(Ah, the mullet--gotta love early 90's fashion.)
Breakin' some new ground there, Copernicus.
Well, he was, actually. Copernicus, that is. Centuries ago, according to the Ptolemaic system, Earth would've been the center of that little kid's model of the solar system.
"The big BLUE one is the EARTH!"
That just doesn't have the same ring to it, in terms of orbits or phonetics. :)
And sure, Copernicus was the first to seriously entertain the idea that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way around, but it seems like Galileo caught a lot of the heat for it, especially from the Church. And so I began to wonder: Why is that?
Well, according to The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe, by Dorothy Stimson, A.M., the scriptural arguments against Galileo and his upholding of the Copernican view all revolve around the idea that the earth stood still; for example (quote):
- David in Psalm 89: God has founded the earth and it shall not be moved.
- Joshua bade the sun stand still--which would not be notable were it not already at rest.
Gee, and it's not like he promoted an idea that changed the entire center of the universe as they knew it. You do something like that, and people tend to get a little uneasy. It made me think of the ongoing controversy between religion and science and how people tend to want to make them mutually exclusive. But frankly, you don't have to do that. By expanding our understanding of both science and religion, we often find that ideas of both can be integrated without compromising the integrity of either. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Christian nowadays that doesn't believe the sun is the center of the solar system. Often, it all works out.
"The one in the MIDDLE is the one that they call the SUN!"
"We KNOW!" :)
