SCIENTIFIC IDEAS

With respect to scientific anachronisms, in addition to Jesus’s blood coming from every pore, Mormon advocates Copernican astronomy, “for surely,” he writes, “it is the earth that moveth and not the sun” The earth’s motion around the sun had become common knowledge by Joseph Smith’s time. It supplanted the Ptolemaic view that the sun revolved around the earth, which had been “taught since antiquity.”

Extraordinary scientific advances established the Copernican heliocentric model. As described in part by early Mormon intellectual B. H. Roberts, the Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei confirmed the view of sixteenth-century Polish cleric Nicholas Copernicus by looking through a telescope and noticing that “the planet Venus had phases like the moon, which demonstrated for her a motion around the sun,” as well as “the existence of innumerable stars not visible to the unaided eye.” The next step in the discovery of the solar system was when Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and astronomer, using the exhaustive observations of Tycho Brahe, a Danish aristocrat, refined the model by “proving that the orbits were elliptical” rather than circular and that they were “under the influence of never-varying mathematical law.” In the seventeenth century, the British mathematician Sir Isaac Newton’s “great law of gravitation” explained what “held the planets in their orbits and balanced the universe.” Roberts concluded that “the explanation of the Copernican system was now complete, and everywhere triumphant.”

This brief history has enormous appeal to admirers of science. The five men from different countries and cultures were a microcosm of today’s ecumenical scientific community. Copernicus and colleagues dealt with objective facts and tried to make rational sense of them. The power of their ideas rested not on the certainty of revelation, but on the tentativeness of reason. Copernicus and Galileo ran into trouble with the Catholic Church, and yet their ideas today are universally accepted even by the Roman church. It hardly seems possible that the Nephites could have known what Copernicus postulated in the sixteenth century and was arduously confirmed by scientists and mathematicians over the next century. As one scholar posits, “Mormon cosmology is readily understood in terms of a nineteenth-century scientific milieu . . . when Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton were no longer questioned.”