Falwell's magazine editors lifted the 'Tinky-Winky is gay' idea directly from a gay magazine. Somehow they have been too inept to give credit where it's due and have ended up on the receiving end of that farce.
Galileo himself was a practicing Catholic who saw no problem with his own work. His Vatican persecutors got their cosmological view directly from... Plato, who taught that the Earth had to be the center of everything. It is of minor interest that the biblical text calls the number of the stars as innumerable as the grains of sand, while up until recent times educated scientific opinion was that the stars numbered, oh, into the thousands.
I don't know of any biblical text that insists that the Earth is the center of the universe. However, it can be read to describe a creatio ex nihilo eerily like the Big Bang, and this was all too evident to British mathmetician Fred Hoyle, who rejected Einstein's cosmology on the basis that it gave encouragement to the church, which he was adamantly opposed to.
The Jesuits are no slouches. Stanley Jaki, whom I referred to, is a Catholic monk of I forget what order. Has PhDs in physics and philosophy. His area of expertise is the history of science, and unlike many historians he can do the math. A brilliant man. Teilhard de Chardin is an idiot.
There may be a few ringers in my list of scientists. I intended Planck rather than Heisenberg. The Bacons are questionable. I should have included Gregor Mendel, Ockham, Huygens, Buridan, Oeresimus. |
