'Was Giordano Bruno Burned at the Stake for Believing in Exoplanets?'

[Nearly Sane]

I think there is an alternative case to be made but I will still raise a glass to Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori when I am in Rome.


https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/was-giordano-bruno-burned-at-the-stake-for-believing-in-exoplanets/

[floo]

I hadn't come across the term, 'exoplanet', until now.

[Dicky Underpants]

I think there is an alternative case to be made but I will still raise a glass to Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori when I am in Rome.


https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/was-giordano-bruno-burned-at-the-stake-for-believing-in-exoplanets/

I suppose such ideas did hit hard at a central doctrine of Christianity, that God became incarnate in Jesus, and died for the sins of the world. If you posit a universe of infinite worlds, millions capable of supporting intelligent life, then you're faced with the possibility of extra-terrestrials sinning, and also requiring redemption. This might require God incarnating and being done to death all over the bloody universe. Apart from sounding even sillier than the original Christian doctrine, it also destroys the idea of the earth being at all special. And that certainly wouldn't do.
Curiously, C.S. Lewis toys with the idea of extra-terrestrial life being tempted, sinning and requiring redemption in his sci-fi novel Perelandra, but maybe that's no recommendation for the idea.

[wigginhall]

He used an interesting argument, that if God is all-powerful, then he would make a very large, or maybe an infinite number of worlds.   It doesn't necessarily follow, but he seems to have got closer to the truth than some other astronomers, I mean about a vast universe.   Did he argue that the earth was not at the centre?   That would probably be considered non-Biblical, I suppose.

But as AB tends to say, the Church just knew the truth.