Dr. Thomas Madden

The Gregorian calendar, the calendar that the whole world uses today, that is still precise because the calendars had all got out of whack.

And you can only do that if you're doing observations.

So the calendar that we use today is a product of the Catholic Church.

And so it was clear that they were not opposed to any of these things.

They were opposed to bad science.

And Galileo, unfortunately, particularly later in his career, he would just get positions on things like tides or comets, and he would hold these positions, and they were just wrong.

And he wouldn't listen to the other side, so.

Yeah, initially it came out mostly in the late 16th century, early 17th century, as part of the confessional fights between Protestants and Catholics.

And the argument was that Galileo had...

Because the thing with Protestants is they were more opposed to the heliocentric model and Copernicus than the Catholics were.

Because remember, they're basing everything on the Bible.

Yeah.

And on the literal word of the Bible.

And so while the Catholics are willing to see this allegorically or in other ways, and so they were the ones that were the most critical of it.

But by the 18th century, this became a useful play because the argument by that time was that they were looking at the Roman Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition, and saying, well,

That's what keeps these areas backward.

They don't let people think.

They don't let reason survive.

And so the natural way forward, they took credit for everything that happened during the Middle Ages.

The natural way forward is Protestantism and free thinking.