Good heavens: Vatican rehabilitating Galileo

[Donald L.]

Good heavens: Vatican rehabilitating Galileo (http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/23/europe/EU-Vatican-Rehabilitating-Galileo.php)

Galileo Galilei is going from heretic to hero.

The Vatican is recasting the most famous victim of its Inquisition as a man of faith, just in time for the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope and the U.N.-designated International Year of Astronomy next year.

Pope Benedict XVI paid tribute to the Italian astronomer and physicist Sunday, saying he and other scientists had helped the faithful better understand and "contemplate with gratitude the Lord's works."

[Problematique]

Wow.

This is just sad.

[Chris Nahr]

I agree, this vile heretic should stay condemned!

[CSL]

I think he was pointing out the sad fact that it took them 400 years to do this, when obviously 300 years was enough.

But then, you know that already.

Edit: I WILL NOT STAND FOR SARCASM!

[Brendan]

And in other Qt3 religion bashing news, representing the atheist camp we have Stalin and Mao. Finer, more upstanding pillars of the community the planet has yet to see.

(Note to people searching in Google, that is sarcasm.)

[Bahimiron]

You shoulda said Mao instead of Hitler.

[Kraaze]

Better late than never, I applaud this move by the church.

[Aeon221]

Galileo got hisself in trouble more for making the Pope's ideas on the matter look ignorant than anything else. Since the Pope had been favorably disposed to Galileo, and had requested that he supply arguments both for and against heliocentrism, it didn't make him happy that Galileo had put questions asked by the Pope on the subject in the mouth of a man named Simplicio (translation: Stupid). Poor PR on the part of Galileo, rather than outright hostility by the Papacy.

And in defense of the Pope wanting arguments both for and against heliocentrism, you have to remember the context of the times. Copernicus had only advanced a heliocentric model because he believed that an object as beautiful and perfect as the sun should be the central element of the universe. And Kepler had only empirically proved it a few years before Galileo's text on the subject -- and while Kepler's data was good, it had all been collected by eye by that freak, Brahe, leaving it pretty suspect to most.

Also Ptolmeic model of geocentric epicycles actually outperformed the Copernican model in predictive utility. It wasn't until Kepler finalized the heliocentric model a couple of years prior to Galileo's seminal work by changing orbits from perfect circles to ellipses that the heliocentric model began to win out.

Furthermore, nobody could find any evidence of the aberration of starlight or stellar parallax -- both concepts having been well known and understood by Greek astronomers, and the absence of which served as the primary rational for a "stable earth" geocentric model. Neither of these oddities was observed until the 19th century iirc.

So the geocentric vs heliocentric debate was still pretty open at the time of Galileo. And the Pope actively encouraged him to both write and publish his book. It was Galileo's decision to call the Pope stupid, and the Pope, unsurprisingly, reacted poorly to that.

[Qenan]

Yes, but it demonstrate's Lord Acton's proposition:

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Declaring someone a heretic because he got your nose out of joint isn't really very defensible.

[Calistas]

But what is the point of being Pope if you can't have a good time? ;)

[Mister Widget]

It's good to be the Pope!

[bago]

And it's bad to be an altar boy.

[Gordon Cameron]

Declaring someone a heretic because he got your nose out of joint isn't really very defensible.

I thought Brahe was the one with a nose out of joint?

*badum ching*