Aristotelian View of the Universe Thesis

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This allowed the Catholic Church to present the idea that Earth was special because it was God's greatest creation. Thus, the sun, stars, and planets worked for the Earth and not the other way around. The Earth stayed completely still at the center of the universe and was surrounded by less important celestial bodies that did not receive as much of God's grace. Since Aristotelian philosophy fit so nicely within Christian doctrine, it was adopted and held as truth for hundreds of years, until late into the Middle Ages.

However, there was a drastic and radical change in the concept of the formation of the Universe at the dawn of the Renaissance. As more and more of the Church's truths were challenged during the Scientific Revolution of the 14th and 15th centuries in Europe, it was only a matter of time before Aristotelian philosophy was placed under question. The first and probably most influential mind in the re-formulation of the universe was Nicolaus Copernicus. This astronomer of the 14th century, formulated his own version of the construction of the universe that actually placed the sun at the center of the solar system. This radical idea disturbed the church and brought great backlash from Catholic officials, but eventually gained speed within the budding scientific community. In his model, also known as heliocentrism, the sun was the center of the solar system, and the Earth rotated around it with the other planets (Oster 24). This upset Catholic officials based on the idea that it presented Earth as just another copy of the other planets, taking away the uniqueness which they believe was attributed to it based on God's grace.

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Galileo Galilei, and Italian mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who had previously made significant improvements on the telescope which then allowed him to look into the heavens with a whole new and scientific eye. Galileo made a significant discovery when he saw that Jupiter had moons orbiting it, thus proving that the Earth was not the complete center of the universe. This helped give great weight to the Copernican theory of heliocentrism like no other discovery ever had before. With his adjusted telescope, Galileo also documented various phases of Venus that resembled that of the moon, thus also providing evidence for the concept that the sun was the center of the universe. His discoveries made it very clear to the scientific community that the Aristotelian view of the universe could not work alongside such other phenomenon. The ideas of both Copernicus and Galileo helped revolutionize scientific belief in Europe, leading to the modern view of the universe that we still currently hold today......

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