In this episode we will look at the obstacles faced by Copernicus, Galileo and others in trying to convince humanity we are not the centre of the universe.
Having brought you right up to the present with Flat Earth theory and its pundits in the previous 2 episodes, ‘New Flat World Order 1 Flimflammers Charlatans and Snake Oil and New Flat World Order 2 Liars Deniers and INCELs’, we will now take a detour back in time. The denial of a heliocentric solar system is crucial to any flat earth theory.
As discussed in the first episode of this trilogy the spherical nature of the earth was pretty much accepted fact by most educated thinkers since the early Greeks. But even people who believed the evidence we live on a round planet found the idea of it spinning on its own axis and orbiting the sun a bridge too far.
This idea of the Earth orbiting the sun goes back to at least the 5th century BCE. Greek philosopher Philolaos was the first to put forward the idea that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. He even went one step further and proposed the sun and all the stars and planets we see orbited a central fire. Philolaos may have been the first to allude to the super massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BCE and Seleucus of Seleucia in the 2nd century BCE would also famously argue for this heliocentric theory.
As discussed in the first episode many of the church’s thinkers and writers were not flat earthers, but the idea that the sun went around the Earth would take more than a millennia and a half to knock out of them. This geocentric view of the universe would actually cause them nothing but trouble for that whole time.
The church had a vested interest in accurate astronomy dating back to at least the 4th century CE and the first ecumenical council of Nicaea.
The Catholic Church would become a major mover and shaker in astronomy.
Theologians Thomas Aquinas, Giovanni Tolosani, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Francesco Ingoli, Tommaso Caccini, writer Alexander Ross and demonologist Jean Bodin couldn’t imagine an Earth not at the centre of the universe.
It was up to Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilee and other enlightenment thinkers to finally convince the church it was clutching a dogma brick in an ocean of scientific observation.
Eerily reminiscent of the recent Hollywood film Don’t Look Up, Galileo even had trouble convincing the powers that be to simply look through his telescope and see for themselves!
So troubled by Galileo’s revelations Pope Urban VIII had him arrested and refused him a burial befitting his stature when he died.
A pre Paradise Lost, John Milton even gets involved in our story.
Ironically it was at The Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna that the theories of Copernicus, Galileo and Johannes Kepler were finally proven true by Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini late in the 17th century.
Eventually the ban on Galileo and Copernicus’s books was lifted by the Vatican, another century after that all opposition to Heliocentric Theory had disappeared from the church.
Despite the fact that modern flerfers have not caught up, th
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