Excerpt #77 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
“Two other Italian scientists of the time, Galileo and Bruno, embraced the Copernican theory unreservedly.
“As a result, they suffered much personal injury at the hands of the powerful church inquisitors.
“Giordano Bruno had the audacity to go beyond Copernicus, and, dared to suggest, that space is boundless and that the sun and its planets are but one of any number of similar systems: Why! There might even be other inhabited worlds with rational beings possibly superior to ourselves.
“For such blasphemy, Bruno was tried before The Inquisition, condemned, and burned at the stake in 1600.
“Galileo was brought forward in 1633, and there, in front of his “betters”, he was, under the threat of torture and death, forced to his knees to renounce all belief in Copernican theories. He was sentenced to imprisonment for the remainder of his days.
“The most important aspect of Copernicus’ work is that it forever changed the place of man in the cosmos.
“No longer could man legitimately think his significance greater than his fellow creatures.
“With Copernicus’ work, man could now take his place among that which exists all about him and not take that premier position assigned immodestly to him by theologians. (Thanks to Peter Landry for some of this material).
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin. – Cardinal Bellarmino, during the trial of Galileo
“In 1996, the Vatican, fresh from its magnanimous reconciliation with Galileo, a mere 350 years after his death, publicly announced that evolution had been promoted from tentative hypothesis to accepted theory of science.” – Richard Dawkins¸ Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University
TRUTH CAN WITHSTAND SCRUTINY.