Friday, February 10, 2012

Plurality of alien Worlds in Christianity


The geocentric Ptolemaic-Aristotelian was finally challenged and the plurality emphasized, first tentatively by philosophers of the late Scholastics (medieval Christian philosophy) and William of Occam ,  then more seriously by the followers of Copernicus . The telescope appeared to show that a multitude of living was reasonable and was a creative expression of the omnipotence of God, yet powerful theological opponents, meanwhile, continued to insist that although the Earth could have been moved from the center of the cosmos, was still the only center of God's creation thinkers as Kepler were willing to admit the possibility of plurality but not really support it.
The philosopher and Dominican friar Giordano Bruno - condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake in 1600 - imagine an infinite universe, populated by an infinity of stars like the Sun, each surrounded by some of the planets on which intelligent beings grow and thrive  (indeed, some of these worlds are certainly the most beautiful of our population and by far the best land). In reality there is no evidence to say that Bruno was convicted of such an idea (which include not between the charges of the judgment).
The notion that the planets were real physical body was not taken seriously until Galileo discovered in 1609-1610 that the Moon had mountains on its surface, and that other planets could at least be resolved discs.  In 1543 Nicholas Copernicus had postulated that the planets orbit around the Sun, like Earth. The combination of these two concepts led to the thought that planets could be "worlds" similar to the Earth.
The possibility of extraterrestrial life was a commonplace of speech learned in the seventeenth century , thanks mainly to the spread of Galileo's telescope. Since the plurality of inhabited worlds became "reasonably possible", the number of theologians who dealt with the issue became significant from the eighteenth century , the species in the Anglo-Saxon Evangelical and Anglican .

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