The Vatican's Astronomer

I would think that the actual problem that the church had with Galileo was not what he claimed to discover, but that it was released to the general public without the church's review. Even today, I don't believe that the church is against the quest for scientific knowledge, but with the uncontrolled and non-integrated new science that is released to the public before the church has the opportunity to weigh and censor the information.

If Galileo had learned Latin, that in itself would probably have kept him out of trouble, because it would have limited the disemination outside of the church and its realm of control / containment.

Science or Religon are complimentary. I seems strange to me that they are at odds when the information that is learned and the proceddures that are used to gain knowledge can be used interchangeably.

Brother Guy said that science teaches to student levels. if you want your child to be a doctor, you don't give him Gray's Anatomy as a First Grader. If you don't give them something that they can grasp and gain an interest in, the path will be abandoned for some other.

If the Bible explained nature, God, The Heavens, Creation as it really happened, even in todays terms, it would not have been reproduced; even if it had really neat pictures.

Why can't the Bible be considered a primer. It contains only truth, but they are simple truths that began the education, and now it is up to the church, all religons really, and science to expand the education.

I believe that the church may believe this, but is trying to pace the education level with the development of their faithful. Unfortunately, all of their faithful are not at the same level, and as teachers in a class of students of mixed abilities, they are losing the advanced students by going at the level of the slower students.

I liked the show very much. My only comment is in regard to Laura's use of the word "Darwinism". She used it several times. I believe she meant "Evolution" or "Evolutionary Theory".

I believe that fundamentalists, who deny science and especially evolution, are the ones who came up with that word. They use "Darwinism" in order to to attack the science by making it the belief of one person - not by scientists in general.

As a professional evolutionary biologist, I want to correct Avalon and reassure Laura that her use of the term Darwinism is a perfectly correct and acceptable and even necessary usage among professional biologists. Darwin was not the first to propose that organisms undergo evolutionary change, but his particular contribution was to propose the mechanism (natural selection operating on inherited variation) by which such change occurs, and to suggest that all organisms are derived by such evolutionary change from a common ancestral origin. Biologists recognize that "Darwinism" is a useful shorthand for "evolution by means of natural selection." Moreover, some biologists would further use the term "neo-Darwinism" to refer to the hypothesis that all evolutionary change is due to the slow accumulation of genetic mutation. Others disagree with this limited mechanism, holding that such phenomena as symbiosis, lateral gene exchange, and historical contingencies play a major role in the evolution of new species and major groups.