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StAnastasia
Guest
Cassini, I’m intrigued by your mention of AD White’s reference to Dante. You’re not suggesting Dante’s cosmology was correct, are you?
If God both created the Universe and cares about humans, why did he make it so large?
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StAnastasia
Guest
You said,
I ask, how is it coherent for you to assume that “the infinite steps in the chain reaction of steps from the Big Bang on” which produced life on earth would not also produce life on similar planets? Are you assuming that generating life on earth was so difficult that the probability is vanishingly small that life would have arisen on another planet? Or that God’s creative power could not lead to the origin of life many times?
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hecd2
Guest
Naw - you’re ok - back on topic now that you’re talking about the size of the universe and what that implies for theology and now that you’ve stopped talking about what people on earth have to do to be saved.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
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ronnie_bonigli
Guest
Why is this so hard for you to get? Sure, God may have “planned in” life on other planets, I think I’ve said that at least a half dozen different ways now. But we ***don’t ***know that, and you don’t just assume, “since the universe is so very large, the odds of probability dictate that there must be other life out there”. If God wanted man to be the only intelligent beings with free will in the universe he would have planned the chain of events (and even the word “planned” isn’t accurate since God is outside of time) so that the multitude of events would converge on just this one planet to start life.
What you don’t do is say “according to the thinking of atheistic materialism, the universe is ruled by blind chance and with a near infinity of blind chance opportunities going on out there, there must be other incidences of life . . . therefore the Christian doctrine that man is somehow special in God’s eyes is obsolete and Christian theology needs to be revised”. The two halfs of that statement don’t go together, you can’t start with an atheistic premise and end with a conclusion about man’s relationship to God.
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StAnastasia
Guest
This paragraph is not entirely coherent, so I’m not sure what you’re objecting to. The possibility of life having evolved elsewhere in the universe does not at all imply that the view that humanity is “special in God’s eyes” is obsolete. That I exist need not mean that you are not special in God’s eyes. That rational and moral and spiritual life might have evolved on other planets in some of the 300 billion other galaxies need not imply that our life is not “special.” It’s not a zero sum game.
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StAnastasia
Guest
That sounds pretty deterministic to me. Do you mean that from before the Big Bang God planned for the Chicxulub asteroid to wipe out the dinosaurs at the K-T boundary to make room for mammalian evolution? Or that God commandeered an asteroid in a suitably earth-intersecting orbit not long before impact?
The deterministic approach bothers me. At what point would God have stopped programming things deterministically, so that determinism gave way to free will? Half a million years ago? 200,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago?
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ronnie_bonigli
Guest
oh, I’m sorry, it must have been the other StAnastasia that made the below post, I get you two confused.
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Ignatius
Guest
Why would the size of the universe be any problem?
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StAnastasia
Guest
It wouldn’t.
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StAnastasia
Guest
I understand - that happens!
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McatholicN
Guest
Is it acceptable for a Catholic to believe in aliens?
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StAnastasia
Guest
If some Catholics believe in guardian angels, I can’t imagine why belief in aliens would be off the table. The sky’s the limit.
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cassini
Guest
I kinda knew you would ask that St A. I included White’s Dante piece for readers to see the ingredients of a geocentric cosmology in ‘poetic form’ to show that the doctrine of geocentrism embraced every aspect of Christian belief, the material and spiritual world in one beautiful picture. As yet, no one has even attempted to portray a heliocentric doctrine in the same way. I wanted to show readers what was lost to Christianity due to the fixed sun heresy.
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ronnie_bonigli
Guest
Cassini if Dante’s piece showed geocentric cosmology in ‘poetic form’, could not the first chapters of Genesis also be conveying great spiritual truths in poetic form? And when we see the sum total of passages in the entire bible that even hint at a geocentrism, they are very arguably insignificant, there’s almost nothing there. When NASA, based on calculations of the speed and present location of the earth in its orbit around the Sun, and the speed and present location of Mars in its orbit around the Sun, can then calculate to an infinitesimally accurate degree to location of Mars on a particular date one year in the future and then launch a space probe based on those calculation to reach Mars on that particular date in the future, you have to wonder how else they could do that while working with an incorrect model of the solar system.
If you were on a merry go round and someone pointed out to you that you and the horse you were sitting on were not rotating around the center axis of that merry go round, that instead, you were stationary and all the trees and buildings and the earth itself were rotating in reference to you, and they then showed you these complex and very elaborate calculations that showed that model “worked”, I’m sure you’d point out that the “rotating merry go round” model is about a million times simpler and much more elegant and by Occam’s Razor, you’d discard the what appeared to be an *ad hoc * jury rigged and hopelessly complex “everything else rotating in reference to the stationary merry go round” model. No?
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cassini
Guest
First Ronnie, because the Fathers of Catholicism interpreted Genesis for the Catholic faith, for Catholics to understand thereafter. Not all was interpreted literally, but the Fathers knew some was metaphor, some symbolic, some alegorical, some poetry. Now if the Fathers got it all wrong as Moderns insist, then the fundamentals of Catholic biblical exegesis and hermeneutics are worthless. Dante the poet came later.
There are hundreds of immovable earths and moving sun examples in Scripture, NOT ONE HELIOCENTRIC. Here’s 5.
“And Ezachias had said to Isaias: What shall be the sign that the Lord will heal me and that I shall go up to the temple of the Lord the third day? And Isais said to him…Wilt thou that the shadow go forward ten lines or that it go back so many degrees? And Ezechias said: It is an easy matter for the shadow to go forward ten lines, and I do not desire that this be done, but let it return back ten degrees. And Isaias the prophet called upon the Lord, and he brought the shadow ten degrees backwards by the lines, by which it had already gone down in the dial of Achaz”. — (IV Kings 20:8-11).
“Behold I will bring again the shadow of the lines, by which it is now gone down in the sun dial of Achaz with the sun, ten lines backwards. And the sun returned ten lines by the degrees by which it was gone down”. — (Isaias 38:8)
“Then Josue spoke to the Lord, in the day that he delivered the Amorrhite in the sight of the children of Israel, and he said before them: Move not, O sun, toward Gabaon, nor thou, O moon, toward the valley of Ajalon. And the sun and the moon stood still… Is it not written in the book of the just [now lost]? So the sun stood still in the midst of the heaven, and hasted not to go down the space of one day. There was not before nor after so long a day, the Lord obeying the voice of a man, and fighting for Israel.” — (Josue 10:12-13).
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth standeth forever. The sun riseth, and goeth down, and returneth to his place: and there rising again, Maketh his round by the south, and turneth again to the north: the spirit goeth forward, surveying all places round about, and returneth to his circuits. All the rivers run unto the sea, yet the sea doth not overflow; unto the place from whence the rivers come they return, to flow again…Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say; behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us.” — (Ecclesiastes 1:4-7, 10).
“The heavens show forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands….
He hath set his tabernacle in the sun: and he, as a bridegroom coming out of his bride chamber, Hath rejoiced as a giant to run the way. His going out is from the end of heaven, and his circuit even to the end thereof: and there is no one that can hide himself from his heat.” —(Ps. 18:1, 6-7).
Hardly ‘arguably insignificant’ Ronnie.
Now as for all that NASA stuff. Really Ronnie. Please study the phenomenon of relative movement. If you did you, an intelligent guy by all signs, you will see there is a G and a H explanation for all such motions of NASA. This knowledge is essential to see how a guy like me is not proven wrong by NASA, Newton etc.
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ronnie_bonigli
Guest
I admit I find this fascinating, you seem intelligent and you are also geocentrist. Ok, one last attempt here. cassini, if you could just answer me this one question; “Why do the planets have those paths they trace across the sky?”
Now we know understand, as we did not in the time of Ptolemy, that gravity doesn’t merely apply to an apple falling to the earth, it is an attraction between all objects. The reason the moon displays the path we see as it moves across the sky from day to day and month to month is because it’s in orbit around the earth. And the reason it’s in orbit around the Earth is because it is moving at a good speed and is caught in the earth’s gravitational field, if it was moving slower it would crash to earth, just like an apple from a tree, if it was moving faster it would escape the earth’s gravitation and head away from earth. But it’s going at a good enough speed to just keep rotating around the earth. From this understanding of gravitation and orbits, we have now launched thousands of rockets and man-made communication satellites into orbits around the earth. They did exactly what we thought they would do, based on our understanding of gravity and orbits. And we’ve even sent satellites into orbits around other nearby planets like Mars and Jupiter. Those satellites then “obeyed” the law of gravity and went into orbit around those planets, just like the moons that were already in orbit around many of those planets.
Now, in the heliocentric “model” of the solar system, those paths across the night sky of all the other planets are explained perfectly when we consider that they are in fact in orbit around the sun, and the orbit itself is explained by the gravitational field of the Sun. So when we look at a planet like Mars, that say, moves in a path north across the night sky for months, and then one day turns on a dime and then move south across the sky for months, we have to ask; “what is driving it to make this strange zigzag pattern wandering across the sky?” Are the moon and the man-made satellites subject to laws of gravity, yet the other planets in the solar system are exempt from this force, and the other planets just move left for a few months and then right for a few months simply as if they have free will?
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MindOverMatter2
Guest
What are you talking about? So basically your saying if a past interpretation of scripture is found to be wrong that therefore the catholic faith is false? This shows a lack of faith in my opinion.
This is not a doctrinal teaching about a stationary sun. You are aware of that aren’t you?
Clearly according to their perspective the sun appears to or looks like it is moving around the earth and thus naturally they speak as if it does. If they are found to be mistaken, I fail to see why this would be problematic for Catholic doctrine, unless of course it is one of the prime directives of theology and scripture is to be scientifically accurate about the behaviour of physical objects in space. If that isn’t the case, then we can expect to unearth all kinds of scientific errors in ancient scripture the more we find out about the universe. It seems that your position is precisely the idea that Catholic faith is fundamentally and thus doctrinally rooted in the old scientific view of the world, and therefore cannot possibly depart from that view without destroying the essence of what you think the catholic faith is. Its up to you to prove this. Of course if you do, I am not going to waste my time defending the Catholic faith any-more. I refuse to buy in to the paranoid delusion that the devil put dinosaur bones in the ground to fool us, and that there is this grand conspiracy to attack the church by destroying the old scientific view of the world. I am sorry but that is not a faith worthy of consideration.
Again, the author is expressing himself according to his experiences, nothing more and nothing less. The value of what he has said is not intended to be measured by his scientific understanding, but rather by the point that there is nothing new under the sun and that man cannot boast.
.” —(Ps. 18:1, 6-7).
Hardly ‘arguably insignificant’ Ronnie.
Sorry but it is insignificant, since the purpose of the scripture you quoted was never about giving an accurate objective scientific picture of how things really are.
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cassini
Guest
Ronnie, it is a pleasure to discuss this with you. It is extremely rare to find anyone open to try to understand what we all have been trained to reject. Heliocentrism has a grip on the human mind now like drugs have on the drug addict. The prejudice is now complete. The reason for this is because it is the Devil’s most perfect attack on the Church. So good is this ‘Father of lies’, that today churchmen are in the forefront of the attack against the Church of 1616 and 1633. If you do not believe me look at Gaudium et Spes No 36 where a Church council ATTACKED previous popes (under the name of ‘theologians’) and Pope John Paul II’s continuous insulting of them throughout his papacy, telling all they didn’t know how to intrepet the Bible properly in their ignorance of science, and that they unfairly and unjustly tried Galileo. Indeed if this does not ring wearning bells in your Catholic head, how about his receiving the Galileo Galilei award from Italy’s Freemasons, the highest award given to a ‘non-member’. The fact that Italian freemasonry chose Galileo as the one to name their greatest award after should tell you the truth of it, if you know how to think as a Catholic.
Anyway, enough of that. Remember now, I fully accept geocentrism as a metaphysical truth because two popes, one who defined and declared H heresy, and because the other confirmed the 1616 decree as immutible. I satisfied myself it was a matter of faith (the true interpretation of the scriptures, and studied Bellarmine’s letter to find out why it was a serious matter of Catholic faith. I then studied every so-called proof for H and they were no proofs. I studied Newton and Einstein, just to see where they fit in with the ‘truth’ and found a SCAM ronnie, ad hoc theories and confirming of consequents.
Continued:
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cassini
Guest
Now your questions.
“Why do the planets have those paths they trace across the sky?”
They do so according to some law created by God. I now tend towards electromagnetism, the only proven phenomenon capable of moving things and holding things immobile.
**“Now we know [and] understand, as we did not in the time of Ptolemy, that gravity doesn’t merely apply to an apple falling to the earth, it is an attraction between all objects.” **
No we do not. The only ‘physics’ postulated as to what drives the moon and planets in their orbits was heliocentric physics. First it was Newton who proposed his theory of Universal Gravitation that you say ‘we know and understand’. Now you have been trained to ‘know’ Newton’s ‘law of gravity’. You have never had a choice because after Newton’s Law of gravitation it was bye, bye geocentrism. From 1700 geocentrism was gone, so 300 years of speculation was one-sided science.
Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force
that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional
to the squares of the distance between them.
In other words, matter moves itself. Yeh, the perfect perpetual-motion theory.
‘But’, I hear you say, ‘surely scientists throughout the last 300 years eventually confirmed Newton’s law of gravitation - with that instant attraction inherent in every particle of matter and manifested in the movements of the solar system - to be correct? Well actually to begin with, before we come to Einstein’s correction of his theory, even he could not come to terms with his own idea, let alone the many universities in Catholic Europe as Andrew White tells us, for who could take seriously a man that would promulgate a theory as a law that he himself knew had no possible empirical justification. Let us now see what he said in some letters on gravitation sent to the Rev. Richard Bentley soon after his Principia was published:
‘You sometimes speak on gravity as essential and inherent to matter.
Pray do not ascribe that notion to me…’
‘It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and effect the matter without mutual contact…is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who, in philosophical matters, has a competent faculty of th¬inking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether the agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.’ — Newton’s Correspondence, Royal Society Edition, 1693.
Perhaps the biggest problem for Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation lay in the question ‘how does this attraction work through space?’ Here is a Newtonian asking the question:
‘If space is really empty how is it that the sun and moon exercise influence over the earth? “Technical action at a distance is impossible. A body can only act immediately on what it is in contact with; it must be by the action of contiguous particles – that is, practically, through a continuous medium, that force can be transmitted across space. Radiation is not the only thing the earth feels from the sun; there is in addition its gigantic gravitative pull, a force or tension more than what a million million steel rods, each seventeen feet in diameter, could stand. What mechanism transmits this gigantic force? —Sir Bertram Windle: The Church and Science, p.59.
Arthur Koestler presented this inconsistency like so:
‘Newton’s concept of a ‘gravitational force’ has always lain as an undigested lump in the stomach of science…He in fact could only get around the “absurdity” of his own concept by invoking either ubiquitous ether (whose attributes are equally paradoxical) and/or God in person. The whole notion of a ‘force’ which acts instantly at a distance without an intermediary agent, which traverses the vastest distances in seconds, and pulls at immense stellar objects with ubiquitous ghost fingers -the whole idea is so mystical and unscientific, that modern minds like Kepler, Galileo and Descar¬tes, who were fighting to break loose from Aristotelian animism, would instinctively reject it as a relapse into the past… What made Newton postulate nevertheless a modern law of nature, was his mathematical formulation of the mysterious entity to which it referred.’ — The Sleepwalkers, p.344.
So you see Ronnie, we know nothing except how to MEASURE gravity.
Newton’s Law of Gravity‘This method, of which the germ was contained in the scientific revolution initiated at the turn of the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon and which has since been adopted by every branch of science and by countless pseudo-sciences such as politics, economics, the social sciences, and even art, religion, ethics and psychology, is as follows. Take a phenomenon that can be observed, produce a mathematical measurement for it that fits, concoct a hypothesis which, however far fetched, could possibly account for the phenomenon, and finally call the hypothesis and the mathematical formula that supports it a law and regardless of whether or not there is any theoretical justification for it whatever, apply it throughout the universe. And that is all that the famous Law of Gravitation consists of.
As for satellites and probes, well they will do the same no matter what CAUSES the inertial forces about the earth and planets, be it G causes or H causes
Now here is a question for you Ronnie. The earth is supposedly doing 70,000mph. So if a spaceship blasts off the earth at 5,000mph, at what speed should it move through space to get to these planets?
“Why do the planets have those paths they trace across the sky?”
They do so according to some law created by God. I now tend towards electromagnetism, the only proven phenomenon capable of moving things and holding things immobile.
**“Now we know [and] understand, as we did not in the time of Ptolemy, that gravity doesn’t merely apply to an apple falling to the earth, it is an attraction between all objects.” **
No we do not. The only ‘physics’ postulated as to what drives the moon and planets in their orbits was heliocentric physics. First it was Newton who proposed his theory of Universal Gravitation that you say ‘we know and understand’. Now you have been trained to ‘know’ Newton’s ‘law of gravity’. You have never had a choice because after Newton’s Law of gravitation it was bye, bye geocentrism. From 1700 geocentrism was gone, so 300 years of speculation was one-sided science.
Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force
that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional
to the squares of the distance between them.
In other words, matter moves itself. Yeh, the perfect perpetual-motion theory.
‘But’, I hear you say, ‘surely scientists throughout the last 300 years eventually confirmed Newton’s law of gravitation - with that instant attraction inherent in every particle of matter and manifested in the movements of the solar system - to be correct? Well actually to begin with, before we come to Einstein’s correction of his theory, even he could not come to terms with his own idea, let alone the many universities in Catholic Europe as Andrew White tells us, for who could take seriously a man that would promulgate a theory as a law that he himself knew had no possible empirical justification. Let us now see what he said in some letters on gravitation sent to the Rev. Richard Bentley soon after his Principia was published:
‘You sometimes speak on gravity as essential and inherent to matter.
Pray do not ascribe that notion to me…’
‘It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and effect the matter without mutual contact…is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who, in philosophical matters, has a competent faculty of th¬inking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether the agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.’ — Newton’s Correspondence, Royal Society Edition, 1693.
Perhaps the biggest problem for Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation lay in the question ‘how does this attraction work through space?’ Here is a Newtonian asking the question:
‘If space is really empty how is it that the sun and moon exercise influence over the earth? “Technical action at a distance is impossible. A body can only act immediately on what it is in contact with; it must be by the action of contiguous particles – that is, practically, through a continuous medium, that force can be transmitted across space. Radiation is not the only thing the earth feels from the sun; there is in addition its gigantic gravitative pull, a force or tension more than what a million million steel rods, each seventeen feet in diameter, could stand. What mechanism transmits this gigantic force? —Sir Bertram Windle: The Church and Science, p.59.
Arthur Koestler presented this inconsistency like so:
‘Newton’s concept of a ‘gravitational force’ has always lain as an undigested lump in the stomach of science…He in fact could only get around the “absurdity” of his own concept by invoking either ubiquitous ether (whose attributes are equally paradoxical) and/or God in person. The whole notion of a ‘force’ which acts instantly at a distance without an intermediary agent, which traverses the vastest distances in seconds, and pulls at immense stellar objects with ubiquitous ghost fingers -the whole idea is so mystical and unscientific, that modern minds like Kepler, Galileo and Descar¬tes, who were fighting to break loose from Aristotelian animism, would instinctively reject it as a relapse into the past… What made Newton postulate nevertheless a modern law of nature, was his mathematical formulation of the mysterious entity to which it referred.’ — The Sleepwalkers, p.344.
So you see Ronnie, we know nothing except how to MEASURE gravity.
Newton’s Law of Gravity‘This method, of which the germ was contained in the scientific revolution initiated at the turn of the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon and which has since been adopted by every branch of science and by countless pseudo-sciences such as politics, economics, the social sciences, and even art, religion, ethics and psychology, is as follows. Take a phenomenon that can be observed, produce a mathematical measurement for it that fits, concoct a hypothesis which, however far fetched, could possibly account for the phenomenon, and finally call the hypothesis and the mathematical formula that supports it a law and regardless of whether or not there is any theoretical justification for it whatever, apply it throughout the universe. And that is all that the famous Law of Gravitation consists of.
As for satellites and probes, well they will do the same no matter what CAUSES the inertial forces about the earth and planets, be it G causes or H causes
Now here is a question for you Ronnie. The earth is supposedly doing 70,000mph. So if a spaceship blasts off the earth at 5,000mph, at what speed should it move through space to get to these planets?
C
cassini
Guest
The UNANIMOUS teaching of the Fathers is considered infallible by the Church. The unanimous interpretation of the Fathers was geocentric in faith as well as in reality.
Council of Trent stated
‘Furthermore, in order to curb imprudent clever persons, the synod decrees that no one who relies on his own judgement in matters of faith and morals, which pertain to the building up of Christian doctrine, and that no one who distorts the Sacred Scripture according to his own opinions, shall dare to interpret the said Sacred Scripture contrary to that sense which is held by holy Mother Church, whose duty it is to judge regarding the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures, or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers, even though interpretations of this kind were never intended to be brought to light. Let those who shall oppose this be reported by their ordinaries and be punished with the penalties prescribed by law.’ — (Denzinger - 786)
Now if their geocentric reading is found false, then yes, the Catholic Church, which issued the above teaching is also false.
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