The Bible and Copernicus
There are many stories floating around about Nicolas Copernicus, but many are completely false. (Atheistic revisionists are partly to blame.) He was in fact a Christian who believed that studying the heavens glorified God. His views did not contradict the Bible.
Copernicus is credited with the heliocentric view (the earth orbits the sun). He reluctantly brought forward his view. Church leaders were enthusiastic about it at first, and geocentric (the earth moves around the sun) scientists and philosophers opposed him.
Copernicus in the tower at Frombork, Jan Matejko, 1872 |
Copernicus reintroduced heliocentric (Copernican system) cosmology into the modern world, mostly through a book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres), that he published in 1543, the year of his death. But Copernicus had been working on his cosmology for many years prior to publication.Copernicus was a very accomplished scholar. He completed studies in canon law, medicine, mathematics, and astrology (astronomy and astrology were mingled at the time, though there is no evidence that he ever worked in what we would today call astrology). He even studied economics, apparently being the first to deduce the quantity theory of money and an early discoverer of Gresham’s law (it sometimes is called the Gresham-Copernicus law). Besides practicing medicine, Copernicus was much in demand in government service and as a diplomat.
You can read it all at "The Copernican System & the Bible." For additional interesting material, I recommend reading "Nicolas Copernicus."