trth_skr:
Good stuff.
For P1, if I understand right, your starting at the earth and jumping out to more distant observation points until it looks like there is no difference in how you view the earth moon and sun it looks the same. But in the case of Alpha Centuri you dont know if it could be rotating on some bigger orbit (ie the galaxy could be on an orbit we dont know of ?), but that doesnt matter here.
I dont get this:
In the case of a geocentric model, we will place earth at the center of the universe, and fix it (allow no rotation or translation). The universe will revolve around the earth.
How can you do this? Why? The earth moves, and it isnt the center of the solar sytem the sun, so how can you fix it let alone say its the center of anything except the moon?
Also I dont see how you can have a fixed earth model unless you mean it models a whole year cycle like those star chart things that map out all the starts at once that tell you what month to see a certain star?
I read part 1 the best I could.
Part2, I think this is clearing up, from what I understood, IF its set up like a star chart (where everything is mapped out on one page) there is no such thing as a center because as long as you knew a map out from one area you could do it in another and call that the origin instead and the map out would be almost the same.
For the most part I couldnt follow Part 2 after the first few paragraphs.
Part3-
I dont know why God didnt just make everything rotate around the earth so things like Joshua 10 would make sense. I dont even know how to read passages like that now that I think of it.
I would agree with this though: Scientism is a god.
Corpenicus works included a prefix stating that the idea was hypothetical. This is all the Church required. The Church is not anti-science. Galileo tried to make the case that it was proven- to this day, geocentrism has not been demonstrated as false.
I just thought of something, is genocentrism the center of the solar system, galaxy or universe? I thought it was the first.
fidelis:
Start with this tract from Catholic Answers:
The Galileo Controversy
catholic.com/library/Galileo_Controversy.asp
This was very helpful. A lot of it “trth skr” Mark already covered, but this article was good in that it was aimed more at people like me.
Here is something I dont understand, could someone explain (also I didnt know stars moved, the sun doesnt move):
Many people wrongly believe Galileo proved heliocentricity. He could not answer the strongest argument against it, which had been made nearly two thousand years earlier by Aristotle: If heliocentrism were true, then there would be observable parallax shifts in the stars’ positions as the earth moved in its orbit around the sun. However, given the technology of Galileo’s time, no such shifts in their positions could be observed. It would require more sensitive measuring equipment than was available in Galileo’s day to document the existence of these shifts, given the stars’ great distance. Until then, the available evidence suggested that the stars were fixed in their positions relative to the earth, and, thus, that the earth and the stars were not moving in space—only the sun, moon, and planets were.
