Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Imperial Mathematician at Prague, who worked through the observations Tycho Brahe left him until the orbit of Mars gave way and yielded the first two of his three laws — the ellipse, and equal areas in equal times. He had trained for the Lutheran ministry at Tübingen and was refused communion by his own church for refusing to sign the Formula of Concord; he called astronomy thinking God’s thoughts after him, and the preface in which he answered the objection from Scripture was written six years before Galileo’s letter and makes the same case.
Works (1)
- An Abstract of the Introduction upon Mars — The theological part of Kepler’s preface to the Astronomia Nova of 1609, abridged and put into English by Thomas Salusbury and printed with Galileo’s letter to the Grand Duchess. It is the argument Galileo would make six years later, and made first: that Scripture speaks of the sun and the earth as they appear to the eye because it was given to men and not to astronomers, that Joshua asked for a longer day and not for a lecture on the motion of the earth, and that no one should meddle with the Holy Spirit, nor bring him with contempt into the School of Physiologie. It is Kepler’s only sustained piece of biblical interpretation available in public-domain English. (1 note)