It was through the writing of Galileo that the Copernican model of heliocentrism began to gain momentum. The heliocentric model threatened the entrenched philosophical cosmology that had been argued by Aristotle, Ptolemy and Plato. Because the heliocentric model argued that the sun was at the center of the universe, its impact to astronomy was revolutionary as it eventually replaced the incorrect assumptions of their geocentric model. However, it was only through the efforts of natural philosophers, primarily Isaac Newton, that heliocentrism had begun to be widely accepted in the Church.
The heliocentric model convinced Kepler of divine mysteries remaining to be unraveled. He later confirmed, at least to himself, a cosmic connection with his discovery of the orbital period of planets; the time it takes for a planet to revolve around the sun. Galileo, going against Church doctrine, was essentially responsible for introducing heliocentrism and was persecuted by the Catholic Church for his efforts. Descartes, a proponent of rationalism (as were Kepler and Galileo) and mechanism, argued that tiny corpuscles of matter were responsible for the heliocentric activity of the planets. Heliocentric principles were included in Newton’s universal law of gravitation, where gravitational forces are responsible the orbits of the planets around the sun.
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It could be argued that it took the thoughts and efforts of a number of philosophers and scientists of the period to see the acceptance of the heliocentric model gain momentum. The model conceived by Copernicus was not widely known until they were advanced through Galileo’s writings. While Kepler’s ideas were less known, his efforts to prove the nature of heaven can be viewed as momentum towards increasingly more acceptance of a heliocentric solar system. In effect, the acceptance of heliocentrism was predicated on its inclusion to prove the existence of God and or of the universe and natural law.
