Christianity and Judaism are paternal religions that came into power after overcoming maternal religions. The Catholic Church thought of Galileo’s heliocentrism as the revival of a maternal religion, because it implies that Mother Earth moves by itself and makes the sun, the symbol of Father God, fall.

The Copernican heliocentric model was not the victory of science over the religious superstition prevailing in the Middle Age. In fact his system was neither simpler nor more accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model. Copernicus nonetheless proposed the heliocentric model and it was accepted by not a few astronomers, because Neoplatonism that worshipped the Sun was in fashion in those days. The climate background of the sun worship is the modern Little Ice Age, since people tend to accept the common sense of geocentric cosmology in warm periods, while it is doubted in cool periods.