Eventually, the backlash to the inclusion of secular knowledge in the Christian worldview—a backlash led by thinkers like Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564)—led to the Church’s famous persecution of Galileo. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) famously posited that the Earth moves around the sun, and was forced to recant by the Church for his failure to state that his theory was not fact. Copernicus had been treated with decency by the Church of his own time—but in 1616, in response to the new fundamentalist religious wave, Copernican ideas were banned. The ban would last until the
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