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Msg. 15443 of 54959
(This msg. is a reply to 15433 by faul) |
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I know who Lemaitre is. To say he is Catholic doesn't make the theory Catholic. It is a scientific hypothesis which happened to originate with a Catholic astrophysicist. In those terms, his catholicism is irrelevant. The reason the theory of catholic foreknowledge is piffle is because you imply a continuity of unchanging belief within the Church that betrays your ignorance of medieval astronomy and theology. Let me guess the process. Someone found a single quote from Aquinas and reshaped it for a modern argument, knowing nothing else about him or medieval church orthodoxy. You picked up on it and served it as written. The Church's position on the universe changed dramatically during the centuries after the renaissance. Prior to this, medieval astronomers learnt their craft through the trivium and quadrivium that was passed to them from antiquity, featuring important guidance from the book of Genesis. Creation out of something or nothing ("without form and void" versus "clay" - there was an argument even in the two Hebrew creation myths) in seven days by a creator God. Christianity made a structure with the earth as its centre, mankind as its purpose, Jerusalem as its heart and the church as its organising principle. Paradise was around the edge of the world, separated from us by a wall of fire, just as Adam and Eve experienced things once they were expelled from the Garden of Eden: "So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." The medieval cartographers even made maps of the earth that show us how they thought things were arranged. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mappa_mundi_Hereford_1300_explained.png The late medieval/scholastic Catholic position on the shape of the universe, as represented by folks like Aquinas, was less flat and more three dimensional. Derived from Arabic libraries filled with Ancient Greek thought, it used Ptolemy's model - sitting atop the Biblical origin stories with which it conformed reasonably neatly. A Russian doll set of concentric spheres made using perfect circular geometry. The earth was the centre of Ptolemy's universe. The stars were fixed upon one of these spheres, beyond which was the realm of heaven, inhabited by God, angels and the souls of the righteous. Aquinas preferred the Greek/ St John's Gospel/ Augustinian/ Moslem tradition of creation out of nothing over the materialist model. In the beginning was the Word. But creation out of nothing did not imply a big bang. Instead, God created the finished world out of nothing: a perfectly designed place, fixed in space and harmonious, that was stained by the sins of mankind. Astronomy reinforced the Augustinian belief that the key truth of man's inheritance is original sin. Jesus (and his representative church on earth) intercedes between the terrestrial world and the divine domain up above. This is the catholic world architecture up to the dawn of the renaissance. That is, until Galileo and Kepler forced heliocentrism and elliptical orbits upon the world and thus exploded the medieval theo-astronomical consensus. The Catholic Church tried desperately to preserve the medieval model. It was a world created around mankind which preserved divine perfection in the principles of its construction. It was a holistic theory which justified Papal power and the income derived from it. Catholic inquisitors burned heretics like Bruni for believing stars were distant suns. They suffered Copernicus because his model was submitted as a hypothetical rather than a tangible construct and because he published his work from his deathbed. They silenced Galileo who wrote that the laws of nature had equal value with the text of the Bible. To believe in a Big Bang requires a gigantic universe with an unstable, non-earth-centric structure. No one believed this in the medieval period. The Bible said the sun revolves around the earth and so they believed it was so. They thought a spinning earth absurd. They assumed it would necessitate a great wind and folks thrown into the sky like ants from a top. That is, until Newton explained why it is we stick to our planet. A universe with a fixed and central earth was Aquinas' belief. It was Catholic doctrine. Only the bravest souls dared challenge it. It was these heretical heroes of Western civilisation who gave us the freedom to think beyond religious orthodoxy. In the end, the Catholic church submitted to science. But it took centuries. Now, of course, the Popes even accept Darwin. It is absurd to rewrite history in order to conform with a modern conspiracy theory of secret catholic knowledge for which there is precisely zero evidence. The freedom to think about the universe independent of religion was won in spite of the Church's opposition. The fact of Lemaitre's catholicism is merely ironical. Whoops. Self-starred by accident. |
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