In the next post we will discuss Copernicus and his underlying philosophy, including his use of ancient Greek ideas, to propose a counter theory to the Ptolemaic geo-centric model of cosmology.  It is a very important topic when we look at ‘Scientism’.  Many posts on this substack outline issues with the Copernican model, problems which still need remediation.  None of these are well known because ‘The Science’ declines to discuss them.

“…nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion.” Lincoln Barnett (in, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, 2^nd rev. edition, 1957, p. 73)

What is rarely discussed is the philosophy which informed Copernicus’ largely purloined model.  This philosophical foundation is one of the most important yet rarely discussed metaphysics in Western history.  The Copernican model cannot be disengaged from its philosophical imperative.

“The result has been a popular culture littered with ideological detritus: atheism, of course, or naturalism, or materialism, or physicalism, or scientism, or even, God help us, trans-humanism. These are not very precise terms, nor do they denote very precise ideas. Naturalists can rarely say of naturalism anything beyond that it is natural.” (Berlinski, 2023, a secular Jew, Maths-Physics scholar and irreligious)

To set the stage for the Copernican discussion, we want to summarise the key points from the last post.  We discussed the philosophical underpinning of ‘Science’ and the claim that Science is an output from epistemological philosophy, or the philosophy concerned with observing, acquiring and interpreting knowledge (Feyerabend, 1995). 

This is a valid point of view and rarely if ever taught.  We should never forget that the tragedy of the 20th century, the 100 million dead, the endless wars, the general chaos, was based and founded on ‘Scientism’ or ‘The Science’.

More here