Jay Richards, at Evolution News & Views:
Bruno’s execution, troubling as it was, had virtually nothing to do with his Copernican views. He was condemned and burned in 1600, but it was not because he speculated that the Earth rotated around the sun along with the other planets. He was condemned because he denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and transubstantiation, claimed that all would be saved, and taught that there was an infinite swarm of eternal worlds of which ours was only one. The latter idea he got from the ancient (materialist) philosopher Lucretius. Is it any surprise, then, that, as a defrocked Dominican friar denying essential tenets of Catholic doctrine and drawing strength from the closest thing to an atheist in the Roman world, he might have gotten in trouble with the Inquisition? Yet a documentary series about science and our knowledge of the universe fritters away valuable airtime on this Dominican mystic and heretic, while scarcely mentioning Copernicus, the Polish guy who actually wrote the book proposing a sun-centered universe.
The reason is obvious once you see that Cosmos is not just good ole science education, but rather a glossy multi-million-dollar piece of agitprop for scientific materialism. As such, the biography of Copernicus, whatever its scientific significance, provides precious little fodder of the desired kind. Copernicus died peacefully in his bed just as his book, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, was hitting the bookstores (such as there were in 1543). And his most famous disciple, Galileo, despite being censured by the Holy See, died peacefully as well. So it falls to Bruno, who had no scientific achievements, to stand in as a martyr for science. I’d venture that virtually no one other than scholars of Christian history would even know the name of Giordano Bruno but for the propaganda machine of scientific materialism, which needed a martyr for its metanarrative.
Maybe, but the disappointing ratings show that the Cosmos remake is not a good advertisement for scientific materialism. The problem is, most people who would buy the idea don’t really want all the baggage, like Bruno, Gaia, and global warming. And the people who want the baggage are indifferent converts to scientific materialism: Darwin today Gaia tomorrow, panpsychism the day after.
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