Gospel & Universe 🔭 The Sum of All Space
Cities of God
Geocentrism
In 1213 the Catholic Church went so far as to claim, “There is one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there is absolutely no salvation.” Even after the end of the Middle Ages, the Church rejected the heliocentric model of Copernicus, in favour of the geocentric model of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and the Old Testament.
In order to make this model work, they accepted the Ptolemaic concepts of eccentricity and epicycles (little loops or rotations). This seems to have been a case of constructing a model to explain a preconceived notion. Not surprisingly, when new evidence came along, they weren’t prepared to consider it. The rejection of astronomy joined a sad list of rejections: pagan philosophy, polytheism, agnosticism, and free enquiry in general.
In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for the heresy of pantheism and for his cosmological theories. At about the same time, Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, and Galileo was forced to recant the heliocentric truth.
The Church urged people to believe in the fixed Mysteries of God and His Heaven circling above us. At the same time people couldn’t help but believe in their immediate senses, which told them (as it told many an Ancient Hebrew and Greek) that the table in front of them was, like the earth itself, absolutely still. The problem is that the Church coerced people to believe this and nothing else, just as it coerced people to believe in monotheism and Jesus and nothing else.
Believe it or else!
Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition (Cristiano Banti, 1857)
When the Inquisitor saw the table at which he forced Galileo to recant, he saw a table that had to be absolutely still. After all, the Bible stated that the earth was unmoving. For the Inquisitor the table couldn’t budge a millimetre. Not even theoretically. At the same time, he believed that the heavenly bodies moved in harmonious circles, with their strange little added loops, around an immovable Earth.
The Inquisitor got both wrong.
