A Quote by Michael Coren

Galileo was challenged because he declared a theory to be a fact and argued with the Church about the genuine meaning of the Bible. — © Michael Coren
Galileo was challenged because he declared a theory to be a fact and argued with the Church about the genuine meaning of the Bible.
The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just.
At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more reasonable than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.
The Bible judges the church; the church does not judge the Bible. The Bible is the foundation for and the creator of the church; the church is not the foundation for or creator of the Bible. The church and its hierarchy must be evaluated by the believer with the biblical gospel as the touchstone or plumb line for judging all truth claims.
In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis.
It's important for people in the Church to realize that the way they talk and think about the Bible isn't the way Bible scholars talk and think about it - and I'm including "Bible-believing" scholars there. There is a wide gap between the work of biblical scholars, whose business it is to read the text of the Bible in its own worldview context, and what you hear in church.
I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.
Genuine Christianity is more than a relationship with Jesus, as expressed in personal piety, church attendance, Bible study, and works of charity. It is more than discipleship, more than believing a system of doctrines about God. Genuine Christianity is a way of seeing and comprehending all reality. It is a worldview.
A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs.
Men who hold a theory of the Church which excludes from communion those whom they admit to have the Spirit of Christ simply proclaim that their theory is in flat contradiction to the spiritual fact.
The only way to build a church, if you have a Bible church, is to preach out of the Bible, teach out of the Bible, read out of the Bible.
In these researches I followed the principles of the experimental method that we have established, i.e., that, in presence of a well-noted, new fact which contradicts a theory, instead of keeping the theory and abandoning the fact, I should keep and study the fact, and I hastened to give up the theory.
Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man's universe is the earth?
When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted.
Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries. Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I've-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn't want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.
Every theory presented as a scientific concept is just that; it's a theory that tries to explain more about the world than previous theories have done. It is open to being challenged and to being proven incorrect.
The bible is not a blueprint for every day of your life, it is an inspiration not a blueprint. That requires that we listen to one another and get challenged and grow by living with difference within the body of the church.
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