THEME THREE: REFORMATION

• Catholic Church
-purpose of life is to go to heaven
1. Do good works
2. Confess sins to Priest to get penance
-if you don’t complete these= go the hell
-some might still go to purgatory
• hurts like hell but will eventually go to heaven
•Indulgences
-There is a middle place between heaven and hell: purgatory
- In purgatory, there is agonizing fire to burn away our sins
- People were terrified of purgatory
- There was a way to avoid purgatory, by indulgences.
- You just have to pay for a paper/certificate
- After that, the priest says less time in purgatory
- This made the church wealthy and greedy.
- can get ' free indulgence' if you go on a pilgrimage to shrine that contains a relic (a holy
object); popular pilgrimages were Canterbury and Santiago
-not mentioned in bible and bothered some people-> Christian humanist

Erasmus
• from Rotterdam
• most famous Christian humanist; "Prince of Humanists"
• A Christian humanist is a person that believed we should give people the New
Testament in their own language
• He was a monk but left the monastery to become a scholar.
• He wrote "In Praise of Folly" which makes fun of the Pope, relics, greedy
priests, and those who worship the Virgin Mary.
• He did not take action in changing the church since he disliked controversy

1) Martin Luther
• From Germany
• He was born a Catholic
• So he devoted his life to serve God
• To do that, he became a monk and lived in a monastery
• Monks: fast, celibacy = good works
• For years, he was a good monk. But no matter what he does, he was unhappy, thinking only
that he will go to hell (he was not pleasing God)
• He comes up with a new way to go to heaven, challenging what the church taught
• His way was called justification by faith. Martin Luther reads the New Testament, "The
Letter to the Romans."
• He comes across a sentence "The righteous man shall live by faith."
• He the concludes that an other way to go to heaven is that you have to have faith in
something, "Jesus Christ died upon the cross for our sins"
• If you believe that, something happens, your sins are forgiven and you can go to heaven.
 • Luther decides to publish his ideas and his ideas spread= Lutherans
• He puts them on the door of a church in Germany
• His ideas were called the "95 Theses"
• Some of the things he said was: justification by faith, purgatory does not exist, indulgences
are not needed.
• Then the Catholic church excommunicated him. But he left the church already so it doesn't
matter
• Luther then decides to create his own church, the Lutheran church.
• He ended up marrying an ex-nun and had 6 kids.

2) John Calvin
• Born Catholic in France
• As a young man, he left the church
• He believed in the absolute sovereignty of God
• He believed in predestination: God knows who will go to heaven and who goes to hell
• God is in charge of everything that happens
• People found predestination very frightening
• If you believe this, you are a Calvinists
• If you were going to Heaven= Elect; If you were going to hell= Dammed
• Calvin was born in France but moved to Geneva, Switzerland
• He banned drinking, dancing, swearing, and cards. Also, you have to go to church every
day.
• He was very serious and hardly ever laughed
• He wrote a book that was popular in the Reformation "The Institutes of Christian Religion."
• He kept rewriting it
• The original version is 700 pages long
• His main belief was predestination

• Consequences
1. Religious War
a. France v Germany
2. Marriage becomes more important
a. Catholic church thought being a monk or nun was important but no longer
important for Lutherans or Calvinists
b. Marriage is encouraged
c. Woman were scared to die of child birth
3. Religious Liberty
a. Edict of Nantes
• The first modern statement of religious liberty
• In France, Huguenots made up of 10% of population
• Non-discrimination of: schools, universities, hospitals
• Huguenots were not allowed to do public worship.
• They were the majority in south west and south east of France, there they
can worship publicly and build churches
• They were not allowed to worship publicly in Catholic areas. It would be
done in private to avoid problems.
 4. Absolute Monarchy
a. People killed kings because of different religion – they were breaking the
Law of God
b. Does not allow people to kill kings
c. Divine Right of Kings made it Work

THEME FOUR: ASTRONOMY VS COSMOLOGY

•Geocentric Theory
• Geocentric Theory was the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe and
everything revolved around us
• This was Aristotle's idea
• He was ancient Greek
• He wrote a book called On the Heavens. His book became popular after he lived
• He believed the universe was made of 55 perfect circle/ sphere
• In these perfect circles, it contained planets and stars. The 20th circle contained near
stars, the 40th circle contained distant stars, and the 55th circle, it contained the most
distant stars
• There was a liquid in space called Ether -It was invisible and made the circles move
• Aristotle says that all of the stars and planets are perfectly smooth
• Prime Mover controls it all on the 55 sphere
• Dante (supreme poet) lived in Italy wrote 3 volumes called " The Divine Comedy" and
places heave, hell, and purgatory on Geocentric Theory
• Even the Catholic church accepted the idea

•Heliocentric Theory
 Rediscovered by Copernicus
• He was from Poland
• As a young man, he loved astronomy, but was actually trained in Law and
Medicine in Italy
• He ended up dying in Germany
• His idea was from Aristarchus
• It says that the earth is around the sun
• no one believed him
• The sun is the center of solar system
• Earth spins on axis every 24 hours and goes around sun every 365 days
• He writes book only when he died.
• The name of book called" On the revolution of the heavenly bodies". People did
not believe the book. It had one mistake; that orbit is circular.
• Since no proof was never accepted

1) Johannes Kepler
• From Germany
• He was a mathematician at University of Tubingen, Germany
• In Austria was a college professor for math
• Final home was Prague, Czech Republic. They were part of the Holy Roman Empire
 (Germany, Austria, and Czech ).
• Emperor Rudolph II made Kepler the Imperial Mathematician
• Kepler comes up with Kepler’s law. There were three. (1) planets move in elliptical
orbits. (3) the further a planet is from the sun, the longer it takes to go around

2) Galileo
• From Pisa, Italy
• He studied Physics and became a professor at the University of Pisa as a Physics
professor
• He had doubts of the Geometric theory
• He knew that the Heliocentric Theory was right and he wanted to convince other people
• he invented the telescope
• He looks up at stars and sees that the moon is full of craters and the sun has sun spots.
They're not smooth.
• He also noticed Jupiter had 4 moons that go around Jupiter, not us
• He realizes that the universe is infinite and it doesn't end, so earth cannot be in center
• He just destroyed Geocentric Theory.
• He writes down his ideas in a book called "The Starry Messenger"
• It proves that the Geocentric Theory of Aristotle is wrong
• He travelled around talking about Heliocentric Theory.
• You can believe in Heliocentric and the church together. Church gets mad because he
was not a pope or anything but expressed religious opinions
• So they told him to stop talking about it until the church can think or accept the theory
• However, he becomes very impatient and wanted to publish his book
• He publishes his new book "A Dialogue"
• It was two people talking about Heliocentric and Geocentric Theory. Simplicio (idiot)
was the one defending the Geocentric Theory.
• He brought problems upon himself
• he got in trouble and got a house arrest. He would be put on trial for heresy
• the church put him on trial
• Usually, punishment was death by being burned. The church made him take back his
ideas, recant
• It made the Catholic church look bad because it seems like they do not accept science.

•Cosmology
1) Isaac Newton
• English
•into cosmology - the structure and origin of the universe
•26 years old when he became a math professor in Cambridge University
• He had 2 questions: Why do objects always fall? and Why do planets return to
the same spot after going around the sun and don't drift away?
• His answer was gravity. There's gravity between every object.
• His rule is called the Inverse Square Law. ½=1/4 & 1/3= 1/9. You can figure out
how strong the force is by squaring the number
• At 23, he invented a new branch of math called Calculus
• He wrote down his ideas in a book called Principia Mathematica. Only 20
people got it and were able to comprehend it
• Aside from gravity, he introduced Newton's Laws of Motion. (2) Force = mass x
acceleration (F=MxA) and also A=M/F. (3) For every action, there is an equal and
opposite reaction
• He becomes incredibly famous
• He was a superstar of science. he became Sir Isaac Newton
• He dies and gets buried in Westminster Abbey
• He believed in God but his ideas challenged the Catholic church
• Before him, people thought God is a miracle worker. After Isaac Newton's idea,
people began to think God is like a clock maker, and was more distant.