Reply #29: After all the times as we have gone around heliocentrism in this forum, I would expect [View All]

[struggle4progress]

people to know the history better by now

Copernicus himself was a churchman, and the Church freely allowed publication of the Copernicus book for about seventy years before hardliners at the time of the Reformation put the book on the prohibited index: the actual complaint against the book was rather limited, involving only a few sentences in the book; if the text was very slightly modified, it again freely circulated. The Church objections may seem ridiculous to us today: the Church did not object to astronomers using the heliocentric hypothesis as a calculationally useful approach to data but rather objected to the claim that heliocentrism was absolutely true. The changes demanded for the Copernicus book did not involve mathematics or observations but simply sought to maintain Church power to define what is true. Thus, the Church's ultimate stance could not actually affect the practice of science but instead would only restrict the range of allowed abstract philosophical claims. The approach was stupid and heavy-handed -- but (except for a very brief period) it would not have a chilling effect on science