Alright, listen up, y’all. I’m gonna tell ya somethin’ ’bout this fella, Thomas Aquinas. Now, I ain’t no scholar or nothin’, but I heard some things, and I’m gonna try and make sense of it for ya, the way I understand it. This Aquinas fella, he was a big thinker, way back when. People say he talked about stars and stuff, what they call astronomy, you know? But his thinkin’ was different from what folks believe now.
Back in them days, they didn’t have all this fancy gizmos and telescopes and stuff. They just looked up at the sky with their own two eyes. Aquinas, he listened to this other fella, Aristotle, who had some ideas about how the world worked. Aristotle, he thought the Earth was the center of everything, and all the stars and the sun and the moon, they all went around us. Sounds kinda silly now, don’t it? But that’s what they believed.
Now, Aquinas, he was a churchy fella, a priest or somethin’. He tried to mix Aristotle’s ideas with what the Bible said. See, the Bible talks about God makin’ everything, and Aquinas, he figured God used Aristotle’s way of doin’ things. He thought God set up the whole shebang, with the Earth in the middle and everything spinnin’ around it. He called it a “created universe,” meaning God made it and it stays that way.
- Think of it like this: you bake a pie, right? You put it in the oven and it bakes. That’s kinda what Aquinas thought God did with the universe. He made it and set it in motion, and it just keeps on goin’.
- But that ain’t how we see it today, do we? We know the Earth goes around the sun, and the sun ain’t the center of nothin’ much, just one star among billions.
So, what’s this “different theory” the title talks about? Well, it ain’t one single theory, it’s more like… how we understand things now. We got scientists who study the stars with powerful telescopes and they figured out that Aristotle and Aquinas, they were wrong about a lot of stuff. We got this fella, what’s his name… ah, Newton and then this crazy-haired Einstein, they came along and changed everything. They talked about gravity and light and all sorts of things that Aquinas never even dreamed of.
Aquinas, he thought light was real important, said it was how God created stuff. Maybe he was onto somethin’, but he didn’t know what light really was, not like we do now. We know light is made up of tiny particles and waves, and it travels at an unbelievable speed. We use light to see everything, from the stars way out yonder to the bugs crawlin’ on the ground.
And these stars? Aquinas probably thought they were just pretty lights stuck on some big ol’ dome. But we know they’re giant balls of fire, like our sun, only much, much farther away. Some of them stars are so far away, it takes their light millions of years to reach us. Can you even imagine that? Millions of years! That’s longer than my grandma’s, grandma’s, grandma lived for, bless her soul.
Now, some folks say Aquinas was tryin’ to make sense of things with what they knew back then. He was usin’ his brain and tryin’ to fit it all together – the stars, God, the Bible, everything. And that’s what we all do, ain’t it? We try to make sense of the world around us, with the tools and knowledge we have. Aquinas just didn’t have the tools we have today.
So, his astronomy was different, real different. But it was important in its time. It showed people that you could use your brain to think about God and the universe. And even though he got a lot of the details wrong, he was askin’ the same big questions we still ask today: Where did we come from? How does the universe work? What’s our place in it all? And that, I reckon, is somethin’ worth thinkin’ about, whether you’re a fancy scholar or just an old woman like me, sittin’ on the porch and lookin’ up at the stars.
It’s like that fella said grace perfects and builds on nature, but if your nature ain’t right in the first place, you’re gonna build a crooked house, so to speak. Aquinas built with what he had, but later folks got better building materials. That’s just the way it is. We keep learnin’, keep growin’, keep tryin’ to get it right.
Anyways, that’s my two cents on this Aquinas fella and his stars. I ain’t no expert, but I hope I made some sense of it for ya. You take care now, and don’t forget to look up at the sky every once in a while. It’s a mighty big and wondrous place, even if we don’t understand it all.
Tags：[Thomas Aquinas, Astronomy, Cosmology, Aristotle, Medieval Philosophy, Christian Theology, Universe, Light, Scientific Revolution]
