Matthew Stewart Quotes
Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a 'chorus of worlds' just like ours.
Stewart, Matthew. Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
While critics of Islam cite this sura to show how absurd the Koran can be and contradicts what is known about the Earth’s orbit, few sophisticated, moderate Muslims believe this. However, even in the United States there are many Christians and Orthodox Jews who not only deny Evolution but also believe the Earth is 6000 years old. The basic difference is that in Islamic countries publicly critiquing such anti-scientific theological statements is rare and an individual who publicly argues against the Koran taken literally is often in danger from state or private retribution. In the West the conflict between the Bible and known science is not only publicly commented upon but in a somewhat derisive way. However, consider this: Islam is about 1500 years old. When Christianity was the same age, Galileo was tried and convicted by the Catholic Church for denying this very statement. Perhaps in another 700 years Muslims will look back with embarrassment on this as most of Christianity does.
The Roman Catholic Church had stultified scientific thinking for over a thousand years where differing with accepted church doctrine was not only discouraged but was dangerous. Hicletas—see {590328}—realized that the earth rotated around its own axis three centuries before Christ, and his view was in the literature to which learned people had access. Copernicus later communicated this idea to the Pope but in much more delicate terms—see {590327}. He did not have the problems that Galileo endured with the Church for several reasons. There were different men controlling the church, the printing press had been invented and Galileo published a book that many could read, the Protestant Reformation had really frightened the Church fathers who felt more vulnerable and less tolerant.
The Attorney General, Edwin Meese, told the senator that the United States was winning the war on drugs. The senator asked him:
Paine, in Common Sense, marshaled and enumerated every argument he could think of for independence of the American colonies from England. In this case, he used nature and the natural order of the planets to argue that since America was larger than England, it was unnatural for America to be subservient. The term “satellite” meant “moon” and all moons were smaller than the planets about which they revolved.
Matthew Stewart is an American philosopher and author currently living in the Boston, Massachusetts area. He is the author of Nature's God, The Management Myth, The Courtier and the Heretic, Monturiol's Dream, and The Truth About Everything. He graduated from Princeton University in 1985 with a concentration in political philosophy and was awarded the Sachs Scholarship from Princeton for study at Oxford University, where he earned a D.Phil. in philosophy in 1988. He worked as a management consultant prior to writing full-time.
