Inconvenient Copernican Facts

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Those who for whatever reasons are irrationally opposed to Christian moral principles are wont to distort the historical record to support their bias.  A popular but false and easily refuted claim is that somehow the undisputed wonders of modern technology invalidate all religious beliefs.

 

In fact it was the Judeo-Christian tradition which laid the foundations of modern science by dispelling superstition.  In the very first book of the Bible and in awe inspiring allegory, Genesis declared that the universe was created from nothing “ex nihilo” reflecting the orderly mind of its sole creator.  Nature had thus not always existed.  Nor was it a confused mess of mystical spirits mostly opposing each other but was rather governed by simple laws that were intrinsic to inanimate matter.  This doctrine of “Secondary Causation” was the basis for the first scientific revolution.

 

The natural world should therefore not be blindly worshiped in preference to its super-natural creator.  That the cosmos was rational, consistent, and knowable to the mind of man by careful observation and reason was an obvious and necessary precursor to the development of science.  And in fact no other philosophy or religion before or since is founded on these principles and are even today fundamentally hostile to them.

 

HISTORICAL RECORD

 

Despite the sophistication of Greek culture and thought, a core belief was that the physical world, unlike the perfect and unchangeable heavens, was messy, corruptible, and inscrutable.  Misfortune could befall one due entirely the whims and unpredictable passions of sundry gods, goddesses, and other mystical forces.  Lightning bolts were not a natural occurrence but rather the visible wrath of an easily angered Zeus whose aim was often carelessly applied.

 

It was only the Christians who refuted the ancient Greek philosophy of Aristotle which expressly denied the existence of natural law. Rather the Catholic Church adapted Greek insights in logic, geometry, mathematics and perfect forms to the study of nature and invented science in the bargain.   As instructed in the Bible, the motivation was to be good stewards of the world and also to be able to distinguish between rare natural occurrences and true miracles.

 

ANTI-SCIENCE PHILOSOPHIES

 

In stark contrast, Islam denies the existence of natural law in a doctrine called “occasionalism.”  In this view, matter has no intrinsic properties or independent behavior but is rather recreated micro-second by micro-second according to the mercurial moods and will of Allah.  The classical reasoning was that the flickering flame of a burning cloth was manifest proof of nature’s utter arbitrariness and unpredictability.  Mainstream Islam at its core is opposed to even the hint of rationality in nature, and often violently so.

Buddhism does not so much condemn science as consider it to be an annoying and counter-productive distraction.  Rather the highest goal seems to be a mind numbing acceptance of even great suffering.  Needless to say, this dismissive lack of interest is a severe impediment to scientific advancement.  Nor as Buddhism suggests are fundamental questions concerning the physical universe impossible to answer even in principle.  A case in point are the "Five Questions the Buddha Would Not Answer” but for which modern cosmology now has precise and well demonstrated understandings.  

 

Protestant reformers, who tried to define virtue on their own terms, substituted the Bible for the authority of the Pope and the teaching Magisterium of the Catholic Church.  For the first 1500 years of Christianity, Catholics had always taught the Bible they assembled in the fourth century was inspired but not dictated.  But with no other absolute standard, Protestant fundamentalists transmogrified the moral allegories of the Bible into a scientific treatise by twisting their minds into pretzels.  In tortured reasoning, any scientific discovery even remotely at odds with the strict literal wording of favorite Biblical translations is vociferously condemned.

 

This contrast in philosophies was never more apparent than when the Catholic Church applied itself to the study of the heavens partially in an attempt fix the date for Easter celebrations.  Several Popes requested the help of astronomers to determine the exact length of the year.   As perhaps the first modern cosmologist, Nicholas Copernicus famously responded with his novel concept of an Earth moving around the Sun rather than the opposite and commonly held view.

 

And so today, many who oppose Christian moral principles, and resent the success of its undeniable invention of science, strive to distort the historical record with imaginative suppositions and even outright deceptions.

 

COPERNICUS

 

In order to dispel the many popular misunderstandings about Copernicus, we offer the following well documented facts:

 

1.      Copernicus derived his heliocentric theories based entirely on the philosophical principles of the Catholic Faith.

 

2.      Copernicus was a member of the Catholic clergy and was encouraged by the Church throughout his entire life to publish his heliocentric theories at their expense.

 

3.      Copernicus’s work was popular from the start and was widely distributed throughout European academic circles.

 

4.      Violent opposition to the supposed heresy of a moving Earth came from Protestant Reformers and the Islamic world.

 

5.      Copernicus’s achievement was to publicize a conceptual framework others would improve upon because his mathematical and geometric models were mostly a failure.

6.      There was never a religious requirement for planets moving in perfect circles but rather only a mathematical necessity.

 

7.      All the extant physical evidence militated against Copernicus’s heliocentric theories which also violated Occam’s razor.

 

8.      Galileo was not tried because of his support for Copernicus (and opposition to Kepler), but rather due his public and personal attack on the Pope and the authority of the Church to interpret scripture.

 

9.      Until Kepler’s discoveries some 80 years after Copernicus, no Arabic or European model was either simpler or more accurate than that of Ptolemy from about 100 A.D.

 

10.  There was no physical evidence for a moving Earth, and thus no definitive acceptance, until nearly three centuries after Copernicus’ death.

 

DOCUMENTATION

 

Faith, Reason, and Scientific Observation

 

From the earliest times, the Catholic Church has always demanded that interpretations of religious doctrine, reason, and scientific observation must not and cannot be in conflict.  The Catholic bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine (13 November 354 – 28 August 430), famously echoed this long standing and bedrock Christian principle in the 4^th century [1].

 

St. Robert Bellarmine (October 4, 1542 - September 17, 1621), the Jesuit Cardinal of the Catholic Church who was later the chief jurist in the first trial of Galileo, also supported the Catholic belief in the necessary harmony between faith and scientific observation [2].

 

The Pope who Galileo insulted and demeaned was also of this opinion.

 

Numerous Church teachings since continue to support this principle in an unabated stream.

 

Official Catholic Support

 

There are three degrees of “Holy Orders” in the Roman Catholic Church, Deacon, Priest, and Bishop.   We have ample evidence that Copernicus was a Deacon which required a vow of chasity in return for room and board and a requirement to live within Cathedral grounds.   Also we have suggestive documentation that Copernicus was offered appointments that required him to have been a priest as well, but this is less certain.

 

In any event, Copernicus’s earliest heliocentric theories were done at the express request of the Pope and were eventually published at Church expense.  The Pope and Catholic Cardinals asked Copernicus to publish his greater work to be done at Church expense but he refused fearing scientific ridicule.   Copernicus only agreed to publish because of the insistence of the local Catholic bishop.  The Catholic Church reviewed Copernicus’ final manuscript and granted it official approval or “Imprimatur.”

 

Popular Response

 

Many hundreds of copies and reprints of the original work were made and distributed.

 

Protestant Opposition

 

Martin Luther and John Calvin, two of the earliest Protestant reformers, damned Copernicus as a heretic and violently condemned his theories.   Catholic support for his theories was used by the Protestants to attack the mainstream Christianity in the form of the Pope and the Church.  The Islamic world was even more violently opposed.  Nor does modern cosmology find any real support even today among the ever increasing number fundamentalist Protestant sects.

 

Success and Failure of Copernicus’ Model

 

Copernicus’ model was both slightly less accurate and significantly more complicated than that of Ptolemy [3].   But what it did do was to eliminate the “equant” which could not be reconciled to the mechanical crystalline spheres of Aristotle to which stars were attached to keep them from falling to Earth.

 

Perfect Circles

 

Perfect circles for planetary motion were not a religious requirement but rather a mathematical necessity [4].  In fact perfect circles revolving around their proper centers are the modern understanding of orbital mechanics.  Kepler did not abandon perfect circles in describing planetary orbits as ellipses but rather noted an ellipse was a special case of an epicycle.

 

Scientific Difficulties

 

The heliocentric theory demanded that the stars exhibit a parallax which was not observed.

 

Partially because of parallax measurements, the ancient Greek world had a fair idea of the size of the spherical Earth, the distance to the Moon, and a less accurate but still remarkable estimate of the distance to the Sun.   And in Medieval times comets did show a parallax which demonstrated they were not atmospheric phenomena but rather celestial bodies travelling harmlessly through Aristotle’s crystalline spheres to which the planets were supposedly attached to keep them from falling to earth.

 

The difficulty for the Catholic Church was that the Earth appeared to everyone’s ordinary senses to be as stationary then as it still appears to be today.  Please note that whether the Earth moved or not had no immediate bearing on anyone’s daily life.  Nor was any great moral principle, which was by far the central reason for the Church’s existence, involved.   

 

Rather the issue was on the very existence of God and the authority of the Pope and the Church to interpret scripture.   Scripture had alluded to apparent miracles as when the Sun and the Earth stopped moving relative to each other to help Joshua battle the pagans.  Whether this was allegory attesting to God’s favor or an actual miracle was hardly of great import.  But if the Bible was wrong on one issue how could it be trusted on greater matters, or if God could not work miracles in a universe He created, did He really exist.

 

So the position of the Church was that attacks on its authority were to be opposed.  If the Earth rather than the Sun moved, then relevant Biblical passages, like many other passages, could be accepted as allegory without altering the moral message, which was not subject to the slightest revision.

 

Since a heliocentric world demanded that parallax be observed in stars, Medieval astronomers tried to measure it.   Since no parallax was observed and knowing the accuracy of their naked eye observations, they could calculate a minimum distance to the stars.   And remarkably if the Earth was actually moving, the stars had to be millions of times further away than the planets.  Since stars and planets were about the same brightness that meant stars had to be millions of times brighter as well.  There was no direct evidence for this either and also this fantastic result was a clear violation of Occam’s razor.

 

Galileo Galilei

 

Until Galileo demanded the Catholic Church reinterpret scripture to support his theories, he was rewarded by the Catholic Church for his support of Copernicus whose works were referenced to help create the modern calendar by Pope Gregory.

 

Basically, Galileo, like Copernicus, insisted that the heavens were made of giant crystalline spheres to which the stars were attached to keep them from falling to earth.  This was the view of Aristotle whose work the “Almagest” was the definitive cosmology of the world for nearly two millennia.  Unfortunately, none of the early mechanical constructions of interlocking epicycles could predict the sparse observations of planetary positions made in antiquity.

 

In about 100 A.D. Ptolemy added an “equant” to account for non uniform motion in an extremely simple way greatly improving the accuracy.  Indeed all modern planetariums still use the Ptolemaic system for just these reasons.   Unfortunately, no mechanical system of crystalline spheres could accommodate this.  And what was worse was the implication that planets moved under the action of some mysterious force acting across great distances rather than being attached to any invisible clockwork mechanism.

 

There were also a few other but much less significant issues with Ptolemy’s Earth centered system.  Curiously the epicycles of all the outer planets rotated in exact synchronicity once a year almost as if they went around the Sun rather than the Earth.   And Galileo had personally discovered that Venus exhibited phases like the moon.  This alone meant the Ptolemaic system was wrong and needed revision.

 

The earlier contribution of Copernicus was to create a Sun centered system of giant crystalline spheres which eliminated the “equant” and predicted the phases of Venus.  Unfortunately, this construction was much more complicated and slightly less accurate than that of Ptolemy.  Its big advantage was that it eliminated the “equant” and the suggestion of mysterious forces acting across vast spaces on freely moving planets.  And it also gave a better prediction of the solar year.

 

Of course, modern physics now attributes planetary orbits to the force of gravity as described by Newton and revised by Einstein.  But to his dying day Galileo lambasted the very idea of any invisible and mysterious force, such as that of planetary magnetism as suggested by Kepler, or in any other form as being idiotic.

 

And so Galileo knew of no equations of motion and had no mathematical arguments for a heliocentric system beyond hand-waving suggestions.  Another big problem for an Earth centered system was that to the limits of unaided human vision, no parallax was seen in the stars apparently disproving any motion of the Earth.   On the other hand, heavenly parallax was observed for the sun the moon and comets giving a crude estimate of the scale of the solar system.  This meant that for the Sun centered system to be correct, the stars, which were roughly the same brightness as the planets, had to be millions of times further away and millions of times intrinsically brighter.

 

The model of Copernicus was thus a clear violation of Occam’s razor which stated that if two theories give equal results, the simpler one has fewer ways to be wrong and should be preferred.  Of course this is not a logical or scientific necessity but rather only a practical suggestion and in hindsight, is sometimes wrong.

 

Given this lack of physical evidence for a moving Earth and its manifestly outrageous violation of ordinary sensibilities, Pope Urban VIII suggested that an all-powerful God, the creator of the Universe, could easily have imbued natural objects with qualities of attraction unconstrained by mechanical models.  And in hindsight, the Pope actually got the better of all the hand waving arguments. 

 

In any event, they were at a stalemate.  Galileo could not prove the Earth’s motion but the Church could not disprove it either.   The Church admitted as much and held firmly to the view that religious interpretation and physical observation could not be in conflict.  But Galileo was made of sterner stuff and refused to admit the shortcomings of his arguments.   Eventually he claimed he had evidence for a moving earth and tides due to the inertia of the oceans but then failed to produce it.

 

But Galileo was emboldened by the Pope personally allowing him to publish a description of the Copernican model if he agreed to add a phrase about God’s ability to create mysterious forces like gravity noting that God who created the universe could also make even golden birds with mercury for blood fly.   So Galileo published his book entitled a “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” after getting official Church approval, or the Imprimatur, but significantly not in Rome as the Pope had requested.

 

In this work, Galileo personally attacked his previous friend, mentor, and Copernican sympathizer, Pope Urban VIII in print and in the common vernacular.  Specifically he attacked the Pope’s arguments for an all-powerful Creator as being not only wrong but outright stupid.  He caricatured the Pope as the dolt Simplicio, or “simpleton”, in his book “Dialogue Concerning Two World Systems” stating

 

The Simpleton: "Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle."  And then he allowed all the other characters to laugh at this sentiment as idiotic.

 

In doing so, Galileo apparently denied that God could work miracles, that thus God was perhaps not required and may not even exist at all, and especially that the Pope and the Church lacked the authority to interpret not just Biblical allegory, which vaguely suggested a stationary earth albeit without moral consequence, and so lacked moral authority as well.   And Galileo had gone further yet, demanding the Church support his ideas with the promulgation of new dogma since the Church had no official heavenly model.  Considering the spotty accuracy of all of Galileo’s theories, the Church fortuitously declined.

 

Finally Galileo was convicted of the least serious and most trivial crime of “suspicion of heresy”.  This was a venial rather than a mortal sin.  He continued to live in luxury in his villa with funds supplied by the Church.  The entire exercise was more to embarrass than to punish.

 

Johannes Kepler

 

A century after Copernicus, Kepler finally created the first improvement on planetary motion since Ptolemy in 100 A.D.

 

Final Vindication

 

Physical measurements of the earth and heavens to detect motion only happened in the 1800’s.  One can’t tell if the train or the station is moving.  Either description of linear motion fits the laws of physics but not so for accelerated motion. We can feel and measure acceleration and especially in circular motion with a centrifugal force.

 

REFERENCES

1.      “Ancient Christian Writers” by J. H. Taylor, Newman Press, Volume 41, (1982) translated Saint Augustine’s “The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad Litteram Libri Duodecim)“.

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [1 Timothy 1.7].”

2.      In 1615, one year before the trial of Galileo began, St. Bellarmine wrote to Paolo Foscarini (ca. 1565-1616), who was a Catholic Carmelite priest and a proponent of Copernicanism that

 

“If there were any real proof that the sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third heaven [i.e. that the Earth is the third planet in orbit about the sun], and the Sun does not go around the Earth, but the Earth around the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which [i.e. in a strictly literal instead of metaphorical sense] appear to state the contrary, and rather admit that we did not rightly understand them, than to declare an opinion to be false which is [i.e. later] proved to be true. 

 

But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown me.  Nor is it the same to demonstrate that by assuming the sun to be at the center and the earth in heaven one can save the appearances [e.g., explain certain calculations, etc.], and to demonstrate that in truth the sun is at the center and the earth in heaven; for I believe the first demonstration may be available, but I have very great doubts about the second, and in case of doubt one must not abandon the Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Holy Fathers.”

 

3.      “The Exact Sciences in Antiquity” by O. Neugebauer, Second Edition, Dover Publications, Inc. New York, NY (2019), pages 204-205.

 

“The popular belief that Copernicus’s heliocentric system constitutes a significant simplification of the Ptolemaic is obviously wrong.  The choice of a reference system has no effect whatever on the structure of the model, and the Copernican models themselves require about twice as many circles as the Ptolemaic models and are far less elegant and adaptable.”

 

4.      Ibid., page 153.

 

“…all the satellites of the sun – and our own satellite as well – behave with great modesty.  Their orbits can be closely approximated by circles such that the simplest possible model of a circular motion with constant speed leads immediately to very reasonable results for a description of the solar and lunar phenomena.  On the other hand the deviations from the trivial circular orbits are just great enough to be observed and to challenge an explanation, but small enough such that again comparatively simple modifications of the trivial solution give satisfactory results.”

 

 

 

Dogma…