----- Original Message ----- From: "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 2:14 PM Subject: Re: Imax 'shuns films on evolution'
> * Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > > Not really. The concept that we should not use the bible as a means of > > understanding nature predates science (as opposed to natural philosophy) > > by hundreds of years. It was not presented by just any theorist either:... > > rather it was Tommy Acquinis...who was _the_ most influential doctor of the > > church (with Augustine a close second) almost 1000 years ago. > > Galileo may have had a different opinion. Your revisionist religious > apologist attitude is really depressing. I suppose it depends on what is being revised. Laura Bush called the idea that the South fought the Civil War to preserve slavery revisionist. :-) Pop history != history. Personally, I'm relying on the coverage in my history of science course for most of my information. My text indicated that the problem Galileo had was twofold 1) He insulted the pope in one of his books...not a good move. 2) He was opposed to the Classicists who had tremendous political power at the time. His problem was countering Aristotle, not scripture. He couldn't be arrested for countering Aristotle, so they used scripture. But, if the earth orbiting the sun were really a theological problem, then why in the world would Pope Gregory have consulted a number of Copernican astronomers when he made his colander? Especially, since the Copernican system didn't offer that big of an advantage over the Ptolemy system until Kepler used ellipses instead of perfect circles. If you wanted to argue that that pope was corrupt, and that many popes were, then I'd have no problem with that argument. But, the politics concerning the time of Galileo was fairly complicated...and the pop culture history of that time doesn't do justice to it. Out of curiosity, why are you so certain that the pop history must be right? In other areas, pop culture understandings have been shown to be wrong. Maybe you and I have had different texts when we studied the history of science in college. For this question, we used Galileo, Science and the Church by Jerome J. Langford. Looking at http://www.historyguide.org/earlymod/galileo.html I see that there are other texts that cover this period. If you had a text that has a different interpretation of this period, I'd be interested in seeing how it covers it, any data that supports the contention that Galileo's problems were truly theological and not political, etc. I think Langford's book is still around here someplace...I wouldn't mind discussing the pros and cons of his viewpoint with you. As far as I can tell from a google search, it's still being used as a textbook today. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
