Clarification on the impact of Bruno's beliefs (Score 2)

In general attempts to decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy have a very sorry history. That the stars are other suns, that the earth is not the center of the universe, that diseases are caused by microorganisms; all of these crucial insights were strongly and sometimes violently resisited, mainly because the dominant religion of the period happened to believe otherwise. Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake for urging the first view, Galileo was forced by threat of torture in the Vatican's basement to recant the second view. In principle, there is nothing wrong with appealing to a more general theory that bears on the case at hand, which is what an appeal to religion roughly amounts to. But that appeal can only be as good as the scientific credentials of the religion being applied to, and here the appeals tend to fall down rather badly. Bruno's main 'philosophical' insight was that he combined his speculative philosophy of nature with the new recommendations of a naturalistic ethics. Bruno's support for Copernicus in The Ash Wednesday Supper stemmed from his belief that a living earth must move, and he specifically rejected any appeal to mere mathematics to prove cosmological hypotheses. In fact, he ought to be interpreted in the context of Renaissance hermetism, instead of being seen as an active proponent of the heliocentric hypothesis or of a scientific wouldview against medieval obscurantism. Despite superficial similarities to certain beliefs of both Leibniz and Spinoza, Bruno had little or no impact on seventeenth-century philosophy as a whole. His contribution to seventeenth century thought stemmed from the fact that he was the only individual ever condemned by both Catholic and Protestant churches for heresy, and then burnt at the stake for good measure.