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Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong
rollcall writes "'Galileo Was Wrong' is an inaugural conference to discuss the 'detailed and comprehensive treatment of the scientific evidence supporting Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe.' The geocentrists argue that 'Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the [Catholic] Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.' I, like many of you, am scratching my head wondering how people still think this way. Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
I hope there is live blogging from the conference.
Committee meets to discuss how light is actually extreme dark.
My mom says I'm the center of the universe.... or is that just the basement?
...even they know the earth goes round the sun.
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
If your mechanic thinks that "The Little Mermaid" was a Shakespearean drama, that really doesn't affect his ability to fix your car. Same with this.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans
In other news, 17% of Americans were found to exhibit a sense of humor when called by pollsters while most of the rest just get upset.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
In the rest frame of the Earth the entire universe revolves around it.
Why do the websites of lunatics always seem to be based on the same template from some horribly awful site made for Mosaic in 1995? Does crazy dictate design? Or does each wackjob just copy the code from the previous wackjob? Or maybe these sites are all made by the same escapee from the insane asylum? Maybe they are still in the asylum, and the computer in there is running Windows 3 on a dialup modem?
I thought Galileo Darwin had conclusively proved that the Earth evolves around the sun?
90% of the world believes in God(s), and there's nothing but imaginary evidence for that, too.
But by all means mock the fringe dimwits who don't actually negatively impact society.
A compendium of bible quotes loosly supporting this:
http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/geocentric.shtml
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
No you don't, because the earth is a non-inertial frame.
At the risk of starting a shitstorm, see the people who believe the Holocaust never happened. If an idea exists, it's likely some entity believes in it and will find/shape evidence to support it.
Pick a lagrange point between the sun and the earth as the center of the universe so that neither one moves.
Except that we can measure the acceleration of the earth (rotation around the sun is obviously not a strait line, and easily measurable). So... yeah, you don't actually get the same results when you do the math for a point decoupled to the solar system and earth. No one outside of physics learns relativity, despite it being 100 year old science. Some may learn "pigeon" relativity, but that's not really helpful.
There's no preferred point of reference, so you could just as well say that the Sun revolves around the Earth as vice versa. It's not like the Sun is a fixed immovable point around which everything revolves either, at least once you get beyond the solar system. Nor is there any other single fixed immovable point. You can pick any fixed immovable point you like and construct a model to match it. (The big problem with a geocentric model is retrograde motion--that is, the planets appear to go backwards from time to time.) The thing is that it's a lot simpler to look at it from the point of view that that the Earth goes around the Sun--both conceptually and mathematically, which is why astronomers do so when they are looking at the solar system. But it is possible to construct a description of the universe in which the opposite is true that is consistent, just damned inconvenient and not very useful.
So, in that limited since, Aristotle was as right as Galileo. Galileo just happens to be more useful.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Look, these guys know what they're talking about. They have a book published by Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, a non-profit corporation. Since it's a non-profit you know they're not out to make a quick buck.
And the authors both have a Ph.D. The primary author, Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D. holds advanced degrees in Theology and Religious Studies. He has authored ten books including a five volume compendium on the bible. How can you argue with that? If this man says the Earth is the center of the universe, I for one will take him seriously!
In his book Galileo Was Wrong The Church Was Right he authored the entire book except chapter 10. Chapter 10 was written by Robert J. Bennet, Ph.D. Dr. Bennet has a doctorate in General Relativity from Stevens Institute of Technology. He provides a detailed, technical and mathematical explanation of the various arguments for Geocentrism.
With these credentials I am shocked you could so boldly proclaim they have made an error.
The Earth is pretty much at the center of the observable universe...
As some have said, the Bible doesn't make mention of the Earth being the center of the universe. To expand a little more though, Job referred to the Earth as "hanging upon nothing." (Job 26:7). Isaiah described the Earth with the Hebrew word "chugh", which can mean "circle" or "sphere". (Isaiah 40:22) How to take these observations is an exercise for the reader, but they do agree with astronomy.
The summary should read:
Catholic] Church's historical position on the immobility of the Earth was not only scientifically supportable, but it was the most stable model of the universe
The Roman Catholic Church long ago accepted our current scientific understanding of the organization of celestial bodies.
Oh, and evolution through natural selection as well.
And one of its greatest thinkers believed that reason and faith were both equally valid ways to truth and not in conflict at all.
These nuts are in no way affiliated with official Roman Catholic Church positions. So let's just halt the Church bashing before we begin, ok?
What does the claim that 17% of the population believe in a geocentric earth mean? Even assuming that there's no one in that population that is simply saying that for kicks, it seems probable that a large part are simply answering that way because they don't know anything either way and are just guessing. At some level that's not as bad as having people who actively believe in geocentrism. But at another level, that means that one should expect that around 34% are really ignorant and have of them just got lucky when asked. That's not good. However, I suspect that some of these answers really are just people messing with the polsters or not bothering to thing.
But one thing to note is that many of the geocentrists are religious. Not only is geocentrism common among Christians but there's a substantial fraction of ultra-Orthodox (charedi) Jews who are affirmatively geocentrist. This is especially common among the chabad chassidim who are often geocentrists because their guru, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, made pro-geocentrist comments and because they want to preserve the word of Maimonides as inerrant (of course some of these are the same sort of people who refuse kidney transplants because the Talmud says that one kidney is the seat of your good instincts and the other is the seat of your bad instincts. So we're not talking about highly enlightened individuals). There are however, some very disturbing studies by Alexander Nussbaum showing that even among modern Orthodox Jews, anti-science views are disturbingly common. See for example http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n03_orthodox_judaism_and_evolution.html .
However, one thing to note is that although the conference in question in the top post is Catholic, affirmative geocentrism is not nearly as uncommon among evangelical Protestants as one would hope. Indeed, it is common enough that Answers in Genesis, one of the world's largest young earth creatonist ministries, feels a need to have essays that talk about why Christians don't need to be geocentrists. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/geocentrism.asp . Incidentally, There's some evidence that anti-Copernican sentiment actually started in Protestants and only spread to Catholics a few years later. Thomas Kuhn discusses this in his excellent book "The Copernican Revolution" although my understanding is that more modern historians disagree with him on this point and many don't think that there is a strong case for anti-Copernicanism as an originally Protestant ideology.
Finally, note that there are still some flat-earthers out there although they are very rare. They aren't as uncommon in the Islamic world. See for example this segment on Iraqi TV http://haha.nu/interesting/iraqi-tv-debate-is-the-earth-flat/ . In the West there is still some flat-Earthism but it is often more conspiratorial than religious in nature. See http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/ although some of the people there are trolls, some are quite sincere.
If you gave me a survey with questions like that, I'd claim to be a Republican and tell them I thought Obama was a kenyan muslim who worshiped Stalin and wanted to make America a sharia-communist country. Especially if they conducted it over the phone and irritated me. What people believe and what they claim on surveys are entirely different things.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Have you ever gone door to door in a rural environment and met people? Seriously, you select your friends, your friends select you, your family members were raised by the same people, there's a lot of bias going on.
But isn't 'yes' the correct answer anyway? Or at least the centre of the visible universe since you can only see as far as light could travel since the Big Bang and that distance is the same in all directions from whatever point you happen to be observing from...
What the crazies are pushing and deliberately confusing the truth with is that everything in the universe orbits the earth which is just wako...
[The Universe] has gone offline.
[quote]I thought Obama was a kenyan muslim...[/quote]
No, he's a "Keynesian muslim."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Next up on Slashdot 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons hate being asked stupid questions in surveys.
Most of modern science is the result of hundreds of years of research by people who were religious to some extent.
Yes, because people had less of an understanding back in the day of how stuff actually works. Being religious was also compulsory in those days. Bach, one of my favorite composers, glorified god in his music while he was fooling around with maidens in wine cellars and beating up his musicians in street fights.
Anyway, back to your point. Religion is stifling "modern science" rather than advancing it forward. We all know what happened to Persia after Islam, and about Europe in the dark ages, etc. I think it's safe to say that the world as a whole would be much more advanced if magical thinking was abolished somewhere in its history.
The essence of General Relativity is that a non-inertial (accelerating) frame of reference is identical to an inertial frame of reference within a gravitational field--curved paths in Euclidean space become straight paths in gravity-warped space.
No. What gravitational field would explain the rotation of an object on the Equator? You can treat the paths of freely falling objects as geodesics in curved space time (within limits), but you cannot treat objects traveling along nongeodesics as freely falling.
If one treated a point on the Equator as an inertial reference frame, then many stars would be travelling at superluminal speeds with respect to that reference frame.
That is simply not true.
Of course, religion did play a big part throughout history, and it even helped human kind advance a very long time ago. But saying that religion helped man get organized, leave by a certain set of rules, and develop the wheel millions of years ago is one thing, and saying that it still does that today is just plain stupid. Religion has been nothing but our biggest problem for at least 3000 years.
Remember, even in the golden days of Greece, religion was already trying to murder science.
And, really, why am I supposed to treat religion different from other mental diseases?
You wouldn't dare take seriously a scientists that was also an astrologist, or one that claimed aliens visited him daily ... then why do we accept those that believe in that creepy guy in the sky? It's certainly just as crazy as all those guys that keep their head wrapped in tinfoil to prevent the government from controlling their minds, and we love to lock those away at mental institutions. Instead, we grant tax exceptions to those that believe in the crazy guy in the sky. But beware, the rule of thumb is: if your guy in the sky is green and lives in a starship, you get locked away. If your guy in the sky has a badass beard and a jewish son, you get a tax exception. Just remember that, it might come in handy if you ever choose to become schizophrenic.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
But saying that religion helped man get organized, leave by a certain set of rules, and develop the wheel millions of years ago is one thing, and saying that it still does that today is just plain stupid.
Actually, they're both equally stupid, which is why I didn't say either of those things. RTFP.
You wouldn't dare take seriously a scientists that was also an astrologist, or one that claimed aliens visited him daily
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies
And, really, why am I supposed to treat religion different from other mental diseases?
Because it is not.
My mother is very religious. She attends mass every Sunday, she's a roman catholic so she believes in God, Jesus, Virgin Mary, the apostles and the saints. Yet she doesn't believe the Sun goes around the Earth, or that the Earth is the center of the Universe, or that we actually came from Adam and Eve. She's a smart, balanced, and certainly not mental diseased person. I think what you should consider a mental disease is fanaticism. Over anything. Specially religion. That's what really distortion reality for some.
How is believing in two inconsistent theories of the universe view not the sign of a mental illness?
If you believe that somehow your deity is not affected by the laws of formal logic, but simultaneously believe in science, which is based on the faith (for it is faith) that underlying all things is a universal set of rules which can be expressed using math, you are believing things which cannot simultaneously be. You are then forced to train yourself in doublethink -- and people do that: they terrify me. Basically forcing yourself to be schizophrenic is not a sane attitude. That is "being religious".
Now some are more honest, they just don't want to think about it, and will become angry when pointed out that their view of the Universe is absurd. This is infuriating, but not the sign of mental imbalance. These people may think of themselves as religious, but they will probably become either non-believers or religious depending on what people around them pretend to think.
Fanaticism, to me, is not a mental illness. It is just people who have picked the religious view of the Universe and stuck with it. They are logical and consistent. This is why religion is in essence dangerous: because if you are just religious, you are trained in doublethink, and if you are really consistent, your are a fanatic.
If we're picking our axioms, then why can't we choose to believe in a universe which operates on a universal set of rules unless its workings are altered on a case-by-case basis by some being existing outside of those rules? That would sort out the inconsistency - you can get general rules like gravity, electromagnetism etc. but also leave room for "acts of god" which may not be subject to such rules.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Sorry, that is not right.
You have described the Specific Theory of Relativity accurately. However, the General Theory of Relativity expands the equivalency to any point in any reference frame, hence the "General".
You mean the dark ages where fear of heresy stifled secular innovation, or the dark ages where the core of hellenic, roman and islamic learning was preserver in monasteries while the kernels of the renaissance and the core of modern thinking and the scientific method was born between the rabbinical, islamic and christian scholars of the convivencia,?
By your tone, I'm not so sure 'we all know what happened to Europe in the dark ages' - one thing I know is that the foundations of *non-magical thinking* were preserved by the clerical population, not the secular one. Any reasoned study of the Inquisition (the catholic institution, not the spanish one under secular authorities) would be a good exposition of how the simplistic is the idea that removing religious authority out of the picture would suddenly make intellectual advancement flourish.
I say this not as a 'believer' but as someone who divorced himself from a religious tradition for very similar naive intellectual pride - only to rediscover later that much of the scientific and philosophical heritage that I so prized was due to the intellectual traditions that were preserved, cultivated and brought unto the world by brilliant scholars from religious traditions and dispositions.
You can disagree with them all you want (for what's it's worth, I do), but if you feel "it's safe to say the world as a whole would be more advanced" if they had not been there, I'd have to say you have a poor understanding of history.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Very good. Thank you.
More people should take a longer and more precise view of history, such as yours.People should realize that religion and science are two sides of the same nature, our inquisitive mind, which evolved along with millions of neocortical columns relatively quickly such that we became able to ask such questions as "What the fuck is that?" and "Why am I here?" The same impulse that drives science drives religion . That doesn't make science and religion equivalent as modes of explanation, but it does connect them.
Religion may seem like a silly vestige of prehistorical and ancient mythologizing. It may seem like a leftover piece of our brains that we should have learned to think around by now. But science is no less hardwired into our brains than religion. It's all about explaining experience. Some of us do it more with our left hemisphere than our right hemisphere, and situations where it's not lateralized so neatly blur the line between complete and incomplete explanations even more.
Religion is not stifling science. Idiots are. It just so happens that some (maybe even many) of them happen to also be religious.
Actually, no. I don't think even the idiots are because science is still advancing faster than they can attack it. I mean, more than 80% of people know better. Assertions to the contrary aside, I am not of the belief that we need to worry about the remaining ones.
Except that large majorities of people are wrong about universal facts all the freaking time. Sheer numbers don't make a valid source of experimental validity, unless their claims are based in evidence. Mass faith is still faith. Nothing against it, but atheism doesn't stop being rational just because most people aren't atheists.
You do remember that this article started with a discussion of geocentrism, right?
I don't think it's as inconsistant or 'scary' as you think.
I believe in God, and I also believe in his work (science). My experiences and my heart have lead me to my beliefs. When I reflect on what's important in my life, I don't really pay much attention to things I can measure or quantify with numbers - science has it's place, but science itself doesn't even attempt to make any guess as to how 'science' came to be in the first place.
That's not to say I don't enjoy looking at the numbers we do have - I think God would definitely like us exploring how the universe works; physics has always been a passion of mine. But I've felt God's presence many times, and feel I have a close relationship. You may call me schizophrenic for that - and I can understand that, if you are only considering what you can measure. To me, that sounds a little incomplete - considering the nature of human life.
People just don't like to look inward very much - drawing the conclusion that what we can measure is somehow enough evidence to make staments about things we cannot measure.
Maybe I have a chemical imbalance in my brain that is causing me to feel connected to God. Maybe everyone who believes in God has this same imbalance. Or maybe the imbalance is found in non-believers?
Disclaimer:I do believe 'religion' is the cause of untold amounts of suffering. Religion is not God - religion is a (mostly)corrupt human ordeal.
Try looking at General Relativity a bit more closely. Results are the same either way.
You are mistaken. Translation is relative, but rotation is not. Rotation us absolute and measurable.
There is for example the Sagnac effect used in some inertial navigation systems. A laser is placed in a ring with light circling in both directions. The laser will lock on a reinforcing frequency where the light takes an integer number of wavelengths around the ring. After making a loop around the ring there is constructive interference as the standing wave overlaps itself. The light going around in both directions will have the same frequency and wavelength. Now lets give the ring some rotation. The light going around in opposite directions need to cover different distances around the ring to return to the laser which that has advanced during the that time. The wavelength of the light in one direction must increase and the wavelength of the light in the other direction must decrease in order to maintain the integer-number-of-wavelengths constructive interference.
If the ring is not rotating then the light going in the two directions locks at the identical frequency. If the ring is rotating then there will be a difference between the two frequencies, and that difference is exactly proportional to the rate of rotation.
This is not merely theoretical, it is the actual foundation of existing navigation systems.
Rotating reference frames are currently a bit of a mess in General Relativity. There isn't a single well defined way to define simultaneous time across a rotating disk, leaving no single well defined measure of length either. If you Google relativity rotating frames the top result is a $360 book on the multitude of often contradictory models attempting to define rotating reference frames in General Relativity.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I think your view on atheist is completely wrong. I would love for their to be a god. More importantly, I'd love for there to be a loving, kind, forgiving god who cares about it's subjects.
I am an atheist because I refuse to spend my time on something that can not be proven, has no quantifiable useful value to me, and is championed but a bunch of men who for the most part are no better then psychics who claim to speak to the dead. There is no compelling evidence that would require me to take this more seriously then I do santa claus or those christian leaders telling every generation that their generation is the 'end times'.
I also came to my conclusions at a young age. I was punished for them. I was raised catholic, but allowed to read. I read all about mythology because I loved the stories. Eventually it dawned on me that if all those gods were not real and thousands (probably millions) believed in them, then it stood to reason that my god was just another story and that one day people would read the bible like I read stories about Zeus. I brought this up to my parents and my priest and instead of answered with some kind of evidence, I was told that thinking like that would be the path to hell.
It's not that I don't want to accept the stories. I would love for there to be a wonderful afterlife with my family instead d of the unknown. The unknown is fucking terrifying! There have been nights (after a few drinks) when I've talked with people about death. Those nights sometimes lead to sleepless thought about the fear that when this life on earth is over that I am gone. That all that will be left is what I've done here and that is almost nothing. Even eternal punishment would be better then just being gone (Such is the desire for life).
Show me a shred of real evidence that supports god and I'll believe. You must however accept that proof does not mean I'll worship god. If it is the christian god I would rather burn in hell. That god is a hateful, spiteful, jealous god and nothing in the bible has shown me any reason to give him my respect. I'm fully willing to sit down with anyone who has new and useful evidence to the existence of god and how it can benefit me (and let's face it, the worship of gods is all about benefiting one's self). I am not however interesting in creating lies to make myself sleep better at night.
While the Galileo fiasco was not one of the Catholic Church's finest hours it was note because the Church was anti-science. For all of the Dark Ages the Church's monasteries is where all of the scientific learning was happening in Europe. They rediscovered the ancient writings of the Greeks which were preserved in the Islamic world. The study of Heliocentric was encouraged by the Vatican. The rub with Galileo was instead of just making scientific theories he then moved to try to interpret the scripture which is what got him into trouble.
The whole reason science started when it did in all of human history is because of the was Christians looked at the world. Other faiths had active Gods where if you didn't do certain things the sun wouldn't rise or the spring wouldn't come. For the first time with Christians you had an idea of a hands off God. He created the universe and pretty much lets it run according to the set of rules he made. What this did was allow people to try to discover the rules that God set up to run the universe. This was the birth of science. The Church all during the dark ages said that when empirical scientific results conflict with the interpretation of the scripture that it is the interpretation that must be changed because reality is what it is.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
No, no it isn't. The nondeterminism in quantum mechanics is understood and circumscribed, and we absolutely can be exactly sure.
I am trolling
The problem is that for all the good religious institutions have collectively done for science, they have done at least as much bad. It would be reasonable to argue that without religion's involvement, mankind would be more intellectually and scientifically advanced today. And I'm not counting the work of individual scientists who happened to be religious as contributions from religion, as they could have done the same work if they were atheists (and maybe could have done more work if religious institutions weren't causing them trouble - Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin immediately come to mind).
And what about religion's general negative effects on science? "Oh no need to investigate that, god did it!" "Why do you question this, is your faith weak?" "Man shouldn't play god!" are all lines we still hear today, and in the western world theists are a lot less fundamentalist than they were in the past.
For at least the last 200 years religion has only been yanking the brakes on the science train, so for today it would be safe to say that with religious authority out of the picture, intellectual advancement would flourish.
Another poster further down argues that it's just idiots who happen to be religious that stifle science. I agree that many stupid people would be anti-scientific with or without religion, but religion's ability to organize and support people with such viewpoints (and even encourage these views in some cases) can't be ignored. In a world without religion, if all the anti-scientific idiots formed The Organization for the Abolition of Scientific Thought (TOAST), they'd be no more powerful than any other similarly-sized think tank of idiots. But in the real world if the pope says investigation into the origin of the universe is an attack on their religion and their deity's authority, this is much more powerful.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Erm, if there was no religion, there would be no need to hide some selected intellectual works in monasteries.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
The poor understanding of history is on your side. We know a lot about what kind of works were lost during the dark ages from the references to the documents that don't exist anymore. We know that there were works in which scholars argued that stars are like the sun, but very far away. We know that there were other Homeric books around. We know of the lost works of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Aristophanes and many more. You can read the handful of their works that survived - and they are works of genius - and wonder how much brilliance was lost.
The dark ages we are talking about are not to be praised by how works were preserved, but condemned for how many books were lost and destroyed. Go read your Name of the Rose again because that is the true picture of the ages.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
That's first assuming the story of Julius Caesar accidentally burning it down is untrue. It is also an incredibly large assumption that it would continue to exist for 2000 years and that no one would attempt to conquer Alexandria.
But even more, it's quite possible that without religion, it would not have been built in the first place. That library was also a temple to an Egyptian god, though the contents of the library were not specifically religious texts. The Ptolomies (the library was built at the beginning of that dynasty) helped increase their power through the acceptance of the Egyptians' religion, and by at least appearing to respect and even observe it. Maybe if the Egyptians were not religious they would not have been conquered by Alexander. If religion did not exist, perhaps Alexander would not have created Alexandria. Heck, he might not have ever had any power to begin with. Maybe he would not even have been born.
For the record, I do agree with much of your post, but condemning someone for a poor understanding of history and then attempting to suggest that you can divine the consequences of removing an immense aspect of human history, especially one so influential as all religion, ever ... Well, that is not insightful in the least (as a few moderators seem to think) but it is incredibly ignorant and unbelievably arrogant.
On a side note, you're mixing up two different parts of the Middle Ages. The first part of it, the High Period, was actually more liberal both in religion, sexual behaviour, and generally more tolerant towards different cultures. The Augustinian movements, like other misogynistic and other radical positions weren't taken so seriously. The Decameron, which was written in Italy during that period, could be considered Pornographic by today standards and yet was freely available for public consumption. Our collective imagination of such period has been actually created during the beginning of the Low Period, which roughly starts some year after the end of Italian Renaissance.
After the economical collapse of the previous liberal Principalities in continental Europe, due to the side effects of Black Death and the inability to cope with the growing economical power of Spain coming the recently discovered American continent, the most extremist religious positions filled such power vacuum : On a side we got the Protestantism, that tried to recover and "stiffen" most of the theological and religious position of that period, and the other side we got the Council of Trent, which was most interested in recovering the political and cultural relevance of the Catholic Church. They basically rewrote parts of history and used for this the most violent and radical groups, like the Inquisition, which till the 16th century was quite limited in his powers. Most of our opinion regarding the Dark Ages originated then. (And, as you can see, we don't need to wait for a war with Eurasia to observe the phenomenons about control and language illustrated by G. Orwell in 1984. In a sense, the Low period of the Middle Ages could be considered the first post-apocalyptic society ever).
Galileo operated right after their rise in power. Most of the church couldn't care less about the factual truth behind Galileo positions, they were just interested in maintaining an absolute, even if formal, power.
TL;DR: there isn't actually any contradiction between the way the Church operated, we're speaking about really different time periods, and in a sense a totally different organization.
Oh, and when the economy collapses and the turmoil becomes apparent, the extremists take the power. Which reminds me of something relevant in today politics.