Quotation: Michio Kaku on Galileo & Bruno

English: The trial of Giordano Bruno by the Ro...

In my conversations, some have doubted that what a person specifically believes about Genesis matters. Many believers take a casual approach to the text today and cannot imagine that martyrdom has ever been joined to Genesis. Jesus perhaps, but not Genesis. To the contrary: it has carried sufficient gravity to not only execute dissenters, but to do so with leading figures, as an example. There can be little doubt what fate would have befallen Galileo had he not recanted.

From “Parallel Worlds”:

The mixture of science, religion, and philosophy is indeed a potent brew, so volatile that the great philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 in the streets of Rome for refusing to repudiate his belief that there were an infinite number of planets in the heavens, harboring an infinite number of living beings.

Galileo’s and Bruno’s sin was not that they dared to divine the laws of the heavens; their true sin was that they dethroned humanity from its exalted place at the center of the universe.

It would take over 350 years, until 1992, for the Vatican to issue a belated apology to Galileo. No apology was ever issued to Bruno.

Comments

  1. Alice G. says:

    We really are fortunate to live at this time when we can search for truth and talk about it openly.

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  2. we live in good times. We can say the church is and has been wrong without fear of death unless you are muslim and live in a theocracy

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Trackbacks

  1. […] Quotation: Michio Kaku on Galileo & Bruno (jerichobrisance.com) […]

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  2. […] Those who cannot explain cosmology or the theory of evolution are in no position to level blanket criticism at entire fields of scientific Christian and non-Christian specialists, who have collectively dedicated millions of man-years to the accumulation of knowledge in these areas. To state the obvious, you ought not condemn what you don’t understand. There is too long a history of that kind of thing already: “The Galileo Treatment.” […]

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