Remaking America by George Shollenberger, Idea 100 + XIX (Intelligent Design, IX)

In this blog, I discuss the contributions of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) to man’s knowledge of God’s Intelligence Design. Because of Galileo’s work on the motion of the pendulum, he became known as the first modern scientist. However, Galileo found something more basic than the different motions of pendulums. He found how God makes things. Let me first connect Galileo to other important personalities.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) modeled God with a geometrical circle because God is absolutely maximum and absolutely minimum. Thus, God is the center and circumference of every circle. Based on his model, Nicholas says that the universe has no center because God is the center. We must ask the question, ‘Did Nicholas influence the thoughts of Poland’s Copernicus (1473-1543), Germany’s Kepler (1571-1630), and Italy’s Galileo and did this influence cause these personalities to reject Ptolemy’s heliocentric theory of the universe?’ I believe that the work of Nicholas influenced Galileo because both were associated with the university at Padua. Interestingly, all four of these personalities could have been imprisoned by the Vatican. Yet, only Nicholas and Galileo were imprisoned.

There is more evidence that Galileo was influenced by Nicholas’ book ‘On Learned Ignorance.’ I found this evidence in the closing paragraph and last statement of Chapter 6 of Raymond J. Seeger’s ‘Men of Physics’ book on ‘Galileo Galilei: his life and his works.’ In the last statement, Galileo says, ‘And thus we have a continuous quantity built up of an infinite number of indivisibles.’ Galileo is saying that all quantified things have an infinite number of indivisible parts. To use the concept ‘indivisible’ I argue that Galileo read Chapters 16 and 17 of Book I of Nicholas’ book ‘On Learned Ignorance.’

Galileo contrasted the mathematical continuum with the physical atom. Galileo concluded that it is meaningless to speak of relative magnitudes of infinite classes of objects because the infinite class of objects is different from the finite class of objects. Georg Cantor will search for this infinite class of objects and found the transfinite number system. But this system was not found until the 19th century because Western physicists were lured to Isaac Newton’s godless universe. Today, Cantor’s transfinite numbers sit on the shelves of our schools of physics.

Galileo’s contribution to our understanding of God’s Intelligent Design was twofold, the motion of things and the extension of things with indivisible parts. Today, Western scientists are considering only the motion of things. In my book on ‘The First Scientific Proof of God,’ I agree with Galileo and say that these indivisible parts are spiritual atoms and form all divisible things found in the universe. Thus, contrary to the scientific belief that the universe is equal to the sum of its parts, I say that the universe contains an uncountable number of things and that each thing has an uncountable number of indivisible parts.