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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

> Basically the church wasn’t as crazy or evil as they’re portrayed now with their persecution of Galileo: he didn’t actually have convincing evidence because the real theory took hundreds of years later to be accepted.

Sorry, what? They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. That's absolutely crazy. "Evil" isn't a word I generally use, but if I had to apply it to something, it could reasonably be applied to this as well.

Whether or not there was adequate evidence for his theories at the time is irrelevant: you don't imprison someone for an astronomy theory.

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While I certainly don’t agree with them (the church), it’s not quite as evil as I had previously thought.

First, he was kept in a palace, and he was permitted to continue publishing until his death. Second, according to the article he had made a lot of enemies in ways that other scientists of the day, who also held heliocentric beliefs, hadn’t done. Lastly, he was pushing science that there wasn’t evidence for and that required new assumptions to make up for the current assumptions they were trying to prove. Like I said, I don’t agree with them but I also have the luxury of hindsight.

One way to look at it from the church’s pov may have been that he was making up a bunch of stuff that wasn't supported by evidence and also contradicted directly their institution, so they might have perceived him as just creating political trouble and instability. People in the past would make up all sorts of lies back then that would later be used as justification for war, especially when these things had some sort theological underpinnings to properly motivate one side against another.

It’s definitely not good but I now see, as how the history was laid out, that Galileo hadn’t really discovered anything himself, wasn’t even correct, didn’t have evidence for things he was putting fourth, and other scientists didn’t even agree with him. It was in fact Kepler who was much closer to a correct model, but he wasn’t a polemical of a writer so he didn’t have as much influence and legend as Galileo.

> It was in fact Kepler who was much closer to a correct model, but he wasn’t a polemical of a writer so he didn’t have as much influence and legend as Galileo.

By the end of the 1600s most people were using Kepler, not necessarily because they thought it actually matched reality (there was no way to verify one way or the other), but rather because the math was easier: no more epicycles!

Copernicus/Galileo still needed them:

> The Copernican model replaced Ptolemy's equant circles with more epicycles. 1,500 years of Ptolemy's model help create a more accurate estimate of the planets motions for Copernicus.[24] This is the main reason that Copernicus' system had even more epicycles than Ptolemy's. The more epicycles proved to have more accurate measurements of how the planets were truly positioned, "although not enough to get excited about".[25]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_heliocentrism#Coper...

> They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with.

No, they put him under house arrest because he wrote a book about for the Pope is a moron for not agreeing with him, after the Pope explicitly asked him to write a factual account of the theories at the time.

Tyrannical? Sure, like any monarchy. But not anti-science.

One of the biggest issues in our history, was to call the middle ages "Dark ages" and what came next "Renaissance". Thomas Aquinas, Boethius were such great writers, for instance, among many others[1], they contested their faith and believes all the time.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/

Only the early middle ages were actually the "dark ages" (roughly 500AD to 1000AD, I think). They are called that only because of the relative lack of written material we have from that time.

Is that your interpretation, or you read it somewhere? I'm not saying that you are wrong, just that you find others interpretations - those that I was mentioning and that concerns me - everywhere.

stuff like, "The Middle Ages are often said to be dark because of a supposed lack of scientific and cultural advancement. During this time, feudalism was the dominant political system" is pretty common, even Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

If you look at the Wikipedia entry you cite, the very first clause of the first sentence is:

"The Dark Ages is a term for the Early Middle Ages"

That is the normal understanding of "dark ages" among historians.

Did you read the whole sentence?

"The Dark Ages is a term for the Early Middle Ages, or occasionally the entire Middle Ages, in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire that characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual and cultural decline."

So the term is highly disputed and what I understood from there, is that no historian TODAY use Dark ages to describe any moment of the Middle Ages. At least not the serious historians.

I'm not Historian, I'm computer scientist and Philosopher. Dark Ages for me is first connected with the Greek Dark Ages, or Digital Dark Ages.

The scientific advancement claim is weird. It was also very slow during ancient Greek/Roman times and technological progress remained a somewhat foreign concept.

Arguably European/Byzantine society was already quite a bit more advanced in many areas by the 1100s. And the dark ages ended with the Carolingian renaissance. If an ancient work copied by the 900s AD or so the chances that it survived until our day is relatively high, if not.. well it’s gone.

> Tyrannical? Sure, like any monarchy. But not anti-science.

Tyranny is inherently anti-scientific. Right and wrong are determined by the validity of your observations and reasoning, not by power.

Absolutely not. They went after him because he insulted and ridiculed the chief authority. This is something that can still land you in court in today's France (and would have lead to much much harsher penalties in contemporaneous France). Insulting the king is also apparently, not allowed in today's UK for instance -- to say nothing of countries like Russia, etc.

So we're not so different than the catholic church of the 17th century.

> Insulting the king is also apparently, not allowed in today's UK for instance

what?

It's called Lèse-majesté (in English, that is). It is still actively persecuted in Spain [0], forcing Belgium to reinterpret its current laws in order not to extradite a rap singer.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9#Spain

I'm neither a legal expert nor a British citizen, so I may be wrong; but pacific protesters holding anti-monarchy banners were arrested by the Metropolitan police before the coronation of the new king, although they were neither violent nor doing any kind of obstruction.

Holding a sign in the street can land you in jail in the UK, in 2023.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/09/tory-mps-con...

https://www.bigissue.com/news/activism/public-order-bill-exp...

Insulting the king is not illegal in the UK. The protesters were arrested under various public-order pretexts.

Exactly, pretexts – more or less explicitly admitted by the authorities in connection with the arrests. What's actually illegal in the UK is pretty obviously protesting against the king or the monarchy in general.

>Sorry, what? They put him under house arrest for having an astronomy theory they disagreed with. That's absolutely crazy.

That's the unfortunately prevalent "TikTok"-level version of the history.

Has little to do with the actual reason, tons of people, including scientific-inclined people of the church had public alternative astronomy theories of their own or discussed existing ones.

> That's the unfortunately prevalent "TikTok"-level version of the history.

It is also almost verbatim what I was taught in an Ohio school in the 90s.

> It is also almost verbatim what I was taught in an Ohio school in the 90s.

"History changes every day." — Frank Herbert

I bet you were also taught in science class that Pluto was a planet. :)

Look I see where you're coming from of course, living in the same culture you do.

But it's always important to remember that people believe their religions. And not just the clergy. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

They didn't imprison him for astronomy theory. Astronomy was largely not separable from theology. Both Galileo and his judges believed this.

> But it's always important to remember that people believe their religions. And not just the clergy. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

Sure, and I wish more people understood that. But that doesn't make it any less crazy or harmful.

And, the next step in understanding this is to recognize that we're not different. It's still crazy and harmful when we do things like this.

> They didn't imprison him for astronomy theory. Astronomy was largely not separable from theology. Both Galileo and his judges believed this.

Sure... and they were wrong.

> Sure... and they were wrong.

They weren’t. Theology was the primary (pseudo)scientific approach used to explain the law of nature at the time.

The primary (pseudo)scientific approach used to explain the law of nature at the time was wrong. And remains wrong, which is why I'm willing to die on this hill--this ideology is still harming us today.

I disagree it laid the foundations for modern scientific thought.

It couldn’t have developed the way it did without theology and the Catholic church..

> you don't imprison someone for an astronomy theory

Every time I spend some time on dating websites it occurs to me that it might be a good idea to imprison people for astrology theories. Given the adequacy of evidence they had at the time, astronomy, astrology, it's just about the same thing, so I can sympathize

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