In astronomical thought as in many another field, science and reason have had a hard struggle in men's minds to defeat tradition and the weight of verbal inspiration. Within the Roman Catholic Church opposition to this doctrine was officially weakened in 1757, but not completely ended till the publication of the Index in 1835—the first edition since the decrees of 1616 and 1619 which did not contain the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Foscarini, à Stunica and Kepler. Since then, Roman Catholic writers have been particularly active in defending and explaining the positions of the Church in these matters. They have not agreed among themselves as to whether the infallibility of the Church had been involved in these condemnations, nor as to the reasons for them. As one writer has summarized these diverse positions,[1] they first claimed that Galileo was condemned not for upholding a heresy, but for attempting to reconcile these ideas with the Scriptures,—though in fact he was sentenced specifically for heresy. In their next defense they declared Galileo was not condemned for heresy, but for contumacy and want of respect to the Pope.[2] This statement proving untenable, others held that it was the result of a persecution developing out of a quarrel between Aristotelian professors and those professors who favored experiment,—a still worse argument for the Church itself. Then some claimed that the condemnation was merely provisional,—a position hardly warranted by the wording of the decrees themselves and flatly contradicted by Father Riccioli, the spokesman of the Jesuit authorities.[3] More recently, Roman Catholics have held that Galileo was no more
Page:The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe.djvu/108
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it is convinced that the particular view is true. But neither view has, as far as we can know, more than probable truth, hence of itself the intellect can only give in its partial adherence to one of these views, it must always be precluded from absolute assent by the possibility that the other may be right. The fact that men hold more tenaciously to one of these than the arguments warrant can only be due to some extrinsic consideration, e.g., that it is absurd not to hold to what a vast majority of men hold."
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