On Religious and Antireligious Customization of Contemporary Physics

Abstract

In 1679, at Uppsala University, the young student Nils Celsius, son of the mathematics professor Magnus Celsius and father of the renowned astronomer Anders Celsius, presented a controversial dissertation on the principles of astronomy, “De principiis astronomic is propriis”. In this, he presented the three world systems (the Ptolemaic, the Copernican, and the Tychonic systems), out of which he clearly preferred the Copernican. However, what caused the most problems was another issue: Nils Celsius discussed the question of how to interpret Scripture. The authority of the Bible should not be allowed to “in professed piousness disguise the truth” (Lindroth, 1975, p. 457). No prejudice should hinder the astronomers, by accurate observations, to build a true, or at least hypothetically true, picture of the world. Celsius argued, following Descartes, that the authors of the Bible phrased its statements in wordings matching the background of the simple readers of their time. Therefore, it should not be regarded to be in conflict with modern science.