Try to get elected president as an avowed atheist. Or see what happens the day your child announces to his elementary school peers that he doesn't believe in god.

 

You just got me so hard,,,,,,**squirt,squirt**

 

To me, atheism is a lack of religion. But that's just me

 

*nods*

Atheism is the new gay.

 

Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Galileo

The last time I can think of when a new scientist completely overturned the theories of an older scientist was when Copernicus (1473 – 1543) determined that the earth and the other planets revolved around the sun.

Prior to that, Ptolemy (AD 90 – 168 ) claimed that the sun and the other planets revolved around the earth. That was certainly the way it looked from the earth. However, as centuries passed the measurements of the planet's movements became increasingly accurate, and it became known that their apparent revolutions around the earth were increasingly complex.

Copernicus had the insight that the universe looks the way it does to us because we are viewing it from the earth. Taking what was known about the movements of the planets he calculated that if we could view the universe from the sun, the planets would have smooth orbits.

In science, a simple explanation is preferable to a complex one, so Copernicus determined that the planets and the earth revolved around the sun. It was only later that Galileo (1564 - 1642) proved the theory of Copernicus with the telescope that he had improved upon.

The idea that the earth revolved around the sun was troublesome to Roman Catholicism, because it had adopted the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, who agreed with Ptolemy.

However, the Roman Catholic authorities who forced Galileo to publicly reject his agreement with Copernicus told him in private that they had read his papers and those of Copernicus, that they had tested them with a telescope, and that they agreed with him that the earth revolved around the sun. They told Galileo that the faith of many Roman Catholics depended on believing that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the truth would have to be slowly and gently propagated to avoid disturbing that faith.

Those who have read The Divine Comedy by Dante (1265 – 1321) may remember that it assumes the astronomy of Ptolemy.

 

Hilarious! :excited:

Ok, ok, I'm coming out! Mom, dad, I have something to tell you - and it will make baby Jesus cry...

 

You are a bit behind the scientific development don't you think? :excited:

But seriously - it happens all the time now... it is so fucking fast now...

Anyway - what you are saying is that Roman Catholic Church is and always was primarily a political organisation, quite a dangerous, influential and totalitarian one... unfortunately it reflects on the behaviour of many devotees of different Christian sects... fundamentalism is bad!
Faith shold be strictly personal, that's all.

 

Would never happen in the land of "freedom of speech" the USofA.....but it has happened in Australia, our first female Prime Minister is also a confirmed Atheist.

 

Newtonian physics is only taught in schools because people aren't smart enough to understand the maths behind the relativity that Einstein proposed. And just because scientific paradigms have operated in more or less the way you describe over the past few hundred years, doesn't mean they always will do. You can't predict the future. What if aliens landed and showed us a unified field theory that a five year old could understand?

 

All work follows on from other work done; thats 'progress'. And it was actually Newton who said his work on the Principia was only possible because he was standing on the shoulders of giants.

Newton is probably the greatest polymath who ever lived; of that there is no doubt but of course I defer to your greater understanding of science. After all, what the fuck do I know?

 

Dear Distant Lover,

Your lack of understanding of the history of science is palpable. Copernicus did indeed postulate the heliocentric model of the universe but as for it turning science on its head? Ha! It was almost an underground book, prefaced by a conservative thinker who testified that the contents of the book were merely to be taken as a theory to support the observed evidence, not that it was in any way true.

Before Copernicus, some scientists in ancient Greek, notably Aristarchus, believed the planets went round the sun too. Ptolemy was one in a long line of geocentric believers and added nothing new to the systems using eccentrics and elipses to describe the planetary motions.

Furthermore Copernicus was a Polish canon, working for the Catholic Church and his major interest was astrology, publishing readings for the noblemen and women of the time, rather than astronomy. His work was seen as interesting at the time of its publication, a few days after his death, incidentally, rather than Earth shattering. It wasn't until the likes of Keppler, Brahe and most notably Galileo with his telescope observing the Jovian moons some 60 years later that people started to take Copernicus seriously.

And where is your evidence supporting this hogwash that the Catholic Church told Galileo that he was right and that they were wrong?

Yours

ITME

 

I learned that many years ago in a documentary that I watched at the National Art Gallery in Washington, DC. It was based on a popularizing book on the history of science. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the title of the book and the author.

This comes close to confirming what the documentary said:

"Jesuit Astronomers, experts both in Church teachings, science, and in natural philosophy, were at first skeptical and hostile to the new ideas, however, within a year or two the availability of good telescopes enabled them to repeat the observations. In 1611 Galileo visited the Collegium Romanum in Rome, where the Jesuit Astronomers by that time had repeated his observations. Christoph Grienberger, one of the Jesuit scholars on the faculty, sympathized with Galileo’s theories."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

 

So basically some Catholic astronomers might have said "Oh yes Galileo, looks good, but of course if you repeat I said that I will deny it."

And noone of any importance in the Catholic hierarchy admitted as such for the next two hundred years.

 

"In 1758 the Catholic Church dropped the general prohibition of books advocating heliocentrism from the Index of Forbidden Books.[40] It did not, however, explicitly rescind the decisions issued by the Inquisition in its judgement of 1633 against Galileo, or lift the prohibition of uncensored versions of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus or Galileo's Dialogue.[40] As a result, the precise doctrinal status of heliocentrism remained unclear, and many Catholic scientists continued to pay lip service to the view that it could only be treated as a hypothesis.[40] Others, however, openly endorsed it as an established fact without meeting any official opposition from the Church.[41] The issue finally came to a head in 1820 when the Master of the Sacred Palace (the Church's chief censor), Filippo Anfossi, refused to license a book by a Catholic canon, Giuseppe Settele, because it openly treated heliocentrism as a physical fact.[42] Settele appealed to the then pope, Pius VII. After the matter had been reconsidered by the Congregation of the Index and the Holy Office, Anfossi's decision was overturned.[42] Copernicus's De Revolutionibus and Galileo's Dialogue were then subsequently omitted from the next edition of the Index when it appeared in 1835."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

My point is that from the beginning the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to Copernicus and Galileo was more hesitant and less uniform than often believed, especially by enemies of the Roman Catholic Church.

 

Compare and contrast. If you are trying to get your point across, maybe you should think about being more uniform and less hesitant.

kisses xxx

 

Baloney. They teach Newtonian physics because Newtonian physics works, and because it provides the basis for the refinements developed by Einstein and others. You can build bridges and dams using Newtonian physics and have no fear that the invisible hand of Einstein will cause them to fail.

 

Which is why I employed that particular phrase. But you'll notice it's not a direct quote.

But there's a difference between a scientific revolution in which previous work is found to be dead wrong (as in the case of Ptolemy/Copernicus, a true paradigm change), and the Einsteinian "revolution", which was a refinement and enhancement of earlier physics. Many people have advanced and refined evolutionary theory, for example, but they have not contradicted the central principles articulated by Darwin, and thus Darwin continues to stand as one of the pivotal figures of science.

 

We get it - Roman Catholic Church was and is a political organisation with a very specific agenda... which was very influential in the socio-political life of the World in the past, but is at least a bit less now - officially... thank God! :excited:

 

I like you... let's fuck.

 

Wait...that's MY line!