Who Were the Sea Peoples?

As I have noted many times before, among historians of science, there just is no controversy about the fact that Galileo had certainly not "proven" heliocentrism, or that the Church considered the theory seriously, and found Galileo's scientific claims for it unconvincing. Here is Thony on the topic: "One of the most persistent and pernicious myths in the history of astronomy is that Galileo, with his telescopic observations, proved the validity of the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis and thus all opposition to it from that point on was purely based on ignorance and blind religious prejudice. Strangely, this version of the story is particularly popular amongst gnu atheists. I say strangely because these are just the people who pride themselves on only believing the facts and basing all their judgements on the evidence." Except, of course, when they don't like the facts!

He preferred Coperican orbits to Ptolemaic because... well, let's have him tell us: "If God... had wanted the planets to execute spirals... he could have easily brought it about... "[But] what would God have preferred: that the planets should fly about in composite, ever-changing, and irregular curved motions... or that each should describe a circle, uniform and regular as possible...? There is no one who philosophizes soberly who would not affirm the latter opinion and altogether reject the former." -- quoted in Howard Margolis, It Started with Copernicus , p. 91 So, a major reason for Galileo's scientific choice here was his contemplation of what God would have preferred .

Interesting post here : In 1618 the Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grassi showed by observation and parallax measurement that the comet of that year was indeed supra-lunar driving another nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian theory of comets. Galileo, who due to illness had been unable to observe the comet, was urged by his claque to enter the arena with his opinion on the nature of comets. Galileo then famously launched an unprovoked and extremely vitriolic attack on Grassi condemning his work and defending what was basically a version of the Aristotelian theory. It was one of Galileo’s less glorious moments, far from using mathematic to criticise a doctrine of Aristotle’s Galileo was defending Aristotle’s theory of comets against an astronomer who had used mathematic to disprove it. So, in this case, someone from the Church was disproving a theory of Aristotle's while Galileo was dogmatically defending it. Life is usually not as simple as we like to make it out.

As noted by Ed Feser, Thomas Nagel pins the tail on the exact same donkey I have in some recent posts: The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essentia...

the more you talk: "Parmi d'aver per lunghe esperienze osservato, tale esser la condizione umana intorno alle cose intelletuali, che quanto altri meno e ne intende e ne sa, tanot più risolutamente voglia discorrene; e che, all'incontro, la moltitudine delle cose conusciute ed intese renda più lento ed irresoluto al sentenziare circa qualche novità." -- Galileo, Il saggiatore It seems to me through long experience observing, such is the human condition regarding intellectual matters, that the less one is familiar with and knows things, the more one wishes to discuss them; and that, on the contrary, the more numerous are things one knows and understands the more hesitant and irresolute one is in declaiming about something new. (Translation mine: It has the sense of the passage, I am sure, but perhaps it is not exact in some spots.)