History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.166

v6.c82.166

One is tempted to return Whitney's compliments to Indians in the same coin by saying that for 1400 years from Ptolemy, the ancestors of Whitney and other highbrows hardly ever made any discovery of astronomical importance, stuck unthinkingly and slavishly to the Almagest and were literally in the dark about the true astronomical position during what are often called the Dark Ages of Europe Even Luther who rebelled against the authority of the Pope denounced Copernicus as a fool, charged the latter with turning upside down the science of astronomy and relied upon the Bible, which, he said, declared that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still and not the Earth (Joshua 10. 12). This betrays the old mentality that if there is a contradiction between the words of the Bible and Nature, the believers in Scripture must correct their ideas of Nature in accordance with the Bible and not the Bible in accordance with what is found to be Nature This also reminds one of the maxim of the Pūrvamīmāṁsā that there is nothing too heavy for a sacred text.