models). They did allow heliocentrism to be presented as an unproven hypothesis. The heliocentrism model was only proven by the successive efforts of Kepler and Newton. Kepler made it more accurate by formulating his laws of motion (which allow for an elliptical motion and eliminate the last need for epicycles), and Newton showed how Kepler's laws of motion could be derived from F = GMm/d^2. Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo, and Newton came later. Regarding the treatment of Galileo, Galileo was on very good terms with the Roman Church until he openly insulted geocentrism proponents in a book, and presented the heliocentrism theory as a proven fact. The book is also notable for presenting an incorrect theory of tides, not giving credit to his contemporaries, omitting the more accurate and profound theory of Kepler, and attacking a strawman that nobody was defending (in the sense that the favoured model of the time was Brahe's, and not the complicated epicycles model that Galileo was attacking).

jsrjenkins 5y ago

Copernicus himself was a Catholic priest and a Canon. The first opposition to his works was actually from Protestant thinkers.

TheBlight 5y ago
Right. So he would've been acutely aware of the implications of his work and how it might be received. Maybe that's why he didn't publish his book until 2 months prior to his death over a decade after completing the first manuscript. AFAIK Protestants are Christians.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, I think on that you're probably right. See what they did to Gallileo, after all (and maybe also Giordano Bruno, though that's not clear). I don't reckon it was an easy job to be an astronomer in those days...

ogogmad 5y ago

It's more complicated than that. The Church didn't so much "attack" it, as not accept it as a proven fact, and not allow it to be presented as such. They favoured the mathematically equivalent model of Tycho Brahe (which is just a coordinate change from the Copernicus model, unlike earlier geocentric models). They did allow heliocentrism to be presented as an unproven hypothesis. The heliocentrism model was only proven by the successive efforts of Kepler and Newton. Kepler made it more accurate by formulating his laws of motion (which allow for an elliptical motion and eliminate the last need for epicycles), and Newton showed how Kepler's laws of motion could be derived from F = GMm/d^2. Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo, and Newton came later. Regarding the treatment of Galileo, Galileo was on very good terms with the Roman Church until he openly insulted geocentrism proponents in a book, and presented the heliocentrism theory as a proven fact. The book is also notable for presenting an incorrect theory of tides, not giving credit to his contemporaries, omitting the more accurate and profound theory of Kepler, and attacking a strawman that nobody was defending (in the sense that the favoured model of the time was Brahe's, and not the complicated epicycles model that Galileo was attacking).