Copernicus’ Heliocentricty a Dangerous Threat to Inerrancy

While I appreciate the tongue in cheek nature of this post, I’m sure that you are aware that the debate over heliocentrism was a much more complex affair than is often presented in public, and effort should be made to clear the numerous myths and misrepresentations that are often presented as historical fact. In particular, we need to stop perpetuating the widespread myth that the debate over heliocentrism was primarily a conflict between science and Scripture, and that the chief opponents to Copernicus’ theory were theologians who rejected heliocentrism because it contradicted Scripture. Unfortunately, it seems that the main people who are fighting this misrepresentation are the historians of science who have actually studied the circumstances in depth–but who listens to historians?

For example, this excerpt from “Beyond War and Peace:
A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science”, by respected historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers addresses the quotes from Luther and Calvin that are cited in this post:

White’s picture of unremitting religious hostility to heliocentrism is no longer defensible-if, indeed, it ever was. If Copernicus had any genuine fear of publication, it was the reaction of scientists, not clerics, that worried him. Other churchmen before him- Nicole Oresme (a bishop) in the fourteenth century and Nicholas of Cusa (a cardinal) in the fifteenth-had freely discussed the possible motion of the earth, and there was no reason to suppose that the reappearance of this idea in the sixteenth century would cause a religious stir. Indeed, various churchmen, including a bishop and a cardinal, urged Copernicus to publish his book, which appeared with a dedication to Pope Paul III. Had Copernicus lived beyond its publication in 1543, it is highly improbable that he would have felt any hostility or suffered any persecution. The church simply had more important things to worry about than a new astronomical or cosmological system. Although a few critics noticed and opposed the Copernican system, organized Catholic opposition did not appear until the seventeenth century.

Concerning the Protestant response to the ideas of Copernicus, White claims that “all branches of the Protestant Church … vied with each other in denouncing the Copernican doctrine as contrary to Scripture. ” He also maintains (and his account has been repeated endlessly) that the theologians Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, and John Calvin all bitterly attacked the new theory. In fact, from Luther we have only a single off-the-cuff remark, made during a “table talk” in 1539 (four years before publication of Copernicus’s book), in which he refers to “that fool who wants to overturn the whole art of astronomy.” Melanchthon expressed early disapproval of heliocentrism as a description of reality but later softened his position. Calvin spoke out against the mobility of the earth in a sermon on 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 (dating from 1556), denouncing the propagators of such vain novelties for their contentious spirit, which undermines the quest for truth; however, it is likely that Calvin had in mind only the rotational motion of the earth as described in Cicero’s Academica, and there is no convincing evidence that he was even acquainted with the heliocentrism of Copernicus. In any case, Calvin’s dismissal of the earth’s mobility is a passing remark, and it is clear that cosmological issues never entered systematically into his thought.

May I also refer you to this blog post that describes how the primary opponents of Galileo were the other Aristotelean scientists of the time, and not primary the Church, due to the fact that Galileo actually did not have convincing scientific evidence for heliocentrism.

This recent paper also addresses the issue of how the scientific evidence during Galileo’s time actually supported geocentrism (in the form of the Tychonian model) rather than heliocentrism.

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