Response to Galileo Galilei Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615 PDF

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Response to Galileo Galilei Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615, Week #3...

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Itskhakovich 1 Etyen Itskhakovich Prof. Kotick History 3005 18 February 2018

Response  to Galileo Galilei: Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615 I chose this read to further understand what scientists of the 17th century had to deal with in order to promote logical and mathematical reasoning. The letter starts off by speaking of the Bible, and how most of the beliefs of many people were primarily based on the bible and not science. Galileo also states, “To this end, they hurled various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain arguments, and they made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly, and which were ill-suited to their purposes.” Which means people have no evidence and reasoning to their beliefs, and adding the bible in their writings only made matters worse. What I got from the beginning of the letter was that he knew the bible was full of crap, and this was him persuading Grand Duchess Christina to think so too. I truly believe that this is a letter which compiles a list of things on the ongoing war between theology and scientific theory. Although, I think Galileo’s goal was to show how he could prove the heliocentric system without going against the Bible. To conclude my thoughts furthermore, there were passages in the Bible that were particularly about the sun and earth, which in his scientific mind were not all true. The verses from the bible stated that earth was stationary and in fact, it wasn’t. But at the time people were believers of these

scriptures, with little interpretation they believed that most the things written in the Bible were true. So the rigorous task of trying to prove heliocentrism while not disproving the Bible was Galileo’s goal....