Copernicus Lost

November 30, 2006 by Dr. Mc.

Serendipitously, I discovered John Milton’s views of science while reading Paradise Lost. In Book 7 of this fictional account of the fall of Satan and temptation of Adam and Eve, the angel Raphael explains to Adam the 6 days of creation and the events in Heaven on the seventh. In Book 8 Adam’s awe is so great that he seeks to detain Raphael with a question about why God created such an expanse of stars and space if just to support so small a planet. Raphael quips, what if the earth has “three motions” (alluded to as spinning for day and night, rotating around the sun, and tilting for seasons), of what consequence is such useless knowledge to Adam? Several interesting insights unfold from this dialogue, published in 1667: First, Milton must have been aware of Galileo’s 1632 publication of Dialogo, out only 35 years before Milton’s own book. Second, Milton did not wish to disclose a personal opinion on these propositions. Third and most tragic, Milton’s solution to the dilemma was that science was irrelevant to faith. It is understandable that he would want to comment on this issue, even while being non-committal. He published at the same time that the Puritan minister Cotton Mather was fighting the established church in support of the Copernican system. The established church had bought into Aristatle’s model of the universe by bowing to the science of its day, not something mandated from Scripture; and as a result, believers were again at odds with each other, as well as with true science. This sounds vaguely familiar to today’s “scientific” pull on the Church into believing and defending evolution, to the extent of not even tolerating the contrary evidence.

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