Ten models for the solar system in the 1600's

Frontispiece of Riccioli's 1651 New
Almagest (Wikipedia)

In order to understand the debate around the Copernican heliocentric system and Galileo, it is important to understand the different alternatives that existed, once it was realized that the geocentric Ptolemaic system from antiquity no longer was correct. 

There were really three different classes of models:

• Geocentric - with the earth in the center and with roots in antiquity
• Geoheliocentric - with the earth in the center, and the sun orbiting the earth, but with most of the other planets orbiting the sun.
  If you don't understand why this class of models gained prominence in the first half of the 17th century, you cannot really understand the science of the Galileo conflict.
• Heliocentric - with the sun in the center, resembling our system today

And then there were variations of these. The ones I have identified are:

Spooky action at a distance outside quantum physics

‘Spooky action at a distance’ is now used to describe quantum entanglement. But forces, like gravity, appear in the form of action at a distance too. Are forces spooky too? Physics professor, Sverre Holm, journeys the occult origins of forces, and the mysteries still looming over modern science. 

Article on web page of IAI, UK
- The Institute of Art and Ideas, 4 July 2023

Isaac Newton is well known for having added, "I frame no hypotheses" to the second edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1713, meaning that he could not explain the cause of gravitation.

Gottfried Leibniz’ view was that if such attraction at a distance is not explainable then it is a perpetual miracle, and added that it is “a chimerical thing, a scholastic occult quality.”

Leibniz’ dismissal is all the more strange in light of Newton’s seeming agreement with Leibniz. Newton himself had after all dismissed the medieval scholastics for their belief in substantial forms, like “sympathies” between similar objects. He had written that “to tell us that every Species of Things is endow'd with an occult specifick Quality by which it acts and produces manifest Effects, is to tell us nothing.”

How could Newton be so sure that his theory of gravitation did not fall under the category of such a scholastic form, and thus that Leibniz' arguments were not valid?

Little has changed since 1875!

Below is the beginning of the preface to the 1875 book "The Unseen Universe" by Scottish physicists Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait.

The objective of the book is "to endeavor to show that the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist." Note that this is two decades before the publication of the influential book "The Warfare of Science with Theology" by Andrew Dickson White (1896) and the year after "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science" by John William Draper (1874).  

The three different kinds of responses Stewart and Tait received for their book, are identical to the ones my book "The imagined conflict" from 2021 has received in the eight or so reviews that have been published. Therefore I found comfort in reading it and reproducing it here. So little has changed in 150 years!

Stewart and Tait wrote: "As a preface to our Second Edition, we cannot do better than record the experience derived from our first. It is indeed gratifying to find a wonderful want of unanimity among the critics who assail us, and it is probably owing to this cause that we have been able to preserve a kind of kinetic stability, just as a man does in consequence of being equally belaboured on all sides by the myriad petty impacts of little particles of air. 

Darwin's surprising statements on the role of the Creator

Page II of the 6th edition of
Origin of the Species

Darwin's Origin of Species has many more statements about the Creator than most people are aware of. Unfortunately, Dawkins' view that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist", which gives the impression that Darwin supported atheism, is much better known. 

This parallels the confusion around the 18th century intellectuals who championed a godless mechanistic universe with justification taken from the clockwork world of Newton's laws. It stands in contrast to the statement "He of all people was no Newtonian," as the Newton biographer, James Gleick, declared.

Similarly, Darwin was no atheist, and seems to have preferred to call himself an agnostic. The different versions of "Origin of Species" are framed in statements that picture Darwin as upholding the idea of a Creator as the primary cause.