In my opinion he won’t be considered mainstream until he gives up any reference to geocentrism.
Which is dumb. Because geocentrism, under Relativity, is a valid (though often more complicated) model.
My physics teacher (an extremely anti-religion atheist) even told us that just off-hand when discussing Relativity.
In terms of the empirically proveable…there is no center of the universe, and no universal frame of reference…so you can take anything as stationary (and in fact that IS what we assume for most of our on-earth small-scale experiments)
And for some things, like the Moon-earth system…it actually makes the math easier. When investigating the moon’s orbit, we take the earth to be stationary and the moon to be going “around it” because if we took the sun as stationary in this case…the moon is moving relative to IT in a weird loopy thing or cycloid.
geocentrism is not a doctrine; I don’t think Divine Revelation answers the scientific questions that he tries to answer on that point. On this topic he is speculating science, not theology.
It’s actually really NOT science he is discussing with geocentrism. And that is where he messes up. When he tries to “prove it” scientifically that earth is the center of the universe…he is going to look like a fool.
Because, scientifically, it MAY be taken as the center…but that doesn’t mean it is scientifically true in an absolute sense…because its relativity and anything may be taken as the center.
From “inside the box” we cannot say there is any universal frame of reference. We are inside the System (the universe) and so cannot step outside and say what is absolutely moving and what is not. It would take going into a higher dimension and “looking down” at the whole universe to prove if there was any sort of absolute frame of reference (for the universe alone at least, because then we would also have the new problem of taking into account things moving relative to the new higher dimension itself!)…something science cannot do, so from it has to treat everything as relative.
I don’t think it’s religiously important…but I find it interesting that this is, in fact, one of those things that ONLY Revelation could tell us (ie, if there is, in fact, an absolute frame of reference if one looks at the universe from the outside in) because science cannot step outside the universe to look in, and so has to make its models relative.
And yet I agree with Robert’s basic political point: science uses the Galileo story to push their own agenda. Science teaches little kids that “the Church was wrong” and that the Earth revolves around the Sun…even though Science actually works (with relativity) under the assumption there is no empirically proveable center, and that the earth revolves around the sun AS MUCH AS the sun revolves around the earth.
And that is an ideological choice that science chooses to bombard kids with as young as elementary school. Earth and Sun are BOTH vaild reference frames, and they know it…so why they are so insistant in making lay people think it is the Sun…must be a political choice.
For Catholics, ideologically, the Earth would be the unmoving center (if there is an absolute center when looking from the outside in) and should generally be taken as the reference frame in theological thought.
If science wants to use other models (all valid internally) to make the math easier…fine. But don’t tell little kids that the Sun is absolutely the center (when you really treat it all as relative) and that “Galileo was right and the Church crushed science” when really, niether Galileo nor the Church were right or wrong.
They were both scientifically right in their respective positions (the earth and the sun can both be taken as the center) but Galileo was wrong in insisting that his position was, from a scientific standpoint, absolutely right (when really, to science, it is all relative and both were right). But the Church may or may not have been right about the earth being absolutely the center when looked at “from the outside in”…something science cannot test because it would require going up a dimension. So frankly, only belief could tell us…though I don’t believe that is really a subject of revelation.
