Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/150

 the early Church, astronomy, like other branches of science, was looked upon as futile, since the New Testament taught that the earth was soon to be destroyed and new heavens created.

The heavenly bodies were looked upon by the theologians as either living beings possessing souls, or as the habitation of the angels. However, as time passed, the geocentric doctrine, the doctrine that the earth is the center of the universe and that the sun and planets revolve about it, was the theory that held the highest respect.

Copernicus, in 1543, was first to bring clearly before the world the then astounding theory that the earth and planets revolve about the sun. But not until he was on his deathbed did he dare to publish it, for he well knew the opposition with which it would be met. Even then he published it with an apologetic, lie by a friend Osiander, that Copernicus had propounded the doctrine of the earth's movement not as a fact, but as a hypothesis.

"Thus was the greatest and most ennobling, perhaps, of scientific truths a truth not less ennobling to religion than to science forced in coming before the world, to sneak and crawl." (White: "History of Warfare of Science with Theology."

During the next seventy years the matter slumbered, until Galileo upheld the Copernican doctrine as the truth, 148