Reddit reviews Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion
We found 6 Reddit comments about Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Yes, nearly everyone knew the world was round. Eratosthenes measured the earth's circumference with reasonable accuracy in the third century BC.
Medievals knew this. You can even find medieval clerics (like Nicole d'Oresme) hypothesizing about the earth going around the sun centuries before Copernicus. They couldn't prove it yet, but they had suspicions.
A good book on all these subjects is Galileo Goes To Jail, edited by Ronald Numbers. It features dozens of the world's most eminent historians of science discussing myths about science and religion.
Concerning the Inquisition, you can reference Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition for an important 20th century interpretation of what the Inquisition was.
Those guys are horrible at history. I would recommend going to /r/badhistory for rebuttals, in the meantime I found some books that I think can really help out debunking this myth.
Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction
Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology
Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion
When Science and Christianity Meet
The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution
The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450
The Savior of Science
For the Glory of God
The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science
The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo
Yes this is a long list but that's because it's studied so often ;). I hope this helps.
Well, ok. Read a biography of Galileo some time. Or a book like "Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths" available off Amazon. Or read about why the Conflict Thesis is wrong.
Or, as I started with, just read Dinesh's summary. It's accurate.
That's really sad. But you honestly don't need to worry. As far as I've seen, there very much is a God - and I say that as someone who has heard every atheist argument there is. The thing about atheist arguments, though, is that they rely on belief. You have to believe that the universe is purely made of atoms and that there is no spiritual dimension to anything. It causes them to reject evidence outright and pretend they are being scientific.
I'm not honestly sure what you found in other religions, but you should know that the spread of Christianity has had a profound effect on them. Before we turned up in India they would burn you alive on the funeral pyre if your spouse died. You should also know that in other religions, their Gods aren't even really spiritual beings. They're more like our concept of a super hero or super villein - and that is in the places where they don't just worship objects. It's like humans are wired with the concept that there is something more, but they go looking in all the wrong places.
If you would like to really delve into religion and find out more about it I suggest delving into Christianity too. You are not really going to learn about Christianity from atheists or agnostics. They have a very ideological view of it and they tend to twist things to fit their view. The best method of debunking their ideas about the Bible I've ever found is to read the quotes they give in context. Usually you find out they didn't read the line literally just before that one they are quoting! This holds true even for those atheist books - you should always check their quotes because they are hyper selective. They'll tell you the Jews practiced slavery, for example, but they won't tell you that it was a method of paying debts and that you are set free once the debt is paid. (Also, slave-taking the way we understand it was a crime)
If you want to take a closer look at Christianity, the theologian William Lane Craig has a really good free podcast series where he goes through the proofs for God: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts. But if you prefer books, here are a few. I have more as well:
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Mere Christianity- and CS Lewis in general. He used to be an atheist, and he talks about it in depth. The Problem of Pain is a great one.
Letters from a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with His Father's Questions about Christianityis a classic that is formed as a long question and answer between an atheist and his Christian son.
Let There Be Science: Why God loves science, and science needs God Is really good if anyone tells you that Christianity is unscientific. The actual truth is that science flourished under Christianity and there is at least one scientific experiment in the Bible itself.
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And a couple on myths about Christianity:
Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread about Christianity
Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion this one was actually written by a bunch of different experts - some of them atheists.
Thanks for reading, and sorry for the late response. I don't use this account much!
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> Science. Religion has been fighting it for thousands of years.
I'm afraid that to even assume that science and religion existed as distinct concepts or endeavours thousands of years ago is a bit naïve, and this idea that they are eternally opposed is a very simplistic view that reflects the biases of anticlerical 19th Century historians more than the actual facts—it's only really been defended by people with a grudge against religion since a reappraisal of the subject in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s (and especially since the reappraisal by James Moore in The Post-Darwinian Controversies). Here are a few books that could help you develop a richer understanding of the historical relationship between science and religion.
These would probably be illuminating reading as well.
> Here is just another surrender by a guy at the top of the money chain.
No one interested in the subject should be under the impression that what the Pope has said is anything new. Eminent Catholic theologians like John Henry Newman found Darwin's theory of natural selection consistent with Christianity when it was published, and Pope Pius XII very famously affirmed that there was no intrinsic conflict between them in his 1950 encyclical Humani generis. As for the Big Bang, it is downright foolish to characterise the Church as "surrendering" to a theory that was formulated by a Catholic priest in the first place.
Here are a few books which explore the science-religion relationship through history. The first two are more academic books, while the last one is a more popular level book.
God and Nature is a great book on the history of the science-Christianity relationship. It's fairly even-handed - it gives a lot of credit to the Catholic Church for their promotion of education in the Middle Ages, but also criticizes it for its anti-heliocentric stance in the 17th century.
The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages by Edward Grant: talks about medieval (proto-)scientists, and shows that both Christians and Muslims were heavily involved in the origins of science.
Galileo Goes to Jail - each chapter in the book debunks a myth. These include both common Enlightenment myths (e.g. Christianity caused the Dark Ages, the medieval Church thought the earth was flat) and Christian apologist myths (e.g. Intelligent Design is taking seriously by scientists today, Einstein believed in a personal God).