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probable.” We can be sure that Copernicus believed that the earth really moved, but he did not believe that either the earth or the planets moved in the manner described in his system, which he understood to consist of geometric fictions. And he did not believe that his work undermined the supremacy of theology. It is true that Martin Luther called Copernicus “a fool who went against Holy Writ,” but Copernicus did not think he had done so—which proves, I suppose, that Luther saw more deeply than Copernicus.
    Kepler’s is a somewhat similar story. Born in 1571, he began his career by publishing astrological calendars, and ended it as court astrologer to the duke of Wallenstein. Although he wasfamous for his service as an astrologer, we must credit him with believing that “Astrology can do enormous harm to a monarch if a clever astrologer exploits his human credulity.” Kepler wished astrology to be kept out of sight of all heads of state, a precaution that in recent years has not always been taken. His mother was accused of being a witch, and although Kepler did not believe this specific charge, he would probably not have denied categorically the existence of witches. He spent a great deal of his time corresponding with scholars on questions concerning chronology in the age of Christ, and his theory that Jesus was actually born in 4 or 5 B.C . is generally accepted today. In other words, Kepler was very much a man of his time, medieval through and through. Except for one thing: He believed that theology and science should be kept separate and, in particular, that angels, spirits and the opinions of saints should be banished from cosmology. In his
New Astronomy
, he wrote, “Now as regards the opinions of the saints about these matters of nature, I answer in one word, that in theology the weight of authority, but in philosophy the weight of Reason alone is valid.” After reviewing what various saints had said about the earth, Kepler concluded, “… but to me more sacred than all these is Truth, when I, with all respect for the doctors of the Church, demonstrate from philosophy that the earth is round, circumhabited by antipodes, of a most insignificant smallness, and a swift wanderer among the stars.”
    In expressing this idea, Kepler was taking the first significant step toward the conception of a technocracy. We have here a clear call for a separation of moral and intellectual values, a separation that is one of the pillars of a technocracy—a significant step but still a small one. No one before Kepler had asked why planets travel at variable rates. Kepler’s answer was that it must be a force emanating from the sun. But this answer still had room in it for God. In a famous letter sent to his colleague Maestlin, Kepler wrote, “The sun in the middle of the movingstars, himself at rest and yet the source of motion, carries the image of God the Father and Creator.… He distributes his motive force through a medium which contains the moving bodies even as the Father creates through the Holy Ghost.”
    Kepler was a Lutheran, and although he was eventually excommunicated from his own church, he remained a man of sincere religious conviction to the end. He was, for example, dissatisfied with his discovery of the elliptical orbits of planets, believing that an ellipse had nothing to recommend it in the eyes of God. To be sure, Kepler, building on the work of Copernicus, was creating something new in which truth was not required to gain favor in God’s eyes. But it was not altogether clear to him exactly what his work would lead to. It remained for Galileo to make visible the unresolvable contradictions between science and theology, that is, between intellectual and moral points of view.
    Galileo did not invent the telescope, although he did not always object to the attribution. A Dutch spectacle-maker named Johann Lippershey was probably the instrument’s true inventor; at any rate, he was the first to claim