Preparedness Notes for Monday — June 22, 2020

On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilei was coerced by Pope Gregory XV to recant his belief in heliocentrism–that the Earth orbits the Sun. The Vatican did not concede that it was wrong until October 31, 1992.

Today, another review by our tireless Field Gear Editor, Pat Cascio.




4 Comments

  1. That was common Knowledge even in antiquity, Galileo invented a better mathematical Modell or Method for that

    Galileo was judged guilty of Lese Majeste against the Pope and IIRC by a civil court of Rome, not a papal or church court

  2. Heliocentrism is the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the center of the Solar System. Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth at the center. The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun had been proposed as early as the 3rd century BC by Aristarchus of Samos, but at least in the medieval world, Aristarchus’s heliocentrism attracted little attention—possibly because of the loss of scientific works of the Hellenistic Era.

    It was not until the 16th century that a mathematical model of a heliocentric system was presented, by the Renaissance mathematician, astronomer, and ~~>Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus, leading to the Copernican Revolution. In the following century, Johannes Kepler introduced elliptical orbits, and Galileo Galilei presented supporting observations made using a telescope.
    [Wikipedia ~ Heliocentrism]
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    Galileo did not discover that the earth goes around the sun, nor did he prove it. At his time there were two theories about the universe, the most common of which was the geocentric theory based on Aristotle and Ptolemy. This theory taught that the earth was the center of the universe around which the sun and other bodies revolved. The other theory was the heliocentric or Copernican theory which held that the sun was the center of the universe and that day and night were due to the rotation of the earth. This theory was named after a Catholic canon, Nicolaus Copernicus, who published a book on it 21 years before Galileo was born. Copernicus dedicated his book to Pope Paul III with his knowledge.

    Long before Galileo was born the heliocentric theory was freely taught in the Italian universities. In 1533, Albert Widmanstadt lectured on it before Pope Clement VII. The popes were well aware of this teaching and were in no way opposed to it. Many other Catholics also began to teach it. If the Catholic Church wanted to condemn Copernicanism, she had plenty of opportunities to do so before Galileo’s time.

    The first opposition to the theory came from the Protestants, including Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin, who were violently opposed to it. Luther called Copernicus a madman because, as Luther said, Josue in the Old Testament stopped the sun, not the earth. Johannes Kepler, a contemporary of Galileo, wrote a work supporting the Copernican theory. In 1596, the Protestant Faculty of the University of Tubingen unanimously condemned Kepler’s book as damnable heresy, because they believed it was contrary to Scripture. As a result he was forced to flee his country. He went to the Jesuits and was given a teaching position in astronomy in a Catholic university by the pope himself.
    [From Congregatio Mariae Reginae Immaculatae (CMRI) site ~ Footnotes at the site]
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    Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître (July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian ~~>Catholic priest, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to identify that the recession of nearby galaxies can be explained by a theory of an expanding universe, which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble’s law, or the Hubble–Lemaître law, and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble’s article. Lemaître also proposed what later became known as the “Big Bang theory” of the origin of the universe, initially calling it the “hypothesis of the primeval atom”
    [Wikipedia]
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    “Let there be Light” in the Bible, with a sudden start of our expanding Universe. Only God can create something out of nothing in our physical Universe.
    [Religion answers different questions than pure science, as science is understood today.]

  3. I don’t think God can create something out of nothing and I don’t think Genesis says that He did. It says “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”. It doesn’t say He created them from nothing, just that he created them. I think He organized existing matter to create them.

  4. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. GENESIS 1:2

    [There’s biblical interpretation to this passage, as to ‘formless and empty’ in the description. Do the words mean Formless and Empty as commonly understood.]

    What are the Waters?
    Maybe the Good Book answers.

    “Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.”

    To the Samaritan woman: “Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” …….. ” … whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

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    “Our Expanding Universe: Age, History & Other Facts” [Space(dot)com June 17, 2017]

    “The universe was born with the Big Bang as an unimaginably hot, dense point. When the universe was just 10-34 of a second or so old — that is, a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second in age — it experienced an incredible burst of expansion known as inflation, in which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. During this period, the universe doubled in size at least 90 times, going from subatomic-sized to golf-ball-sized almost instantaneously.”

    “According to NASA, after inflation the growth of the universe continued, but at a slower rate. As space expanded, the universe cooled and ~~>matter formed. One second after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons, photons and neutrinos.”
    [This article is compatible with what I learned in school, and many similar articles can be found on the Internet. Matter was created, and the Universe can be explained by E = mc2 (at least in a science class).]
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    Can the scientific method be useful for proving God’s existence?
    Yes, in two ways:
    A. If science can show that the universe had a beginning in time, then it
    would imply a Creator. Why? Consider the following—if the universe
    had a beginning (a point at which it came into existence) then prior to
    that beginning it would have been nothing. So what can nothing do? As
    you may have surmised, nothing can only do nothing. Now—if nothing
    can only do nothing, then when the universe was nothing, it could not
    have made itself something (because it could only do nothing). This
    means that something beyond the universe—like God—would have to
    have brought it into existence (moved it from nothing to something).

    B. If science can show that the conditions and constants of the universe
    being able to support life are highly improbable (and that a multiverse
    explanation is not really adequate – we will explain this in greater
    detail later), it is reasonable to conclude that a superior intelligence—
    like God— designed it to be that way?
    [from The Magis Center]

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    Me GGHD. An understanding of God and our world must be copacetic with science. Many religions and people share that belief. The Bible should also be understood with ‘right reason’ and science. God keeps our world spinning with scientific predictability. Yet, God can >intervene in what is called a >Miraculous Event.

    GGHD has heard it said:
    Jesus miraculously multiplied a small amount of bread and fish, to feed thousands. [A miraculous event with a spiritual message.]
    Big Thinkers in disbelief have said, ‘People with bread and fish just shared their food to those without.’
    Actually, anyone with a modicum of knowledge about human nature would realize a ‘sharing of food’ would require a ‘bigger miracle’ than, Jesus miraculously multiplying a small amount of food to feed thousands.

    [This comment added to demonstrate the Power of God. … Even disbelievers have faith in miraculous occurrence possible with people. … As a note: millions of people starve to death each year. Hundreds of millions are malnourished, and suffer an early death.]

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