Thread by @TimONeill007

This is utter garbage.

https://twitter.com/CosmicSkeptic/status/1355542439793197056

This kid has been mangling the history around the Galileo Affair for a couple of years now, and he really needs to stop.
(i)The Church actually *did* declare it was open to the idea that the earth went around the sun. They had been so when they had sponsored and actively ...

... encouraged Coperncius a century earlier, with the Pope even favourably receiving a lecture on his theories before his court in the Vatican Gardens in 1533. The problem was that the Copernican Model was full of scientific holes, and so was rejected by almost all ...

... scientists. But in 1615 Cardinal Bellarmine, who a year later made the ruling against Galileo’s theological interpretations based on Copernicanism, made it perfectly clear in his open letter to Foscarini that *IF* those scientific objections were overcome and a ...

... heliocentric model could be demonstrated, the Church *would* accept the science. But that had not happened in 1616, or in 1633.
(ii)They did not “threaten him with torture”. Both the inquisitors and Galileo knew he was in no danger of being tortured because (i) he ...

... cooperated fully with the 1633 tribunal, (ii) he was too old (iii) he was sick and (iv) he had friends in very high places. The only mention of “torture” in the trial documents is a purely formulaic reference found in all Inquisitorial trials that he should tell the ...

... truth or "otherwise one would have recourse to torture" (trial minutes, June 21, 1633). Galileo was never in danger of torture and he knew it.
(iii)They did not “eventually falsify evidence against him in court”. This silly kid has been peddling this nonsense since a ...

... video he did on Galileo in Dec 2019, where he presents a fantasy version of the trial. He claims that the trial minute dated March 3 1616 which was the centrepiece of the 1633 trial was a “forgery” and that Galileo trumped it by producing “the original document signed by ...

... Cardinal Bellarmine” which did not include the injunction to never “hold teach or defend in any way” his heliocentric ideas. This is neat little story, but it’s total nonsense. Nineteenth century historians suspected the 1616 trial minute was a forgery cooked up to ...

... skewer Galileo, but modern historians now accept it as a genuine case note from 1616. And what this kid claims was “the original memo” was nothing of the sort – it was a brief document written *two months later* (May 26 1616) by Bellarmine at Galileo’s request to help ...

... refute the rumours that he had been “abjured” and given penances. It only talks about the March 1616 hearings in quite general terms. So it was not “the original” and it did not somehow show the March 3 memo was wrong. This is further shown by the fact that when Galileo ...

.. was shown the March 3 memo in his 1633 trial, instead of stridently disputing what it said he merely said that “I do not recall” that the ruling had been that explicit on whether he could or could not “hold teach or defend in any way” his theories and agreed that he may ...

...have been instructed that way. Hardly the defence of a man confronted by a patent forgery when he had the “original” document.

This kid is a repeat offender in mangling history on this topic – he’s a classic case of smug wannabe who knows just enough to get things badly ...

... wrong. The idea that Galileo wanted to “question the truth of Christianity” and was only restrained by the Wicked Old Church ™ is more fantasy. Galileo does not seem to have been a very devout believer, but there is zero evidence he was a sceptic about Christianity. ...

... People need to stop trying to pretend their heroes from the past were actually just modern people stuck in the wrong time. That’s the Presentist Fallacy and it’s plain silly.

Don’t get your history from people like this silly kid. Try actual historians.