Question

Modern debates between science and religion revolve around evolution. What are some of the past debates that took center stage in previous eras?

Answer 1

In around the 16th century, the Church was a war with the early astronomers concerning the movement of the Earth and Sun.

Explanation:

For centuries people thought that the Earth was pretty much the centre of the universe - the stars seem to rotate around us, the moon revolved around us (which did turn out to be true) and the Sun seemed to revolve around the Earth. The Catholic Church liked this idea as it put "man" at the centre of the universe as God's preferred creation.

Copernicus, in 1543, published a research paper that proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun. This caused a great uproar but as the decades went by, more and more scientific evidence supported the "heliocentric" view that the Earth revolved around the Sun, not the other way around. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution for more info.

Since that time, our "human centrality" in the universe has been further eroded. In the Milky Way galaxy, our entire solar system is only one of billions of stars and we are on the outskirts of the galactic community, not the centre of it. Our galaxy is also only one of billions in the universe, so even our galaxy is not that central!