'Absurd' Rationalist Cosmology: Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes and the Religious Basis for the end to Aristotelian Dogma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current popular narratives regarding the history of astronomy espouse the narrative of scientific development arising from clashes between observed phenomena and dogmatic religious scripture. Such narratives consider the development of our understandings of the cosmos as isolated episodes in ground-breaking, world-view shifting events, led by rational, objective and secular observers. As observation of astronomical development in the early 1600s shows, however, such a narrative is false. Developments by Johannes Kepler, for instance, followed earlier efforts by Nicholas Copernicus to refine Aristotelian-based dogma with observed phenomena. Kepler's efforts specifically were not meant to challenge official Church teachings, but offer a superior system to what was than available, based around theological justifications. Popular acceptance of a heliocentric model came not from Kepler's writings, but from the philosophical teachings of Rene Descartes. Through strictly mathematical and philosophical reasoning, Descartes not only rendered the Aristotelian model baseless in society, but also provided a cosmological understanding of the universe that centred our solar system within a vast expanse of other stars. The shift than, from the Aristotelian geocentric model to the heliocentric model, came not from clashes between theology and reason, but from negotiations between theology and observed phenomena.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".