As The Holy Scriptures Show
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
This June, 465 years ago, Nicolas Copernicus dedicated a book to Pope Paul III. “I can easily conceive,” he wrote, “that some people will cry out that I and my theory should be rejected.”
Copernicus was a physician and civil servant who worked within the Catholic Church. He was also from a prosperous family that was politically well connected. His uncle was a powerful Church offical who helped him receive an appointment as Canon of the Cathedral in Frombork, Poland.
Copernicus outlined his theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun around in 1514. Some officials in the Church admired his work and offered to pay all his expenses.
The theologian, Martin Luther took a different view. He wrote, “This fool wants to turn the entire art of astronomy upside down. But as the Holy Scriptures show, Joshua ordered the sun, not the Earth, to halt.”
Copernicus dedicated the preface of his famous work, “De Revolutionibus” to Pope Paul III in 1542, remarking that he
had been motivated by, “the uncertainty of the traditional mathematical methods of calculating the motions of the celestial bodies.”
Copernicus died in 1543, the day the book was published.
Almost one hundred years later, in 1632, Galileo Galilei published the, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”. Although this book was only a further advance to Copernicus’s views, times had changed, it was considered heretical and Galileo was ordered to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633.
Galileo was found guilty, and the sentence of the Inquisition was that he must recant his ideas, his works were forbidden, and he was placed under house arrest, where he died in 1642.
Nearly 350 years later, in October 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the Galileo affair was handled.
b.
