The cosmos of the middle ages

Today I want to talk briefly about a book called Kepler's Witch. In an effort to get people to read the book (one of the best I've read in years) I'll give a few quotes, and then offer a way for people to experience the cosmos as people did in the middle ages.

Quotes and comments;

A. 'Surprisingly, the difficulty in adapting to the new placement of the earth in relation to the other heavenly bodies was not primarily that it spelled the downfall of human dignity. Later generations seemed to think that the geocentric model promoted the dignity of humanity’s place in the universe, as the apple of God’s eye, while the Copernican system turned this around and set the earth spinning meaninglessly through a meaningless universe.
This is not quite accurate, for Aristotle never thought of the earth as a special place or the apple of anybody’s eye. The earth occupied the lowest position in the cosmos, where all things chaotic and all things corruptible eventually settled. [1.]

- If you want to know how people saw the cosmos, how they thought of it, you need to go at on a cloudless night and life flat on the ground, and stare up at the stars. The effect is to feel one's self at the bottom of a well. It was this 'view' of things that people had in the middle ages.

B. Kepler's witch.
- The witch in the title refers to Kepler's mother. The book gives us a detailed look at a witch trial; a look that's both gruesome and sad. She apparently was an intelligent but had little or no schooling, and was unable to read. [2.]
What we see in this account is people making connections between events, and then blaming things on people. e.g. One man told the court he got sick after drinking something Kepler's mother had given him. He then made the (false) connection she had poisoned him deliberately. Ironically, it's this ability to draw connections and inferences that lies behind the human ability to do science.

C. 'The world beneath the sphere of the moon was the privy of the universe, where living things came into existence and then died away, where sooner or later all life returned to rot. Only the heavens were eternal; only the heavens were divine. Redefining the earth as a planet, as Copernicus did, actually set the earth into the heavens with the other planets and raised property values all around. [1.]

- It's sad the way Humanist writers have deliberately falsified the medieval view of the cosmos. Even today we continually hear this absurd claim that Copernicus dethroned man, and that heliocentrism was a great humiliation for man... and other such nonsense. These are lies and distortions. (Anyone who wants to critique Christianity can find lots of honest material, they surely don't have to resort to lies and distortion.) Most people who talk this way don't have a clue what they're talking about.

How people saw the cosmos in the Middle Ages is immensely complicated, and I think it's impossible to know with any exactitude. [Ch. 4 gives a good overview of the Copernican controversy.]

It was Christians who brought in the new heliocentric view, and contrary to the ignorant claims of professors and school teachers in our day, they in no way saw this as destroying human dignity... quite the contrary. The textbooks of our universities are full of anti-Christian slander and bigotry. (It appears that once such lies have been told, succeeding generations of professors just parrot them. Who after all bothers to check on the veracity of comments they approve of?)

D. 'In 1593, Kepler wrote a short dissertation, supported by his friend Christopher Besold, imagining what the earth would look like to people living on the moon. This would be revised several times in his life and finally published as Kepler’s Somnium, his Dream, after his death.
The purpose of this dissertation was to demonstrate Copernicus’s idea that the earth moves very rapidly, rotating and revolving around the sun, but the people living on the earth cannot see or feel this. [4.]

- This is the kind of thought experiment later made famous by people like Einstein.
- It's a slander on people like Kepler for atheists to claim that Christians can't do science. (Not to mention being an absurd denial of reality.)

Summary; Kepler's Witch is a great book. It's more of a biography than a book about science. You get a real feel for the times he lived in. It's a wonder he was able to accomplish so much given the times he lived in. (e.g. the middle of the Thirty years war.) The contrast between his harried life and Newton's relatively placid one, couldn't be more stark. As an independent thinking Lutheran, he was hounded from town to town as a heretic, experienced much illness and poverty, and most of his children died very young. Throughout all the 'chaos' of society in turmoil he continued to search for a grand cosmic harmony that he believed must exist.

Notes;
1. Kepler's Witch - James A. Connor/p. 61
2. That we can go from her to Kepler in one generation is a refutation of Darwinism in itself.
3. While it's true that many of the ideas and speculations of men like Kepler etc. were wrong, this is how progress (toward truth) is usually made. i.e. we walk up stairs that are crooked and maybe even broken... but yet we walk up despite this. In fact, at least looking back, it's the only way we can walk.
4. KW p. 80