“There are certain ‘idle talkers’ who take it upon themselves to pronounce judgment, although wholly ignorant of mathematics, and if by shamelessly distorting the sense of some passage in Holy Writ to suit their purpose, they dare to reprehend and to attack my work; they worry me so little that I shall even scorn their judgments as foolhardy.”
Nicolaus Copernicus wrote the above-quoted words to Pope Paul III. Copernicus included them in the preface to his groundbreaking work entitled On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543. Regarding the views expressed in this work, Christoph Clavius, a 16th-century Jesuit priest, said: “The Copernican theory contains many absurd or erroneous assertions.” German theologian Martin Luther lamented: “The fool will upset the whole science of astronomy.”