Earth 2.0: Bad News for God

[struggle4progress]

37. Of course, it is entirely plausible that there are other inhabitable planets in our universe

and that life has evolved elsewhere

I can't see why that should affect my religious views. Schweitzer wants to go on record declaring this response as nonsense, by referring (say) to the trial of Galileo. I find Schweitzer's understandings of culture, history and religion limited

The trial of Galileo, now four centuries ago, can perhaps best be understood as part of the Counter-Reformation -- that is, the official Catholic reaction to the Protestant Reformation which had begun a century earlier. By Galileo's era, nobody who wanted to do astronomical calculations doubted the computational usefulness of the Copernican scheme, compared to the Ptolemaic scheme, and even the Church's own astronomers were happy to utilize the Copernican view when they needed to work out astronomical questions, as (for example) in the case of the Gregorian calendrical reform. Galileo's real crime, for that time, was his challenge to Papal authority:his famous Dialogue put official Catholic views in the mouth of "Simplicio," which suggested to diverse folk that Galileo was calling them simpletons

Nowadays, of course, we say that the annual parallax of some stars can be observed; and from this we conclude that the heliocentric view has been established. But the critical observations were only made two centuries after Galileo, the technology being inadequate in his time; and therefore the parallax argument could not be thrown at those who wanted to use Biblical-literalist arguments against Galileo in order to consolidate Papal power. It is certainly true that church history is riddled with such power-struggles, waged in theological terms; but not all theological thinking is motivated by such crass struggles