Y Safle

“We have no interest in oppressing other people. We are not moved by hatred against any other nation. We bear no grudge. I know how grave a thing war is. I wanted to spare our people such an evil. It is not so much the country; it is rather its leader. He has led a reign of terror. He has hurled countless people into the profoundest misery. Through his continuous terrorism, he has succeeded in reducing millions of his people to silence. The maintenance of a tremendous military arsenal can only be regarded as a focus of danger. We have displayed a truly unexampled patience, but I am no longer willing to remain inactive while this madman ill-treats millions of human beings.”

In hindsight we may argue that some of these threats regarding the military arsenal were over-estimated. But who can deny that the case for war was adequately made in this speach?

I will leave it as an exercise for someone to work out which great world leader said it, but in the same vein, he also said the following:

“By the most brutal methods of terrorism, a regime sought to maintain an existence that was condemned by the overwhelming majority of its people…I have tried to persuade the responsible authorities that it is impossible for a great nation, because it is unworthy of it, to stand by and watch millions belonging to a great, an ancient civilized people be denied rights by their government

There are a number of sites around which retell a piece of naval history. For instance this one on myspace:

It was necessary to keep a good supply of cannonballs near the cannon on war ships. But how to prevent them from rolling about the deck was the problem. The best storage method devised was to stack them as a square based pyramid, with one ball on top, resting on four, resting on nine, which rested on sixteen. Thus, a supply of 30 cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the cannon.

There was only one problem — how to prevent the bottom layer from sliding/rolling from under the others. The solution was a metal plate with 16 round indentations, called a Monkey. But if this plate was made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it.

The solution to the rusting problem was to make Brass Monkeys. Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and much faster than iron when chilled. Consequently, when the temperature dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the iron cannon balls would come right off the monkey.

Thus, it was quite literally, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. And all this time, you thought that was a vulgar expression, didn’t you?

Similar stories can be found at Life with Larry and The Gray Monk. The latter even purports to have a picture of one of these.

The problem is, no such ships fittings ever existed.

The point I want to make is that we cannot always rely on the popular explanations, just because someone we deem to be an authority has proffered the information, and when we hold something to be true, it is often necessary to undergo rather more research than to simply ask a historian friend (or local pastor, or church website or whatever), to verify that this thing is actually true.

You see, this explanation is wrong on several points:

1. Stacks of cannon balls were held in garlands, not monkeys

2. These stacks were made from wood, attached to the edge of the ship. The balls were not piled in stacks, but each seated in the garland in such a way that they would not come loose when the ship was pitching and yawing at sea.

3. The thermal coefficient of expansion is such that, taking some reasonable values for the size of the brass plate and the size of the cannon balls, and allowing that they would not be stacked so precariously that they would fall at the slightest touch, let alone the movement of a ship’s deck, it has been calculated that the temperature would need to dip to minus several thousand degrees celsius to cause the stack to collapse (and we don’t really need to consider anything past absolute zero, obviously). A few degrees Celsius would not have a noticeable effect on the stack - it may not even be measurable.

4. There are no sources that verify the story. It seems to be a recent invention.

Another, slightly more plausible story is that the phrase referred to freezing a ball on a brass monkey. In this version, brass monkeys are lifting gear on ships used to raise cannon balls to the gun deck in the place of powder monkeys (small and agile boys who would fetch the gunpowder from the ship’s magazine in times of battle). The argument then is that the lifting gear (made from brass, so it did not rust) would get covered in saline sea water. In times of extreme cold, the water would freeze. A cannon ball would then be placed on the lifting gear, and because of its weight, the pressure would briefly melt the ice - but being so cold, the ice would re-melt by the time the ball was lifted to the gun deck. Thus the weather was cold enough to freeze the ball onto the brass monkey.

Sounds better, but it is also implausible, because:

1. I cannot find any clear evidence that such lifting equipment existed and was called a brass monkey.

2. Lifting gear for ships certainly did (and does exist), but why for cannonballs? Powder monkeys fetched gun powder from the magazine, hidden deep in the ships hull, behind a dampenned “fearnought screen”, because the worst thing that could happen in a sea battle would be to get so much as a spark in the magazine. Thus powder monkeys fetched powder on a just in time basis for safety. Cannon balls, on the other hand, were kept near the guns. Being large lumps of iron, there was no danger these would explode! Thus no lifting equipment required.

3. There are no sources that back up this explanation either.

The only source I have ever found was a secondary source that suggested a monkey was a type of cannon. [The concise OED cites “Art, Rendition Edinburgh Castle”, published 1650 which refers to “28 short brass munkeys, alias dogs”. This would put the term in the civil war, but the cannon, and not the ball or the stack is meant. I don’t have any access to the original source material].

Thus all I am really certain of, regarding this phrase, is my ignorance.

But that is the point: We often believe things on trust. These blog writers have trusted some information they have been given about this term. I likewise have believed a similar explanation in the past.

But there comes a time, when a subject is important enough to us, that we must move forwards - verify what we know, and treat critically that which we believe.

And this is true in all walks of life. For instance, in our churches, we can go so far by listening to the teachings of our church leaders, but how do we know that the teaching is true? How do we know that a certain doctrine is held by us to be correct, because it really is true, rather than simply because we have been told it is true? (Yes, we can look at scripture - but my point is : how do we know that the interpretation we have accepted of that scripture is true)

Often we need to look past what we are told by people we trust, and actually evaluate information as well as we are able from the primary sources, or (if that is impossible) from secondary sources who do not have a bias towards our own viewpoint.

Now this last matter is crucial, for if I read the works of a certain respected preacher (Billy Graham perhaps), and I say, “yes, he is quite correct on the need for evangelism” and such like, but then “he is in error on the Holy Spirit”, then all I am saying is that I like Billy Graham’s ideas when they agree with mine.

But if I read all he says on the Holy Spirit, and say “is his view consistent?” then I am setting prejudgement aside, and exploring the issue for myself.

We can do this with Brass Monkey’s, and we can do it with Christian Doctrine. We can do it with current affairs and politics too.

When we do it well, I think we move closer to an appreciation of truth.

I received a long comment in this blog this week that included something I see from time to time by those who want to believe that climate change is not man made:

1300AD — when exploring vikings named ‘Greenland’ Greenland, they did so for a reason: they cultivated the land for two centuries — before they couldn’t grow any more (it wasn’t human greenhouse gas that interrupted their cultivation LOL

Firstly, let’s get the facts straight. The Vikings colonised Greenland towards the end of the 10th centure (c. 982). They remained there for over 400 years, but their settlements were abandoned by the 15th century (after c. 1430 AD, but it is unclear exactly when the colony was abandoned).

Now the argument that is made is that the name of the country - “Greenland” and the fact that people lived there implies that at this time (during the so called “medieval warm period”) the global temperature must have been much warmer than it is now.

But this argument is made in ignorance of a few key facts. Firstly, people live in much the same locations of Greenland now as the two Viking settlements. These areas are indeed very green even today. Look at this google map of the area of the Western settlement. The eastern settlement area is here. Notice the strong green colour in all the valleys! Whilst travel to the settlements and trade with them would have become very hard in the Little Ice Age, it is not as if they were overwhelmed by the Greenland ice sheet!

Indeed the average temperature in Greenland now is higher than it would have been in the medieval warm period[1].

But there are other misconceptions in this argument. Greenland was settled by Erik the Red, who was expelled from Iceland. It is a very likely theory that the naming of the land as “Greenland” was a bit of 10th century marketing hype to encourage others to settle there.

Another point is that “grn” is an indo-european word meaning something akin to a nugget, and at the root of hundreds of words in a multiplicity of languages. Words including “ground”, “corn”, “grain” and so on. Some early maps actually refer to Greenland as Groundland (the Old Norse equivalent at least), and it may be that the country was not named for the colour green at all.

Finally, the medieval warm period was primarily a Northern European phenomenon, and not one found worldwide.

So an argument made on the existence of the Viking settlement, and the naming of the country as Greenland, is a very tenuous argument against global warming.

Notes

1. Crowley TJ, Lowery TS (2000) How Warm Was the Medieval Warm Period? AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment: Vol. 29, No. 1 pp. 51–54

Five people found my blog yesterday because they were looking for information on the Rathbone plot. Unfortunately all they found was my article about bonfire night, which is a pity, because Google turns up virtually nothing on this long forgotten act of treason.

So for anyone else visiting here, looking for details of this plot, here is what I know:

The Rathbone Plot took place in early 1666, coming to trial in April of that year. The key conspirator was Colonel John Rathbone. He and a group of eight former parliamentarians were arrested, tried and executed for conspiring to overthrow the King and Parliament and restore the Commonwealth.

The plan had apparently involved setting fire to London on September 3rd. The London Gazette reported this and speculated that the conspirators had consulted William Lilly’s almanac and horoscopes that predicted the fall of the king in that year. I suspect that the speculation may have been designed to discredit the conspirators, as the date also commemorated two of Cromwell’s victories at Dunbar and Worcester, as well as his death. It seems unlikely that puritan parliamantarians would have consulted with horoscopes.

For some background information, the 17th century was a turbulant time, particularly in English history. The English civil war saw the overthrow and regicide of king Charles I, who had been emulating the French absolutism, and advocating the doctrine of the divine right of kings. He was defeated by the puritan Oliver Cromwell, who was installed as Lord Protector in 1653.

Cromwell died on September 3rd 1658, and left a political vacuum. Whilst his son, Richard, was installed as Lord protector, there was a growing movement for a restoration, and in 1660 Charles II was restored to the English throne. Later in the century, in 1688, the glorious revolution would depose James II and lead to a second interregnum, in which the transfer of absolute power from monarchy to parliament in England was sealed.

However, the Rathbone plot was in 1666, and was an attempt to undo the restoration. It is principally of interest because of the coincidental starting of the Great Fire of London on 2nd September 1666. The fact that the fire started so close to the chosen date of the Rathbone plot is curious.

Whilst the fire is only known to have killed 6 people, it destroyed most of London. This tragedy eventually turned out to be a good thing, because Sir Christopher Wren was able to impose his magnificent artistic vision on the city, giving us the new St Paul’s, the London monument and much more. The redesigned city is also sometimes credited with imporoved sanitation that led to the great plague of the year before being the last plague to affect London.

Most work calendars these days start a week on Monday, and shuffle Staurday and Sunday to the weekend. As pragmatic solution as this may be, I find it annoying in that it does not recognise that the first day of any week is Sunday.

The UK moved to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, which involved changes to the current day of the month, but the week days were left unaffected. Thursday, September 14th followed Wednesday, September 2nd in 1752.

It is therefore probably best to consider the week days as divorced from the calendar itself. They do not fit neatly into a 365.24 day year. They are a more granular measure of the passing of time, but not truly calendar markers.

So the question is, which day of the week comes first?

Businesses group Saturday and Sunday together on a calendar for convenience, because then you can group working week and weekend quite easily in two locations on a calendar, but they are strictly speaking incorrect to do so.

You see, the seven day week is of Persian/Chaldean and Judeo/Christian origin. In all these cultures, a seven day week was observed, and the week days were named for the seven visible heavenly bodies, starting with the most dominant: the Sun.

Thus we have (in English and Welsh, but other languages show the same pattern):

The day of the Sun (Dydd Sul - Sunday) The day of the Moon (Dydd Llun - Monday) The day of Mars (Dydd Mawrth) (Tuesday is named for the Norse God) The day of Mercury (Dydd Mercher) (Wodan is Norse) The day of Jupiter (Dydd Iau) (Thor is Norse) The day of Venus (Dydd Gwener) (Frida is Norse) The day of Saturn (Dydd Sadwrn - Saturday)

In the Biblical account of creation, it can be shown that each stanza of the creation hymn takes up the astrological significance of the gods associated with the days, and shows that the God who is one God created the realms considered to be the domains of these other gods. Thus the creation hymn can be seen as being in direct opposition to Chaldean (and later Babylonian) belief. The message of the hymn is that the almighty God is ruler high above all others.

In the first century AD, the seven day week was introduced in Rome, under the influence of Persian astrologers. When Rome became Christian, the Christian view of the seven days was conflated with the Persian influence, but both had the same common root.

Thus the week began on the day of the Sun, and ended on the day of Saturn (the day God rested). Saturday was the true week end.

However, the Resurrection took place on a Sunday morning, and in honour of this fact, the “Lord’s day” was taken to be Sunday. Christians thus began the practise of meeting together to worship on the Lord’s day - the first day of the week.

Thus the weekend as we now have it conflates the Jewish Sabbath (or a day off at the end of the week) with the Christian Lord’s day (or a day off at the start of the week).

Secularists want to regularise the whole thing and call both days the week end, but they might as well try and rename Monday to something less pagan, or choose a five day week instead of seven! The fact of the matter is that weeks start on Sunday - they always have. It is only the working week that starts on Monday.

However, if you want to arrange your calendar to start on the first day of the working week, then feel free to do so. As I have said - weeks do not strictly fit into the calendar in any case.

Have you ever wondered where we get the term “freelancer”?

In the fifteenth century, warfare was changing. The arrival of gunpowder, and especially of cannon, had changed everything. The fall of the great city of Constantinople in 1453 - the final destruction of the Roman empire - served as a demonstration of how cannon could achieve what no army had ever managed - to breach Constantine’s massive fortifications.

Before this final siege, defenders had always held the advantage in a siege situation. Attacking armies were in the field, exposed to counter attack and at the end of long supply trains. But now with cannon the tables were turning. It was now possible to breach the mightiest of defensive walls.

European warfare had also, over the centuries, concentrated on cavalry. Knights, who could ride and fight atop horses, were drawn from the aristocracy, and were a warrior elite that had held sway in a time when there was no money for standing armies. Peasants could be archers, and these were important, but with the return of sufficient currency in europe to pay for them, another important force arose - infantry.

Swiss infantry quickly became some of the most sought after - mercenary armies of infantry who would fight for anyone with sufficient silver to pay their wages, and throughout Europe wars were now won or lost by infantry, and not cavalry.

The reason for this was easy to see. These infantrymen, with their long pikes and spears, if they stood their ground, were nearly impregnable. No cavalry could force their horses to throw themselves on those pikes, and so the cavalry charge was blunted. The independent infantry - the free lancers - were what every army needed.

But there was an important proviso here. The infantry had to stand together. If they lost their nerve - even just a few of them - and broke ranks, then the formation would collapse, the defense would be lost, and the infantrymen could be picked off one by one on the field of battle.

Every free lancer knew what it was to entrust his life to his comrades. The same was true in the defeat of the highlander charge at the battle of Culloden. The charge was defeated because each rifle man was tought to put his bayonet not in the man running at him, but the man immediately next to him. Thus the bayonet could bypass the highlander’s shield. But every infantry man on the field had to entrust his life to his neighbour. This took courage, but also an exemplary level of trust.

So how much do we trust our peers? More to the point, how much can they trust us? Could we be faithful in such situations?

Peter said he would stand by Jesus, but when the soldiers came, he departed and denied his Lord. But never again. Peter later stood firm in his testimony and he died for his trust in the Lord who would save him. Indeed, nearly all the disciples of Christ were eventually martyred for their faith in him. That was trust.

John Wesley was approached by the customs and revenue officer, raising taxes. He was asked what silver he had that he might be assessed for taxation. As a clergyman, it was expected he had reasonable wealth. Wesley replied that he had a teaspoon.

Like so many other Christians, Wesley trusted in God to provide for his needs, and saw no profit in hoarding wealth. He knew where true wealth lay, and did not need the crutch of materialism. That too was trust.

History is replete with examples of people who trusted God to meet their needs, because they understood what trust was.

When we speak of fighting the good fight, do we have any vision of what it would be like to be a free lancer, having the tide of battle wash over us, trusting in those around us to stand firm with us?

On MInTheGap’s blog there is an article on the effects of music in the church which has generated quite a few comments. One quote from that page asks:

Music is powerful. How do lyrics with a carnal beat nourish a young believer’s renewed spirit?

The writer is in good company. A famous and successful minister and evangelist wrote of the contemprary music that is plaguing our churches and destroying worship, with these words:

There are several reasons for opposing [this music]. One, it’s too new. Two, it’s often worldly, even blasphemous. The new Christian music is not as pleasant as the more established style because there are so many new songs, you can’t learn them all. It also puts too much emphasis on instrumental music rather than on Godly lyrics. This new music creates disturbances, making people act indecently and disorderly.

The only thing is, this was not written by Billy Graham, or Bill Hybels, nor John Stott, Jim Packer nor any other of our modern day evangelists or Christian leaders.

No, this was written by William Romaine, an Anglican Calvinist. He wrote this in 1775 in repsonse to the worldly hymns of Isaac Watts.

You see Watts was bored by the dry and lifeless psalms singing of the English churches. One day he complained bitterly of this to his dissenting minister father. After much discussion, his father challenged Isaac to do better, and he promptly did so - singing the new hymn that very night.

Watts used a popular musical style, based on the sea shanties he heard being sung by sailors as they worked. This was the popular music of the day, and it took the church by storm.

And storm is an apt description, because the storm split churches (including the congregation that had been John Bunyan’s). Pastors were dismissed over these new hymns, and countless lines of criticism were written. But Watts persisted, and even now a good proportion of the hymns in any hymnal are those written by Watts.

Watts did not disdain Christian lyrics. He reworked psalms so that they scanned better and could be set to modern music, but he maintained their content. The hymns he wrote reveal his deep piety and breathless devotion to the immense and glorious creation.

But nevertheless he was attacked (by good and pious men), who believed that we should still be chanting the aptly named “Te deum”, because of some misguided opinions about good order and decency in a church service.

Yesterday I wrote a post about whether Christianity is the enemy of science, and spoke about Copernicus. I mentioned in that post that Galileo is another issue, and today want to address that issue. However, I could do no better myself than to post a copy of James Kiefer’s excellent article (written in the early 1990s) on the Crime of Galileo.

This article is also available (in a plain text format) in the soc.religion.christian archives.

James wrote:

Since the subject of Galileo has come up, I should like to try to clear up some misunderstandings.

My chief reference here is THE CRIME OF GALILEO, by Giorgio Santillana, Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, available in paperback from Midway Reprint Service, University of Chicago Press, for 14 dollars. Since I have lost my own copy in the usual way (lent it to someone who did not return it), I write from memory.

In Galileo’s day, almost every government required a permit to print a book, and the Papal States (central Italy, ruled directly by the Pope as temporal sovereign) were no exception. When Galileo finished his book, A DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE TWO GREAT WORLD SYSTEMS (meaning the earth-centered system of Ptolemy and the sun-centered system of Copernicus) he applied directly to Pope Urban VIII, with whom he was personally acquainted, for the necessary permit. The Pope granted the permission, on condition that the book give a balanced presentation, and in particular that it contain his own favorite argument against Copernicus, one that he had invented himself and was particularly proud of. Galileo agreed and got the permit. When the book came out, the Pope was chagrined to find that his argument was indeed presented, but not as he had expected. The book was written in the form of a conversation among friends, and the Pope’s argument had been put into the mouth of a character called Simplicio (=the idiot). Moreover, the other speakers then covered the argument with ridicule.

The Pope responded (or so it appears) by giving the Inquisition orders to get Galileo for something or other. He was accordingly brought up on charges, but could properly plead that he had sought and obtained a permit for the book. The prosecution replied that about sixteen years earlier he had received a private admonition from Cardinal Bellarmine that his views were of questionable orthodoxy, and that if the Pope had known of this, he would have been more cautious about giving the permit, and therefore Galileo’s failure to mention the Cardinal’s admonition amounted to obtaining a permit by fraud, which invalidated the permit, etc. Galileo said that he could not remember receiving any such admonition, but under pressure admitted that he could not swear he had not.

The upshot was that Galileo signed his famous “recantation” and was condemned to life imprisonment. This was a blatant injustice, but not as harsh as it sounds. The prison was one of the Pope’s summer palaces, which was turned over to him for life, and he continued to conduct experiments, to receive visitors without restriction, and to publish on any subject except astronomy. He here developed and perfected his works on terrestial physics, works which undermined the theoretical basis of Ptolemaic astronomy.

The wording of the “recantation” is of some interest. The key sentence reads pretty much as follows:

I, the undersigned, Galileo Galilei, renounce and condemn the belief that the sun is at the center of the world, and that the earth rotates on its axis, and also has a daily motion.

Now the word “world” (=mundus) is ambiguous. It can refer to the universe, or to the earth. Similarly, the daily motion of the earth, according to Copernicus, is precisely its rotation once a day on its axis. It is therefore false (according to Copernicus) to say that the earth has two motions, one rotation and the other a daily motion. It is also false to say that the sun is at the center of the earth. Thus Galileo should have had no difficulty about signing the document.

Is there any evidence that this is not just ingenious twisting of words? Four considerations come to mind.

(1) Torricelli, Galileo’s friend and pupil, best known as the inventor of the barometer, when he heard that Galileo had repudiated Copernicanism under oath, said, “Alas, he is damned. He has sworn falsely.” But when he saw the text of the recantation, he said, “Oh joy, he is not damned.”

(2) When the tribunal presented Galileo with their draft of a recantation, he flatly refused to sign it. He then negotiated a revised text, which he did sign.

(3) Both Galileo and the members of the tribunal were men who chose their words carefully, and who knew the art, essential in politics whether ecclesiastical or otherwise, of wording a document to as to convey the impression of saying more, or less, than is actually said.

(4) At least some of the tribunal members (Santillana argues a majority of them) were themselves of the Copernican persuasion, and would be sympathetic to a resolution of the matter that gave the Pope his personal revenge but without forcing Galileo to repudiate what he and they believed to be the truth.

The Galileo episode has often been cited as evidence that Science and Religion (some prefer to say, Science and Theology) are by their very nature irreconcilable enemies. In fact, a close look at the Galileo episode seems to me to yield two morals both quite different from this.

One moral, of course, is that if you need a permit from a board in order to do something, whether publish a book or have your property rezoned, it is unwise to pull the nose of the chairman of the board in public.

Another moral is that if you establish a government committee to safeguard public morals, the committee members will assume as self-evident that nothing could be more subversive of public morals, and therefore of the very foundations of society, than a deed that strikes at the guardians of morality by making the members of said committee look personally ridiculous.

Example: The Watergate scandal began because the press was obtaining confidential reports out of the Nixon Administration, and high officials were determined to learn who was responsible. In the process of trying to learn, they cut corners. One might have expected the investigating committee to be keenly aware that there are things more important than stopping leaks to the press. However, some stories appeared in the press about the committee, including, for example, a statement by one committee member that another member was apparently incapable of answering any question, including, “What time is it?” without first frowning and staring at the ceiling for several seconds. (A perfectly correct observation, by the way, which is precisely why it caused such a commotion.) The committee responded by taking off a full week from the job of saving the country to conduct a full-time investigation into the question of who had been betraying his sacred trust by reporting confidential information to the press, information that, by making the committee, the guardians of the Constitution, look silly, amounted to an attack on the Constitution itself. (My source here is an article in the WASHINGTON MONTHLY at the time.)

The over-all theological atmosphere of Galileo’s time and just before was far from a rigid commitment to the idea of a fixed earth. Nicolas of Cusa, who died a century before Galileo was born, wrote, “When we say that the earth does not move, we mean simply this, that the earth is the point from which man makes his observations of celestial phenomena.” A modern physicist discussing relativity theory could not improve on that. During Galileo’s lifetime, the Inquisition was officially asked whether someone who revealed in the confessional that he held the Copernican view and was not about to give it up should be denied absolution as an impenitent heretic. The official answer was “no”. I conclude that the punishment of Galileo was based, not on any conflict between his view and Church doctrine, but on the Pope’s regrettable but unsurprising conviction that anyone who publicly makes a laughing-stock of the Pope is striking at the foundations of all that is good and decent and must not be permitted to get away with it. Urban VIII is by no means the only public figure to reason like this. I feel the urge to give several more examples, but this post is already too long.

James Kiefer

Time and again I am confronted with arguments such as this one:

Christianity is stupid in the way that most all religions are stupid. It is an enemy to science–and by science, I mean a broad science; not just those who wear lab coats, but those who question and test the natural world, in an effort to answer the venerable questions I’d described earlier with something better than peyote-fueled guesses. Science has eliminated polio, refrigerated chicken and taken mankind to the moon. Science seems to work well, and it’s a bad enemy to have. Yet, Christianity persists on being on the wrong side of scientific debate, not having learned its Flat Earth or Geocentric lessons.

http://donathos.livejournal.com/33308.html

Not only are such arguments highly selective, they are also just plain wrong. The writer makes two assertions about Christianity’s enmity with science. He asserts that Christianity opposed the round earth thesis, and that it opposed the Copernican view that no longer argued for a geocentric universe.

The Flat Earth

In my article on Christopher Columbus, I deal with the fact that the flat earth was never really under dispute in the Christian Church. That not only was the world known to be a sphere, but that there were some pretty good estimates, predating Christ, as to the circumference of the world.

Some might argue that this knowledge was known amongst a small elite, but unknown to everyone else, but it is plain as day in the writings of Christians through the ages.

Dante, writing in the early 1300’s, refers to the earth as a sphere, as did Thomas Aquinas in the opening section of the Summa Theologica. The venerable Bede makes the same point in the early 8th century, and so does Irenaeus in the second century.

Christianity has just never doubted this point, and the reason that atheists such as the writer of the piece above continue to assert this as fact is simply because they have been duped by the atheists Letronne and Irving. So whilst the flat earth argument does not say anything about Christianity and science, it does tell us that atheists (a few of them at least) are the enemies of history and truth.

The Geocentric Model

The writer’s second piece of evidence is the geocentric model. But Galileo aside (and Galileo needs a seperate post), this issue was not an issue of Christian enmity with science. We know that Nicolas Copernicus proposed that the Earth must revolve around the sun, to deal with anomalous results which indicated that the reverse was not true. What is less well known is that Copernicus was a canon of Frauenberg Cathedral, with interests in theology. He was trained in medicine and ran a free clinic for the poor. He also knew a thing or two about economics.

So here was a Christian who proposed a radical new view of the universe. He suggested that the world revolves around the sun. Did the rest of the Church oppose him?

By no means. Indeed his was not actually a completely novel idea. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the papal legate to Germany, and himself a careful scientist who demonstrated that plants grow by taking something from the air rather than the soil, had argued that “When we say that the earth does not move, we mean simply that the earth is the point with reference to which man makes his observations of celestial phenomena.”

But Copernicus took astronomical measurements and use the heliocentric model to simplify and remove anomalies that were being observed. He wrote on the subject in his 1530 Commentariolus.

This was an age when the pope had to approve books for publication in the Catholic world. By today’s standards, we see such approval as unacceptable - freedom of speech and inquiry is so much a part of our culture that we know at once such approvals were wrong (but not so different from, say, Chinese attempts to censor what can be accessed on the Internet in that country).

But we nevertheless note that Copernicus was given papal approval for his Commentariolus. The Church did not oppose the heliocentric model.

What is more, Copernicus refined his work throughout his life, expanding his views into a magnus opus called De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium (The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies). This was printed just before his death in 1543 by a Lutheran pastor in Liepzig.

So Christians - rather than being enemies of the heliocentric model, were rather the very ones who devised that model.

Christianity is not the enemy of science, and so long as Christians are encouraged to further scientific enquiry, there is no reason why they should be.

Please to remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent to blow up the King and the Parliament. Three score barrels of powder below, Poor old England to overthrow: By God’s providence he was catch’d With a dark lantern and burning match. Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring. Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King! Hip hip hoorah!

My five year old daughter learned the first four lines of this very old poem tonight, and my two year old decided she did like fireworks after all.