The Infinite, the Void and Christianity
Everyone’s heard of Galileo and how the Church persecuted him. But what I didn’t know was why . Sure, Christianity considered the earth to be the center of the universe, but was that such a central belief of Christianity that they’d kill a guy over it? I always felt like there was something more to it. Like everything else in the Western world, the story starts in ancient Greece. Pythagoras believed the earth was at the center of the universe. The sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around the earth, with each pinned inside a sphere. How far did these spheres within spheres extend? To infinity? Or did they stop at some point? If they stopped, what lay beyond the last sphere? Aristotle denied the existence of both the void and the infinite. As far he was concerned, both the void and the infinite were just constructs of the mind: and he felt there’s nothing in the real world (universe) that was infinite. So Aristotle’s answer was that there were only a finite number of spheres and that