Errors and heresies

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 449.

Common sense, science, and the Church had all supported the view that the Earth was stationary at the centre of the cosmos. But Galileo used observations made with his telescope to argue that the Earth was moving around the Sun.

According to some versions of the legend, Galileo was imprisoned and even tortured by the Catholic church. Neither of these things happened, but he was condemned for heresy, kept under house arrest, and forced to declare that he cursed and detested the "errors and heresies" of his scientific work.

The church repented of this scientific misjudgement at its leisure, removing works by Galileo from the index of banned books only in the 19th Century.

Then there was the famous rumpus over Moses and monkeys in Victorian Britain, when some Christians attacked Charles Darwin's theory of evolution on the grounds that it contradicted the Bible.

In Oxford in 1860, less than a year after the publication of On The Origin of Species, the tome which laid the groundwork for the theory, there was a famous spat between the Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and the biologist Thomas Huxley.

Legend has it that Wilberforce, in front of a packed auditorium, asked Huxley whether he claimed descent from a monkey on the side of his grandfather or his grandmother.

It was a Victorian bishop's idea of a joke. But Huxley didn't see the funny side and, white with rage, rose to reply, rather piously, that he would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop, especially one who used his intellectual powers to introduce levity into a serious discussion.