Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During the often stormy relationship between science and religion, no other event has proved so troublesome as the Roman Catholic Church's denunciation of Galileo Galilei. In 1633, at the age of 69, the noted Italian scientist was judged by the Inquisition to have violated a church edict against espousing the controversial Copernican view that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe. For the last nine years of his life, Galileo lived under house arrest...
Bellarmine cautioned Galileo that the new Copernican view of the heavens should be treated as no more than a hypothesis. For a while the scientist heeded that advice. But when an old friend, Maffeo Cardinal Barberini, became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Galileo felt confident enough to write his most controversial and, ultimately, self-ruinous work: Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems...
Convinced that the wily scientist had made a fool of him, Urban signaled the Inquisition to proceed against Galileo...
...creation or the movement of the sun. As Galileo said, quoting a churchman of his day, "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach how to go to heaven and not how go the heavens." That is surely a credo any contemporary astronomer, indeed any 20th century scientist, can accept. -By Frederic Golden. Reported by Wilton Wynn/Rome
...abilities as both a scientist and a propagandist were called on during his testimony defending evolution at the landmark 1981 trial of Arkansas' law requiring that creationism be taught in schools...