The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [86]
“Many centuries ago, Augustine said God didn’t create the world ‘for man’ or because of some sort of compulsion, but ‘because he wanted to.’ 26 In The Divine Comedy, the reader learns that the actual sense of us being in the center was merely a bias. We discover, in fact, that everything was arranged so that God is at the metaphysical center—that is, the place of supreme importance.
“Instead of denigrating Earth, actually Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler saw their new scheme as exalting it. For instance, Galileo waxes poetic about how the Earth, like the other planets, reflects the glory of the sun and is no longer just a cosmic sump. 27 So in the transformation from medieval cosmology to the Renaissance view, this new perspective elevated man in some ways.”
Other historical researchers have come to the same conclusion. Said one: “The Copernican system, far from demoting man, destroyed Aristotle’s vision of the earth as a kind of cosmic sink, and if it did anything, it elevated humanity. In making the earth a planet, a heavenly body, Copernicus infinitely ennobled its status.” 28
But something didn’t add up to me. “Didn’t the church persecute Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno for their view that the Earth revolved around the sun?” I asked.
“First of all,” Richards said, “some claim Copernicus was persecuted, but history shows he wasn’t; in fact, he died of natural causes the same year his ideas were published. As for Galileo, his case can’t be reduced to a simple conflict between scientific truth and religious superstition. He insisted the church immediately endorse his views rather than allow them to gradually gain acceptance, he mocked the Pope, and so forth. Yes, he was censured, but the church kept giving him his pension for the rest of his life.”
Indeed, historian William R. Shea said, “Galileo’s condemnation was the result of the complex interplay of untoward political circumstances, political ambitions, and wounded prides.” 29 Historical researcher Philip J. Sampson noted that Galileo himself was convinced that the “major cause” of his troubles was that he had made “fun of his Holiness”—that is, Pope Urban VIII—in a 1632 treatise. 30 As for his punishment, Alfred North Whitehead put it this way: “Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.” 31
“Bruno’s case was very sad,” Richards continued. “He was executed in Rome in 1600. Certainly this is a stain on church history. But again, this was a complicated case. His Copernican views were incidental. He defended pantheism and was actually executed for his heretical views on the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other doctrines that had nothing to do with Copernicanism.
“Now, here’s the point I want to make: it’s very important if you’re going to advance the Copernican Principle that you make it look like it’s grounded in the historical march of science. But when you actually look at the data, it’s just not true. Writers of astronomy textbooks just keep recycling the myth, sort of like the flat-Earth myth, which was the idea that Columbus was told the Earth was flat and he thought it was round. That’s just wrong too.”
“Scholars at the time knew it was a sphere,” added Gonzalez. “Even the ancient Greeks knew it was a sphere.”
“They’d known it for a thousand years or more,” said Richards.
I knew they were right about that. David Lindberg, former professor of the history of science and currently director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, said in a recent interview:
One obvious [myth] is that before Columbus, Europeans believed nearly unanimously in a flat Earth—a belief allegedly drawn from certain biblical statements and enforced by the medieval church. This myth seems to have had an eighteenth century