🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3socsb$heg@newsbf02.news.aol.com> brsimmons@aol.com (BRSimmons) writes:
>
>vision@wwa.com (Richard Harvey) writes:
>
>> The Bible has always said the world was round...
>> If the catholic Pope would have read his Bible instead of prsecuting 
>> gallilleo, he would not have given christianity a bad nam...
>
>Actually, Galileo got in trouble over that whole
>earth-revolving-around-the-sun thing.  It had been known for many
>centuries that the Earth was round.
>

Hang on, I hate to bring facts into a good argument, and it is a
little while since I read Galileo, but:

 I seem to remember that Galileo was tolerated, and indeed entered into
 dialogue with senior church figures for a long time. For most of this
 period the major subject of controversy was his observations of the
 moon, in which he claimed that it was not a 'perfect celestial sphere'
 but rather had markings and irregularities on the surface (ooh err!).

 At one point during one of his dialogues with the Pope, the pontif
 asked to include his own view (some nonesense about science being a
 subjective interpretation rather than a description of the observable
 universe). Galileo included the Pope's view, but put it in the mouth
 of a character called 'Simplicio', the fool of the piece. The Pope was
 not inconsiderably miffed, and had him arrested. Certainly unfitting
 behaviour for the supposed head of the Christian church, but not a
 great theological crusade against science by any stetch of the
 imagination.

 Galileo was the foremost astronomer of his time, however some of the
 'best of the rest', the people who subsequently verified and supported
 his observations (on the moon at least) were priests at the Jesuit
 university in Rome.

But then I am not a historian and tend to believe the last book I've
read. Perhaps someone out there is?

Kevin
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Kevin D. Cowtan                    email:      cowtan@yorvic.york.ac.uk
 +44 (0)1904 432565                    WWW:   http://www.yorvic.york.ac.uk/
York University Protein Structure Research Group, Heslington, York, England

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