Geocentrism: why doesn't it just die and be done with?

[hecd2]

I have been following this thread with some interest and I’d like to make a couple of points - one about the position of modern geocentrists with respect to the Church and the other about the science.

It seems to me, as a neutral observer outside the Church, that the stance of modern geocentrists, like excubitor, hansgeorg, cassini and Sungenis, who insist that geocentrism is a matter of faith, that Catholics apprised of the view of the geocentrists are bound to concur and that the teaching Magisterium of the Church has been in error for two hundred and fifty years or more, is incompatible with the obedience to the Church’s teaching that is demanded of good Catholics. It seems to me that to claim that one’s personal interpretation of Scripture and Tradition should take precedence over the teaching of the Magisterium seems to be more in the Protestant than the Catholic tradition. Moreover, if the Magisterium of the Church has been so far in error, so delinquent, on this matter of the earth’s physical relationship to the rest of the universe which the geocentrists would have us believe so important an article of faith, then what can we say about the validity, truth and force of the rest of the teaching of the Magisterium for the last 250 years? Once Catholics accept that the Magisterium is astray on one article of faith, how can they put any confidence in the teaching on other matters? David Palm has argued similar points with far more scholarship and nuance than I have, but I thought it worth putting the case bluntly.

I am astonished at the claim that the minute band of geocentrists within the Church are able to discern the truth of this matter more clearly than the popes and the rest of the Magisterium of the last 250 years, that the Church has effectively been in the grip of heresy for 250 years and that they and they alone are preserving the true teaching of the Church for the future (in the manner of the laity during the Arian debates - although I think that excubitor’s reading of that history is badly garbled) - what breathtaking hubris.

I also have a comment to make on the science, about a couple of misunderstandings that geocentrists commonly make and on what constitutes strong evidence against geocentrism, but that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[grannymh]

I have been following this thread with some interest and I’d like to make a couple of points - one about the position of modern geocentrists with respect to the Church and the other about the science.

It seems to me, as a neutral observer outside the Church, that the stance of modern geocentrists, like excubitor, hansgeorg, cassini and Sungenis, who insist that geocentrism is a matter of faith, that Catholics apprised of the view of the geocentrists are bound to concur and that the teaching Magisterium of the Church has been in error for two hundred and fifty years or more, is incompatible with the obedience to the Church’s teaching that is demanded of good Catholics. It seems to me that to claim that one’s personal interpretation of Scripture and Tradition should take precedence over the teaching of the Magisterium seems to be more in the Protestant than the Catholic tradition. Moreover, if the Magisterium of the Church has been so far in error, so delinquent, on this matter of the earth’s physical relationship to the rest of the universe which the geocentrists would have us believe so important an article of faith, then what can we say about the validity, truth and force of the rest of the teaching of the Magisterium for the last 250 years? Once Catholics accept that the Magisterium is astray on one article of faith, how can they put any confidence in the teaching on other matters? David Palm has argued similar points with far more scholarship and nuance than I have, but I thought it worth putting the case bluntly.

I am astonished at the claim that the minute band of geocentrists within the Church are able to discern the truth of this matter more clearly than the popes and the rest of the Magisterium of the last 250 years, that the Church has effectively been in the grip of heresy for 250 years and that they and they alone are preserving the true teaching of the Church for the future (in the manner of the laity during the Arian debates - although I think that excubitor’s reading of that history is badly garbled) - what breathtaking hubris.

I also have a comment to make on the science, about a couple of misunderstandings that geocentrists commonly make and on what constitutes strong evidence against geocentrism, but that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

Well done.
May I briefly answer two questions that you raised?

1. Moreover, if the Magisterium of the Church has been so far in error, so delinquent, on this matter of the earth’s physical relationship to the rest of the universe which the geocentrists would have us believe so important an article of faith, then what can we say about the validity, truth and force of the rest of the teaching of the Magisterium for the last 250 years?

The role of the Magisterium of the Church is to proclaim the truths in the Catholic Deposit of Faith. There is no Catholic dogma regarding the earth’s motion or non-motion; thus, the Magisterium would not be teaching earth science in the first place. The rest of Catholic dogmas stand on their own since each has followed the prescribed protocol for defining a Catholic dogma or article of faith.

1. Once Catholics accept that the Magisterium is astray on one article of faith, how can they put any confidence in the teaching on other matters? David Palm has argued similar points with far more scholarship and nuance than I have, but I thought it worth putting the case bluntly.

To answer bluntly. Catholics can accept or reject Magisterium teaching as they please.
So what?
Dissidence does not change the Holy Spirit’s guidance. David Palm has clearly shown that what actually happened at a local trial cannot be considered an absolute Catholic article of faith properly defined and duly proclaimed.

I realize that I am dealing with a negative. However, Catholics can show more confidence in other Church doctrines, simply because a scientific theory was not made a dogma despite the heavy pressure.

Blessings,
granny

John, Chapter 14

 

[Rick09]

I have been following this thread with some interest and I’d like to make a couple of points - one about the position of modern geocentrists with respect to the Church and the other about the science.

It seems to me, as a neutral observer outside the Church, that the stance of modern geocentrists, like excubitor, hansgeorg, cassini and Sungenis, who insist that geocentrism is a matter of faith, that Catholics apprised of the view of the geocentrists are bound to concur and that the teaching Magisterium of the Church has been in error for two hundred and fifty years or more, is incompatible with the obedience to the Church’s teaching that is demanded of good Catholics. It seems to me that to claim that one’s personal interpretation of Scripture and Tradition should take precedence over the teaching of the Magisterium seems to be more in the Protestant than the Catholic tradition. Moreover, if the Magisterium of the Church has been so far in error, so delinquent, on this matter of the earth’s physical relationship to the rest of the universe which the geocentrists would have us believe so important an article of faith, then what can we say about the validity, truth and force of the rest of the teaching of the Magisterium for the last 250 years? Once Catholics accept that the Magisterium is astray on one article of faith, how can they put any confidence in the teaching on other matters? David Palm has argued similar points with far more scholarship and nuance than I have, but I thought it worth putting the case bluntly.

I am astonished at the claim that the minute band of geocentrists within the Church are able to discern the truth of this matter more clearly than the popes and the rest of the Magisterium of the last 250 years, that the Church has effectively been in the grip of heresy for 250 years and that they and they alone are preserving the true teaching of the Church for the future (in the manner of the laity during the Arian debates - although I think that excubitor’s reading of that history is badly garbled) - what breathtaking hubris.

I also have a comment to make on the science, about a couple of misunderstandings that geocentrists commonly make and on what constitutes strong evidence against geocentrism, but that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

Well said. They’ve basically made themselves uber-popes. It has almost a Gnostic quality to it. They know what no one else knows…conspiracies, intrigue…you name it. It’s a black hole. What’s sad is that I think many of them mean well but they’re lacking in common sense, Catholic sense and they suffer from an over-active and extremely suspicious imagination.

 

[gentle_atheist]

All of this talk about what does or does not establish Catholic dogma is irrelevant. The very fact that – with the full knowledge and approval of the Pope – Galileo was convicted of heresy for holding beliefs contrary to geocentrism is proof positive that geocentricism was a dogma of the Catholic Church. Otherwise, how else could Galileo be convicted of heresy for opposing it? It follows from the very definition of heresy itself.

She (the Catholic Church) gives her children complete freedom to believe in the mobility of the earth.

She does now. But she didn’t then. Does anyone here doubt that, were they to be transported back in time to the 1600’s or earlier and criticized geocentrism, they would be found guilty of heresy?

 

[grannymh]

All of this talk about what does or does not establish Catholic dogma is irrelevant. The very fact that – with the full knowledge and approval of the Pope – Galileo was convicted of heresy for holding beliefs contrary to geocentrism is proof positive that geocentricism was a dogma of the Catholic Church. Otherwise, how else could Galileo be convicted of heresy for opposing it? It follows from the very definition of heresy itself.

You may find Catholic dogma irrelevant, that is your choice,
You may never take the time to understand the meaning of heresy in relationship to both science and Catholic dogma, that is your choice.
You may ignore why a judicial ruling regarding science in a local trial is not a proper theological dogma, that is your choice.
You may disregard all the posts which explain Catholic protocol, that is your choice.
You may think that Catholicism is the same as Protestantism, that is your choice.

You have a lot of choices.

May wisdom guide you.
granny

 

[hecd2]

Turning now to the scientific aspects of geocentrism, the first thing that is apparent is that modern geocentrists are not content to rely on their interpretation of Scripture and Tradition to inform their beliefs, but also put forward arguments based on observations of the natural world - ie scientific arguments. Even individuals who ultimately rely on the intervention of the supernatural (eg angels pushing the stars and planets in their courses), advance scientific arguments and quote scientists in support of their position. The two approaches are, of course, fundamentally incompatible. Scientific arguments only carry weight if one accepts the intelligibility of the natural world - that it behaves in a consistent way that is discernible by observation and reason. (Indeed the intelligibility of Nature is for me the single most powerful argument for the existence of God). Once you give up that idea, once you propose that the behaviour of the world lies beyond discovery, discernment and reason, then one might as well abandon all scientific endeavour because the only consistent explanation of any phenomenon is God, or God through His angels, acting arbitrarily and unpredictably. And that perspective is far from the Catholic tradition which, far from denying natural philosophy, lies at the root and foundation of modern science.

So let’s look at a couple of specific scientific errors made by the geocentrists.The first is to confuse kinematics and dynamics. The argument is sometimes made that the “maths” works equally well in both geocentric and any-other-centric systems. It is true that one can make a kinematic transformation (ironically, the Galilean transformation for non-relativistic cases, otherwise the Lorentz transformation) between any two frames of reference to describe the motion of any body as seen from any arbitrary frame of reference. However, what this fails to do is to describe the forces which lead to accelerations - it fails to explain the orbits of bodies around one another which Newtonian mechanics (or to be precise Newtonian mechanics as refined by GR) does. As I have explained elsewhere, if a flea jumps off the earth, it is not dynamically equivalent to claim that the earth jumped off the flea, because the absolutely measurable accelerations in the rest frame of the earth and the flea are different.

This brings us to the question of the equivalence of frames of reference. Geocentrists claim that all frames are equivalent, but this is not so - even in GR. All inertial frames of reference are equivalent, but accelerating frames, including rotating frames can absolutely be distinguished by the forces in those frames. It is true that constant motion is relative - the concept of absolute uniform motion (or as far as GR goes, absolute motion following space-like geodesics) is meaningless because there is not an absolute rest frame (by the way, there is an argument that the rest frame of the CMB can be interpreted as the rest frame of the universe - ie the frame in which the sum of linear and angular momentum of all mass/energy in the universe is zero - but by that definition the earth is definitely not motionless). We look at another galaxy and we see that we are getting closer, but there is no way to distinguish between the case that we are moving towards it or it is moving towards us. However, the concept of absolute acceleration is not meaningless - indeed accelerations can be measured in absolute terms by the forces that arise in the rest frames of accelerating bodies. Wherever a body can be shown to be accelerating or if it can be shown that its velocity is varying over time, it cannot be also permanently at rest (accepting for the sake of argument that the concept of absolute rest is meaningful).

In the next post, I’ll look at a couple of consequences of these geocentric errors - confusing kinematic and dynamic considerations and overstating the principle of equivalence.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[excubitor]

I make the plea that people need to go beyond the Protestant evaluation which has been chosen by some Catholics to support a particular scientific theory regarding one individual planet as debated at a local judicial trial.

David Palm is explaining how the Holy Spirit is guiding the Catholic Church since day one in Acts. Pardon me for being cranky, but it is time for Catholics to pay attention to Catholic protocol instead of accepting Protestant protocol because it is being promoted by public figures.

Personally, I prefer being faithful to the real version of Catholicism and not a modern bookseller’s version which is on the short side of Catholicism.

I rest my case,
granny

Incredible. More rhetoric. First we paint Geocentrists as madmen, then we paint them even worse, as protestants. How is standing up for the Sacred Tradition protestant? The layfolk during the Arian crisis stood against their bishops and resisted them, and the faith was preserved. Were they being protestants? No, there is nothing wrong with resisting in a respectful manner the wrongdoings and failings of our clergy. However, a good catholic will put a sock in it if he is commanded by his superior. Sungenis did just that over the issue of the Jews.

A protestant however does not obey when he is told to put a sock in it or recant. He instead rebels and leaves the church. I am certainly and entirely in full communion with the catholic church. If anyone is standing up for the real version of Catholicism it is Sungenis and the geocentrists, who are faithfully standing by the medieval church and claiming that she did not wrong, and that she made no error. Nor am I being disobedient in any way or acting against the will of the church. The church has never forbidden Geocentrism, in fact it has never flatly stated that geocentrism is false and heliocentrism.acentrism. It has merely made a few innocuous statements which allow modern catholics the liberty to believe what was formerly proclaimed as heresy.

How is that a boast for your camp. Jesus said God allowed divorce because of the hardness of the hearts of the people of Israel. So too the God allows acentrism because of the unwillingness of the people of the church to believe the church and the scriptures.

That is no boast. That’s evidence of a failing and a fissure in the fabric of the church. The barque of Peter might never sink, but she certainly has sprung a major leak with acentrism believed by the vast majority of here passengers.

 

[excubitor]

A good place to start would be to scientifically explain all the Lagrange Points (here) and then scientifically explain how the earth can remain completely fixed in space while a non-homogenous universe swirls around it (which would necessarily cause the universe’s center of mass to move as well) - see here.

Please go back to my post where I explain that it is not necessary to explain how the earth is fixed and unmoving at the centre of a rotating universe. The fact that this is true does not rest upon us understanding how it is true. We believe that Mary conceived and bore a child and remained ever virgin. How this can be possible we cannot say. However we believe it as an article of faith.
In the same way most geocentrists freely admit that their belief is based on faith. However they will also say that our natural reason and observation in no way contradicts this faith.

On the other hand, what does the acentrist base his belief on? He bases it on the natural sciences. There is no faith whatsoever coming into play. So I ask you? What is superior? The belief that comes of faith, or the belief that comes from the physical sciences and philosophy? Surely Catholics everywhere will automatically sense that the belief that is borne of faith is the greater authority.

The scripture is very clear on this point. That which is not of faith is sin Romans 14:23
Without faith it is impossible to please him Hebrews 11:6 *The just shall live by faith Hebrews 10:38. *

Nor is it blind faith. It is obvious to our natural senses that we are not moving and the sun and heavens are moving about us. All of the motions of the planets and satellites which we readily observe can be explained using the geocentric model of Tycho Brahe.

Until the geocentrists get serious, all they’re doing is becoming a stumbling block to potential converts and a source of embarrassment to the Church. Just look at the one commenter who already noticed the bind in which you intend to place the Church: if geocentrism is not true, then the Bible is false. This is foolishness.

Sungenis approached every university in America to do his doctorate on Geocentrism. They all turned him down. You can do university studies in any field of nonsense but nobody would allow him to do his thesis in Geocentrism. Why is this? Because there is a bias against the study of Geocentrism. So it is a bit rich to ask Geocentrists to get serious when there is an overwhelming bias against them. How do you research the science of Geocentrism without funding, without telescope time, with established science attacking you at every turn. Geocentrists have to work as doctors, truck drivers, school teachers. We don’t have the government ploughing billions of dollars into our research, whereas the government is quite prepared to plough billions of dollars into the Hadron collider to try and discover dark matter.

 

[hecd2]

Kinematics and dynamics are not the same. The behaviour of systems can be predicted and explained by the forces acting on bodies. In such a dynamical system accelerations and orbits are caused by forces acting between and on bodies - this is an insightful and meaningful way to look at the orbital mechanics of celestial bodies by considering the forces and accelerations to be gravitational in origin. For a dynamical orbital system the bodies orbit the centre of mass the system - in the case of the solar system, a point near the sun’s surface or inside the sun depending on the position of the planets. The earth’s annual orbit around this point with a semimajor axis of 149.5 million kilometers and an eccentricity of 0.017 is consistent with all the other orbital systems that we observe - to say that the earth is stationary and that the sun orbits it requires one to indulge in special pleading for the earth’s situation and to abandon the principles of orbital mechanics for this one case. (Some geocentrists claim that the rest of the universe exactly balances the gravitational attraction of the sun thus keeping the earth motionless - but the largest gravitational field of an external body at the earth is the sun’s by many orders of magnitude - to the first order the earth’s orbit is not affected by the rest of the universe - although the moon and planets do cause some tiny perturbations in the earth’s orbit. The Hill sphere of a body is the region in which it dominates the gravitational influence of satellites against the perturbation of other bodies. The Hill sphere of the sun extends 230,000 times further than the distance from the earth to the sun. Since the sun completely dominates the gravitational field of external bodies at the earth then it is valid to describe the the earth as orbiting the centre of mass of the solar system annually.)

So observations of the behaviour of dynamical systems support the notion that the earth is in orbit and not at rest. Are there any other observations that are consistent with this? The answer is that stellar aberration (the effect of apparent changes in position of the stars as the earth orbits the sun) is not only utterly consistent with the parameters of earth’s orbit as derived from orbital mechanics (period, semi-major axis, velocity of earth and so on) but can only be explained by the motion of the earth. Note that stellar aberration follows the principle that we cannot measure absolute uniform motion, but that changes in motion are observable - it is the fact that the vector of the earth’s velocity varies over its orbit with respect to the vector of light propagation from the stars that causes the effect of stellar aberration. Earth cannot simultaneously have a varying velocity and yet be permanently at rest. No geocentrist has ever put forward a credible explanation for stellar aberration with a stationary fixed earth - nor can explain how the parameters of earth’s orbit derived from orbital mechanics exactly matches the observation or earth’s velocity as observed by stellar aberration.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[excubitor]

Turning now to the scientific aspects of geocentrism, the first thing that is apparent is that modern geocentrists are not content to rely on their interpretation of Scripture and Tradition to inform their beliefs, but also put forward arguments based on observations of the natural world - ie scientific arguments. Even individuals who ultimately rely on the intervention of the supernatural (eg angels pushing the stars and planets in their courses), advance scientific arguments and quote scientists in support of their position. The two approaches are, of course, fundamentally incompatible. Scientific arguments only carry weight if one accepts the intelligibility of the natural world - that it behaves in a consistent way that is discernible by observation and reason. (Indeed the intelligibility of Nature is for me the single most powerful argument for the existence of God). Once you give up that idea, once you propose that the behaviour of the world lies beyond discovery, discernment and reason, then one might as well abandon all scientific endeavour because the only consistent explanation of any phenomenon is God, or God through His angels, acting arbitrarily and unpredictably. And that perspective is far from the Catholic tradition which, far from denying natural philosophy, lies at the root and foundation of modern science.

This is a bif furfy that get’s used all the time. That if we believe something by faith that this will stifle scientific endeavour. So what do we do? We abandon our faith and throw ourselves into scientific endeavour. What incredible folly. As you properly say, it cannot be shown that the medieval church ever stifled scientific endeavour, despites its preconceived beliefs. However it does and has stifled heresy, one heresy of which was boldly proclaimed to be heliocentrism. You see the church ruled that you may construct a heliocentric model of the solar system to help you understand the motion of the planets or to think of them in a different way, but to actually say that IT IS SO, in direct opposition to the scriptures and the church fathers is forbidden.

So let’s look at a couple of specific scientific errors made by the geocentrists.The first is to confuse kinematics and dynamics. The argument is sometimes made that the “maths” works equally well in both geocentric and any-other-centric systems. It is true that one can make a kinematic transformation (ironically, the Galilean transformation for non-relativistic cases, otherwise the Lorentz transformation) between any two frames of reference to describe the motion of any body as seen from any arbitrary frame of reference. However, what this fails to do is to describe the forces which lead to accelerations - it fails to explain the orbits of bodies around one another which Newtonian mechanics (or to be precise Newtonian mechanics as refined by GR) does. As I have explained elsewhere, if a flea jumps off the earth, it is not dynamically equivalent to claim that the earth jumped off the flea, because the absolutely measurable accelerations in the rest frame of the earth and the flea are different.

Again, you are getting caught up on the issue of how the planets orbit the sun. We just don’t know. Scientists have theories that’s all. Your flea example is very poor. A flea has legs. You can see them springing and it is very obvious that the flea is pushing away from the earth. No such obvious action occurs which would lead us to conclude which body is orbitting which. In fact we can know certainly that the earth is in the centre of the universe because the north and south celestial pole are in the same position throughout the year, proving that the earth is not being displaced by 150 million kilometres during the course of the year. So I admit your point that the two theories are not dynamically equivalent. In the case of Geocentrism it is almost as obvious that the sun is orbitting the earth, and not vice versa, as it is obvious that the flea jumps from the earth, and not vice versa.

 

[excubitor]

This brings us to the question of the equivalence of frames of reference. Geocentrists claim that all frames are equivalent, but this is not so - even in GR. All inertial frames of reference are equivalent, but accelerating frames, including rotating frames can absolutely be distinguished by the forces in those frames. It is true that constant motion is relative - the concept of absolute uniform motion (or as far as GR goes, absolute motion following space-like geodesics) is meaningless because there is not an absolute rest frame (by the way, there is an argument that the rest frame of the CMB can be interpreted as the rest frame of the universe - ie the frame in which the sum of linear and angular momentum of all mass/energy in the universe is zero - but by that definition the earth is definitely not motionless). We look at another galaxy and we see that we are getting closer, but there is no way to distinguish between the case that we are moving towards it or it is moving towards us. However, the concept of absolute acceleration is not meaningless - indeed accelerations can be measured in absolute terms by the forces that arise in the rest frames of accelerating bodies. Wherever a body can be shown to be accelerating or if it can be shown that its velocity is varying over time, it cannot be also permanently at rest (accepting for the sake of argument that the concept of absolute rest is meaningful).

Look, I know that I could break my brain trying to understand all this. I used to try a few years ago, but I got tired of it. It doesn’t make sense and nobody understands it no matter how much they try to convince you they do. In your world there is no such thing as absolute rest. Just take an orbit for example. According to physics an orbitting object is constantly falling, constantly missing, the larger object. Try understanding it. You can’t. Those who say they can are just pretending to themselves. It’s illogical to the point of foolishness. As is much of modern physics and cosmology.

You all have a choice. You can believe my plain words that you can understand. Or else you can allow yourself to be convinced that the scientist is correct simply because you can’t understand his clever sounding language. I speak plainly from the scriptures and the fathers. I’m not trying to dazzle you with my cleverness. I’m just being a plain guy. Why do you have such prejudice against plain men, and prefer for yourselves wise egg heads who can spin a clever story that you have no way of verifying whether or not it is true or not. Not ten in a thousand readers will understand what hec said in his post. And of those ten, most will be pretending they understand it. Maybe one in a thousand might understand it, and he will be an atheist.

Surely we have all had enough of being manipulated. Let’s just come clean and admit. No I don’t understand it. And no, just because I don’t understand it does not mean that I have to believe it.

 

[razredge]

The very fact that – with the full knowledge and approval of the Pope – Galileo was convicted of heresy for holding beliefs contrary to geocentrism is proof positive that geocentricism was a dogma of the Catholic Church. Otherwise, how else could Galileo be convicted of heresy for opposing it? It follows from the very definition of heresy itself.

She does now. But she didn’t then. Does anyone here doubt that, were they to be transported back in time to the 1600’s or earlier and criticized geocentrism, they would be found guilty of heresy?

Yes, you are quite correct. You will find however that the Church unfortunately does tend to indulge in historical revisionism from time to time.

Sungenis himself makes a strong argument for that view:
catholicintl.com/articles/Dave_Armstrong_Teaching_Falsehoods_About_Galileo.pdf

I don’t think too many people will argue that the Ordinary
Magisterium of the Catholic Church both condemned Galileo and the doctrine of
heliocentrism. It would be quite difficult to argue against this thesis considering the
following words issued and approved by the then reigning pope, Urban VIII, at the 1633
tribunal of Galileo:

“The proposition that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from its
place is absurd and false philosophically and formally heretical, because it is
expressly contrary to the Holy Scripture.”

“The proposition that the Earth is not the center of the world and immovable but
that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false
philosophically and theologically considered at least erroneous in faith.”2

Prior to issuing this decree, Pope Urban VIII was in protracted discussions with the Grand
Duke of Tuscany about putting a stop to Galileo, stating that Galileo’s teaching was a
“pernicious danger to the Catholic faith.”3
After the 1633 decree, Pope Urban VIII sent
letters to all the papal nuncios and universities of Europe stating that Galileo had been
condemned and that heliocentrism was branded as “formally heretical” and not to be taught

---

Most important is the fact that the 1633 decision condemning heliocentrism as
formally heretical has never been overturned by the Catholic Church, even to the present
day.

And most people on here think the ordinary magisterium is infallible too, see the huge issue we have with Humani Generis and polygenism.

 

[grannymh]

Incredible. More rhetoric. First we paint Geocentrists as madmen, then we paint them even worse, as protestants.

I do not know what you are talking about. Perhaps you may be confused by protocol and evaluation in post 294. These terms refer to the how something is accomplished. For example. Can the Governor of Florida declare war on Canada? Of course he can. Will the President of the United States immediately send troops across the border? Why not?

 

[grannymh]

And most people on here think the ordinary magisterium is infallible too, see the huge issue we have with Humani Generis and polygenism.

Take heart. There are a few Catholic remnants who understand and defend Catholicism in regard to the dissidents’ human polygenism. One is both lucky and fortunate to find them.

 

[LogisticsBranch]

So let’s look at a couple of specific scientific errors made by the geocentrists.The first is to confuse kinematics and dynamics. The argument is sometimes made that the “maths” works equally well in both geocentric and any-other-centric systems. It is true that one can make a kinematic transformation (ironically, the Galilean transformation for non-relativistic cases, otherwise the Lorentz transformation) between any two frames of reference to describe the motion of any body as seen from any arbitrary frame of reference. However, what this fails to do is to describe the forces which lead to accelerations - it fails to explain the orbits of bodies around one another which Newtonian mechanics (or to be precise Newtonian mechanics as refined by GR) does. As I have explained elsewhere, if a flea jumps off the earth, it is not dynamically equivalent to claim that the earth jumped off the flea, because the absolutely measurable accelerations in the rest frame of the earth and the flea are different.

This brings us to the question of the equivalence of frames of reference. Geocentrists claim that all frames are equivalent, but this is not so - even in GR. All inertial frames of reference are equivalent, but accelerating frames, including rotating frames can absolutely be distinguished by the forces in those frames. It is true that constant motion is relative - the concept of absolute uniform motion (or as far as GR goes, absolute motion following space-like geodesics) is meaningless because there is not an absolute rest frame (by the way, there is an argument that the rest frame of the CMB can be interpreted as the rest frame of the universe - ie the frame in which the sum of linear and angular momentum of all mass/energy in the universe is zero - but by that definition the earth is definitely not motionless). We look at another galaxy and we see that we are getting closer, but there is no way to distinguish between the case that we are moving towards it or it is moving towards us. However, the concept of absolute acceleration is not meaningless - indeed accelerations can be measured in absolute terms by the forces that arise in the rest frames of accelerating bodies. Wherever a body can be shown to be accelerating or if it can be shown that its velocity is varying over time, it cannot be also permanently at rest (accepting for the sake of argument that the concept of absolute rest is meaningful).

In the next post, I’ll look at a couple of consequences of these geocentric errors - confusing kinematic and dynamic considerations and overstating the principle of equivalence.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

Great! Sorry to be late on this topic and others. Been extremely busy.

I caught this on the run in an attempt to help with this discussion.

The Earth Observatory is part of the EOS Project Science Office located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This is what it states on their reputable website, “ Galileo discovered evidence to support Copernicus’ heliocentric theory when he observed four moons in orbit around Jupiter. Beginning on January 7, 1610, he mapped nightly the position of the 4 “Medicean stars” (later renamed the Galilean moons). Over time Galileo deduced that the “stars” were in fact moons in orbit around Jupiter. [Adapted from Galileo Galilei, 1610, Sidereus Nuncius (“The Starry Messenger.”)]

“At about the same time, German mathematician Johannes Kepler was publishing a series of laws that describe the orbits of the planets around the Sun. Still in use today, the mathematical equations provided accurate predictions of the planets’ movement under Copernican theory. In 1687, Isaac Newton put the final nail in the coffin for the Aristotelian, geocentric view of the Universe. Building on Kepler’s laws, Newton explained why the planets moved as they did around the Sun and he gave the force that kept them in check a name: gravity.” earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OrbitsHistory/

Also, “The three hundredth anniversary of the publication of Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica provided an appropriate occasion for the Holy See to sponsor a Study Week that investigated the multiple relationships among theology, philosophy and the natural sciences. The man so honoured, Sir Isaac Newton, had himself devoted much of his life to these same issues, and his reflections upon them can be found throughout his major works, his unfinished manuscripts and his vast correspondence. The publication of your own papers from this Study Week, taking up again some of the same questions which this great genius explored, affords me the opportunity to thank you for the efforts you devoted to a subject of such paramount importance.” (LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II TO REVEREND GEORGE V. COYNE, S.J. DIRECTOR OF THE VATICAN OBSERVATORY
vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/1988/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19880601_padre-coyne_en.html)

I agree with what EUGENIE C. SCOTT (NCSE) said in , “Heliocentrism, as Galileo discovered, was once considered a challenge to religion, because it was thought to conflict with the Bible. The Bible, read literally, assumes the ancient view of the cosmos that the earth is the center of the solar system and the sun revolves around it. Few Americans these days interpret the Bible as a geocentric document, but a healthy percentage still accept a literal reading of Genesis regarding the separate creation of plants and animals as independent “kinds”. This belief contrasts starkly with the scientific concept that living species are descended with modification from ancestors that differed from then. Thus evolution, and not theologically-acceptable heliocentrism, is vigorously opposed by an active segment of modern American society.”
ucmp.berkeley.edu/fosrec/Scott1.html

Sorry, I didn’t have space to post the beginning of Alec’s comments.

 

[hecd2]

Look, I know that I could break my brain trying to understand all this. I used to try a few years ago, but I got tired of it. It doesn’t make sense and nobody understands it no matter how much they try to convince you they do. In your world there is no such thing as absolute rest. Just take an orbit for example. According to physics an orbitting object is constantly falling, constantly missing, the larger object. Try understanding it. You can’t. Those who say they can are just pretending to themselves. It’s illogical to the point of foolishness. As is much of modern physics and cosmology.

There is no point trying to debate obscurantism. I’ll just make a few points:

1. excubitor completely misses the point of the flea example which is nothing to do with legs but shows that acceleration can be absolutely determined - it is unlike uniform motion which can only be determined relative to some other inertial frame - even if a little spring popped out of the earth and shot the flea in the air my point would stand: the rest frame of the flea is still the one doing the vast bulk of the accelerating
2. All these claims about the difficulty of science are nonsense and laziness. In order to understand elementary orbital mechanics, all you need is some simple high school maths and a modicum of study and thought. Catholicism is not an obscurantist religion
3. excubitor’s claims about the celestial poles are not strictly true (changes occur due to equinoctial precession, nutation, and changes in obliquity to the ecliptic) but it is true that over the period of a few years the position of the north and south celestial pole against the star field does not change very much. However, that doesn’t show that the earth is static given that the diameter of the earth’s orbit (~300 million kilometers) is a tiny tiny distance in astronomical terms. In fact the earth’s orbit can be clearly distinguished through both stellar parallax and stellar aberration. With regard to the latter, I notice that excubitor has studiously ignored it.

You all have a choice. You can believe my plain words that you can understand. Or else you can allow yourself to be convinced that the scientist is correct simply because you can’t understand his clever sounding language. I speak plainly from the scriptures and the fathers. I’m not trying to dazzle you with my cleverness. I’m just being a plain guy. Why do you have such prejudice against plain men, and prefer for yourselves wise egg heads who can spin a clever story that you have no way of verifying whether or not it is true or not. Not ten in a thousand readers will understand what hec said in his post. And of those ten, most will be pretending they understand it. Maybe one in a thousand might understand it, and he will be an atheist.

Surely we have all had enough of being manipulated. Let’s just come clean and admit. No I don’t understand it. And no, just because I don’t understand it does not mean that I have to believe it.

excubitor berates others for the use of rhetoric. What sweet irony.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Al_Moritz]

All of this talk about what does or does not establish Catholic dogma is irrelevant. The very fact that – with the full knowledge and approval of the Pope – Galileo was convicted of heresy for holding beliefs contrary to geocentrism is proof positive that geocentricism was a dogma of the Catholic Church. Otherwise, how else could Galileo be convicted of heresy for opposing it? It follows from the very definition of heresy itself.

She does now. But she didn’t then. Does anyone here doubt that, were they to be transported back in time to the 1600’s or earlier and criticized geocentrism, they would be found guilty of heresy?

Yes, you are quite correct. You will find however that the Church unfortunately does tend to indulge in historical revisionism from time to time.

Sungenis himself makes a strong argument for that view:
catholicintl.com/articles/Dave_Armstrong_Teaching_Falsehoods_About_Galileo.pdf

The Galileo issue is not quite that black and white:

catholic.com/library/Galileo_Controversy.asp

 

[hansgeorg]

You atheists must be glad you don’t have to spend eternity with people like excubitor. (1)

What has this got to do with the observation that the Earth goes around the Sun? Are you saying that it merely looks that way? (2)

That’s some dilemma you have there - either you believe in geocentrism or you don’t believe in God (3)

1. Being wrong about geocentrism may not in heliocentrics be treason to the faith. But calling people names or referring to them s undesirable company, even if otherwise Christian, and right on this issue, is a kind of treason. Of the brother in Christ, of his faith or charity if he gets into trouble, and of the possibility of conversion in an atheist.

Actually in a way these words do sum up one very sad side to atheist psychology: some would rather be in eternal pain than share bliss with corny company.

1. It does NOT look the way that the earth goes around the sun. This is not a prima facie impression, but a counterintuitive interpretation.
2. Rather like this: if I were convinced there was no god or angel in the entire universe, all matter, all mass and energy and speed of light and such, all physical blind forces, and life and our own consciousness just a by-product of it, a particular arrangement of them like a computer or an abacus, though “as yet we have not come far enough to make computers actually think” (to any sane man it looks like we never will, as we cannot make an abacus thik either), I might have to settle for heliocentrism as the only technical possibility for the universe to function.

Rossum posted two questions, one of which is revealing of this mindset: “what keeps the big mass of the sun in orbit around the small mass of the earth” or he might even have omitted twice “mass of”. Now, he is a western buddhist and seemingly a kind of atheist. To him, then, it is basically smallness of one mass that keeps it in orbit around bigness of other mass. To him that kind of question makes sense.

As I do believe in God and angels, it does not make sense to me, as an objectively pertinent question, once reiterated after the simple answer: “God or angels”. For daily rotation of universe around earth, the simple answer to that and to speeds involved is “God”. Which means I do not need earth to either rotate daily or to orbit a bigger orb to account for impressions that immediately say the opposite.

Someone said - and I have heard it before - if you take that sort of things into account, it is no longer science you are doing.

Quite so, I admit it is metaphysics rather than physics. But I insist that heliocentrism as commonly argued by scientists is a conclusion from erroneous and negative metaphysics, not from physics, still less immediately from observation.

 

[hansgeorg]

If the Holy Spirit did not even put details of the physical universe into sacred Scripture, then those details certainly cannot be a matter of faith and morals.

Book of Joshua? And Joshua said “sun stand still” and the sun stood still.

Galileo had gotten across this as confirmation that sun usually revolves daily around earth. Since this got against his theory, he devised an alternative explanation. And that was where his writings ceased to be mere astronomy and became a matter for Pope Urban VIII and for Cardinal Bellarmine and other inquisitors.

However, HELIOCENTRISM most certainly is not a matter put into sacred Scription, and therefore obviously cannot be a matter of faith and morals.

Some heliocentric catholics are trying to treat geocentrics as heretics, and therefore go against this when even quoting this.

Oh, the rule mentioned by Ludwig Ott obviously has to do with the fact that he was himself a heliocentric and knew the historic details of this debate. Obviously, if he did not make it up himself, it was maybe already an unanimous conclusion among his teachers.

 

[Prophesy]

As I do believe in God and angels, it does not make sense to me, as an objectively pertinent question, once reiterated after the simple answer: “God or angels”. For daily rotation of universe around earth, the simple answer to that and to speeds involved is “God”. Which means I do not need earth to either rotate daily or to orbit a bigger orb to account for impressions that immediately say the opposite.

Someone said - and I have heard it before - if you take that sort of things into account, it is no longer science you are doing.

Quite so, I admit it is metaphysics rather than physics. But I insist that heliocentrism as commonly argued by scientists is a conclusion from erroneous and negative metaphysics, not from physics, still less immediately from observation.

The physics of gravity makes sense. The math works out quite well for a heliocentric set to the solar system. To say that God causes the universe to rotate around the Earth is a statement with interesting consequences (such as if God intervenes in this movement, why not elsewhere?)

-Prophesy