Apparently there’s an insurrectionist branch of the Catholic Church in Chicago that’s pushing the church reject Galileo (again) and embrace a geocentric universe. I’ve always wondered how these folks explain the fact that our space probes managed to sail by the outer planets, taking plenty of pictures, land on Mars, land on Venus, and visit asteroids. All the mathematical calculations for guiding these probes is based on a heliocentric solar system.
This whole gravity thing is a conspiracy by the orthodox science establishment man!
I’m sorry you want them to accept it based on satellites?
There are still people that don’t think we landed on the moon, that George Bush remote controlled the plains into the World Trade center, that fire can’t weaken steel, contrails are actually chemtrails, a hollow earth with beings living below, 300 mpg carburetors etc etc etc.
Logic doesn’t work with these people too.
And those are just the major ones.
And everyone knows the flat earth and a geocentric universe, and all the things I mentioned above have all been created by Skull and bones to distract us from their controlling of the world.
Madness.
Maybe that sect is led by that Snuffy Pflueger nut.
The Marcel Lefebvre loonies still around? At least they are not as harmful as the Theology of Liberation idiots. Both came to be about the same time.
When I was preparing a tutorial for my students about reliable and unreliable sources, I found a web site that tied the 9/11 Truther stuff in with the flat earth stuff, and amazingly enough, in their alternatively logiced reality, it all fit together.
They should have good representation in Terrapass Co2 and tree-planting indulgences among the eco-Elites!
Ah, but the Earth is the center of the universe! Or rather, we can just as arbitrarily center the universe on Earth as we can any other point of our choice. Indeed, we can make Jerusalem the center of the Universe, and the equations will all still work out!
It’s just that the equations involved become a lot simpler if we choose a different center–say, the Sun–or perhaps even the center of the Milky Way.
And then there’s Relativity. It makes the equations a little bit more complicated, but a tiny bit more accurate. Unfortunately, when you’re trying to keep a satalite in geocentric orbit, you need that additional accuracy.
(To counter the visit to the moon claim, someone offered an obscure, but very good bit of evidence, that we were really on the moon: radio signals. People around the world pointed their antennas at the moon, and received the transmissions. This would have been near-impossible to forge.)
Now that I’ve looked at the article, it causes me to twitch a little: as much as I respect Holy Scripture, I don’t think it’s a wise course of action to base a scientific theory on a handful of verses that you think ought to mean a certain thing.
It would be one thing to say the geocentric theory is false, if they have data to back it up, or if there was a book, or even a chapter, in scripture, describing in detail why the Earth was the center of the Universe and why it mattered. It’s another thing entirely to base it on a verse here, and a verse there, which might have been used because it sounded nice, in a literature sort of way, but not in a “let’s take this literally!” sort of way.
“Indeed, we can make Jerusalem the center of the Universe, and the equations will all still work out!”
In thinking about this line from my previous comment: could you imagine what the equations would look like? The Earth will be orbiting around Jerusalem in a lop-sided sort of way. If we chose London instead, the rotations would be even more lopsided! I wish I had the time to work out the equations, or even to animate a model…
Come to think of it, one thing I like to do every so often is to imagine that my vehicle is completely stationary, and that the Earth–perhaps even the entire universe–moves according to what I do in my car–rotate the Earth with the gas pedal, and spin it with my steering wheel. A rather extreme example of Relativity!
Alphaeus: the problem with your theory is that your car is not stationary with respect to itself. Perhaps your flywheel is the center of the universe?
Seriously, I wonder if these people realize that the Church’s geocentric teachings came not from the Bible, but from the ancient Greeks, who were at least nominally pagan, and more likely completely atheistic. (I might add that the Renaissance Popes copied not only the Greeks’ and Romans’ astronomy, but their sexual morality as well).
kenno271, The center of the car can be taken to be the center of the universe. Trying to imagine the flywheel to be the center…now that’s an interesting thought experiment! The car spinning around the flywheel, the Earth moving under the tires, etc…it almost gives me vertigo thinking about it!
Alpheus kinda beat me to it but:
I’ve always considered the universe to revolve around ME, but I do acknowledge that it isn’t a regular orbit. :)