Christianity's Valuable Contributions to Humanity: An Examination of Militant Atheism

[Belacqua]

It doesn't specify that they were never burned. It also doesn't specify that they were never chewed up and spit out by donkeys. If you have any reliable source saying that one or the other of these things happened, I would be interested to see it. 

Copernicus had supporters and detractors within the church. They finally put the book on the Index of Prohibited Books about 70 years after it was published, but of course by this time it was in wide circulation. And remember that the Index was only enforceable in the Papal States. In other countries bans were almost always enforced by secular authorities, if at all. In Spain, even at the height of the Inquisition, Copernicus was never banned and his book was taught by priests at the university in Salamanca throughout. Even in the Protestant world, book bans were regularly flouted by samizdat editions. If you know of any cases in which people were punished for reading the books I would be interested to hear about them. 

The Index is often exaggerated. Every edition contained instructions on how to read a banned book if you really needed to. My father spent years in a Catholic hospital instead of going to high school. (He was not Catholic, but they were the only ones who would take a patient with no money.) He got a copy of the Index, and used it as a reading list. (It was still in effect then, and included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others.) He enjoyed arguing with the nurses, who were all nuns. The nuns got permission to read many of the banned books so they could better argue with a patient. So it's clear that the bans were hardly absolute, and did not include burning.

I'm not interested in doing your footwork for you.  I presumed that you would have linked to an article that was relevant to your criticism.  My mistake.

Here are three up-to-date and useful books which describe how Copernicus' book was debated and banned by the church:

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Nobody-Read-...311&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Copernicus-Cultur...287&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Aside-All...337&sr=8-1

All of them can be pirated from Library Genesis. 

None of them says that Copernicus' book was ever burned. None of them says that any such order was made. 

It is difficult for me to prove a negative. But a reasonable amount of legwork turns up no evidence that the book was burned. I have made an effort to look for evidence supporting Fake's assertion, and have found none. This is consistent with everything I have seen in the past. 

The only mention of book-burning in any of the books is when Nicolaus Raimerus Ursus published an attack on Tycho Brahe's system that was very critical. Tycho brought legal action to have the book burned, but apparently no such order was made. This was not a church matter -- it was all secular. 

This is from Gingerich's book:

NORMALLY, BOOKS don't disappear so dramatically. Galileo's Dialogo, the book that got him in trouble with the Inquisition, was published in an edition of a thousand, and despite the ban by the Inquisitors, it remains one of the most common of the great scientific classics. Apparently, its listing in the Index of Prohibited Books simply made it more apt to be preserved in the seventeenth century. By the same token, Kepler was worried about sales in Catholic countries when his Epitome of Copernican Astronomy was placed on the Index, but a correspondent from Venice assured him that his book would be all the more sought after.

Publishers in Venice were notoriously independent of Rome, since at least the time of Aldus Manutius. 

The English translation of De revolutionibus was issued in eight editions between 1576 and 1626. It was well-known in Protestant countries, even where officials criticized it. 

Omedeo's book describes a French Catholic who wrote a list of books recommended for a well-stocked library:

In his famous Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Advice on Establishing a Library, 1627), the Paris Librarian Gabriel Naudé included Nicholas Copernicus among the authors that a good furnished library ought to include, notwith- standing the fact that the Catholic Church had prohibited any support for the physical reality of the heliocentric system since 1616. Naudé insisted that Copernicus, followed by Kepler and Galileo, had thoroughly changed astronomy (Copernic, Kepler et Galilaeus ont tout changé l’astronomie).1 Contrary to the views of Roman censorship and projects aiming at “selective libraries,” such as that of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, Naudé argued that all those who innovated (innové) our knowledge (és Sciences) or modified any respect of it (changé quelque chose) merit a place in a good library, even though they cast doubt on ideas that were held for irrefutable by the ancients and those who followed them uncritically.2 He even listed Copernicus among scientific innovators who brought precious novelties (Est quoque cunctarum novitas gratissima rerum).3  

Omedeo's book also describes how Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598 –1671) got permission from the church to read De revolutionibus in 1629, a few years after it was placed on the Index. It was not difficult to get permission if you could show you had a good reason.

So I discover no reason to believe that the church called for De revolutionibus to be burned, or that anyone did so. Again, if you have evidence that it was, I'd be interested to see it. I don't expect that asking Fake for evidence backing up his claim would be useful.