Featured Geocentricity: What's It Hurt?

Abandon Randy Alcorn, and you'll do better. He's nuts. His teachings are more akin to Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witnesses than to Biblical Christianity.

You think God's throne has a location somewhere in outer space, and that angels are corporeal agents probably because of the superstitions surrounding the Nephilim, ignoring the fact that we're explicitly told that angels are spirits.

You haven't said it, but if you are a disciple of Alcorn's, then you believe that our reward is to live forever in a paradise on earth—this earth, in corporeal bodies.

You dream up in your head things about a culture you can know nothing about. You imagine a library that was preserved on the Ark and survived till the days of Moses, which gave Moses his source material for writing Genesis. You imagine that culture more advanced, probably because of interbreeding with gods. It's like you're writing a story about Atlantis.

When pressed for evidence of your presuppositions, you accuse the examiner of questioning the Scripture.

Do you want to imagine the antediluvian culture? Let's go by what were told about it:

The wickedness was great, and every imagination of the thoughts of men's hearts was only evil continually. They corrupted their way and filled—filled—the earth with violence. Instead of romanticizing this culture, it's more properly thought of like that of Sodom on a global scale, where one could look forward to being gang raped and murdered.

How do you think the children fared?

A culture wholly given to its appetites is not advancing, it's devolving from whatever height it may have been able to reach without the light of the Gospel into a hodgepodge of warring tribes. They were corrupt and took pleasure in beastiality and all forms of sodomy.

A culture like that is not focused on the preservation of it's heritage, and likely actively worked to purge itself of any hint of the light and goodness they hated. Fat, loud and violent, like the feminists marching naked with genitalia costumes and shouting their profanities and deifying and smearing their uncleanness wherever they go.

We are told, however, of something of that culture was brought onto the Ark in the heart of Ham, who indulged himself in his father's nakedness when he had gotten drunk.

If you want to go back and forth about what the antediluvian culture may have been like, or the location of Heaven, or whether or not angles are corporeal beings, the authorship of Genesis, or whether or not Alcorn is a nut, I'm game, but let's do it in another thread.

 

Just have to read one's posts, which you have not.

 

No

No, but that didn't stop them from imagining the Multiverse and Boltzmann Brains: cosmologies that tell us where the “dice” came from, who rigged the roll, and why.

Every Big Bang cosmologist, but they don't call them problems. There's the Horizon Problem which necessitated the creation of the Inflation theory, and the Expansion Problem that requires more energy than the observable universe can yield, the speed of galactic rotation which requires much more mass than is observed to hold the galaxies together.

96% of the universe has to be made up of energy and matter that is completely undetectable and has no other effect except to hold everything together in the Big Bang model. They call it dark matter and dark energy. The Big Bang cosmology needs it, so it must be there.

Two notable physicists: John Hartnett and Russell Humphreys. They both have books called Starlight and Time. Hartnett both specifically stated that their models do not require dark matter or energy. Hartnett goes in depth about the Hubble constant and other such stuff, and he takes pains to make the material comprehensible to the uninitiated. Humphreys was the first I read that told me about the assumptions behind

Jason Lisle works for Answers in Genesis, and isn't a Geocentrist, but he calls himself a Galactocentrist. Our Milky Way is at the center, rejecting the acentric model of Relativity.

There are more, and I haven't created a bibliography and won't. You can search the reputable Creation science sites like Answers in Genesis and The Institute in Creation Research.

There is no "geocentrism site" I go too. When I Google Geocentrism or the Geocentric Model, I find mostly criticisms and mocking of vocal geocentrists, but I read them anyway and go to the primary sources. I found that both apostles of modern physics, Einstein and Hawking will say that there is no advantage of any model over the other, and neither can be proved. (I've also found those presenting evidence that Einstein was wrong.)

I think the most remarkable thing I've stumbled across is the CMB map and how the dipoles and quadrupoles are aligned with the earth's ecliptic and equinox planes. The alignment is there. No one disputes it and science has dubbed the arrangement as the Axis of Evil, because it violates the Cosmological Principle (the acentric, boundless view of the universe) and plots the earth in the middle. The CMB was mapped three times, billions of dollars spent to verify the findings and eliminate foreground contamination as a cause of the apparent structure thereof. It's there. It has a structure, and that means direction in space, a frame of reference where absolute motion can be measured.

Am I convinced of the geocentric model? Not totally, but I've found that the motion of the earth is not a scientific certainty, as we've been told growing up. Ptolemy may have been right. And science hasn't proven Calvin and Luther wrong, and I no longer feel that the geocentric language of the Bible needs explaining in relative terms to make it palatable or to give me credibility to atheistic cosmologists, like is being done with the days of Creation.

Like I said. I don't have one.

But you don't have to learn about Relativity, except to be able to answer the evidence that is commonly tossed up like the Coriolis Effect and the Foucault Pendulum, and to understand that the General and Special theories contradict one another, most notably with the supposed speed limit of the universe. General relativity says that in strong gravitational or inertial forces light and bodies can travel many orders of magnitude faster than the limit imposed by the Special theory, and other such things. Who cares?

Nothing depends upon the heliocentric model, except philosophy.That is all. And that's no surprise, because the reason the stars were created were to be read from earth to understand times and seasons. Adam was not given a telescope. The stars have meaning when viewed from the surface of the earth. That doesn't mean we can't send probes and such to look closer, just like doctors aren't forbidden to cut a man open, but that doesn't mean man was intended to walk about with his organs in view.

Two years ago, I was talking about Martin Luther. We owe a great debt to Luther and Calvin for the liberties we enjoy in the West, and it's liberty in the Christian world view that put our technological advancement in warp speed. My daughter, who is picking up on liberal philosophies in her studies, said, "Luther opposed Galileo. He said the Bible describes sun in motion, not the earth, so the Catholics were right to arrest him." There you have it. The Bible is geocentric, so you can't trust it fully. Case closed. (Ironically, this was a few short months after I had mentioned how neat it was to be on a world speeding through space in a circuit around the sun. And, ironically, her response was, it would be better if it felt that way. I had to concede. Oh for a TARDIS.)

Well, the case with Luther and Galileo wasn't exactly as she had been told, but then I thought, How does one go about neutralizing the geocentric objections without having to become a theoretical physicist? I'd read Hartnett and Humphreys years prior to this, but that was because I wanted to know how they answered the puzzle of distant starlight in a young universe. So then I asked, what do we have that is of any real use to mankind in any facet of his life, that is dependent upon the knowledge that it is the earth that is moving, and not the sun? And there is none.

 

Yes, yes, yes. The Coriolis Effect and the Foucault Pendulum are well known to the physicists who will readily admit that we can assume a stationary earth and explain them both.

They're saying that. I'm not.

And you're right about the edge and center. Here's the rub: to put the earth anywhere but the center (or very near it), and still explain the observations of astronomers, the universe cannot have an edge or center. The physicists I named in a previous post say that, as well as did Edwin Hubble, who discovered that the distant stars were mostly other galaxies, and who also discovered that the light from all of them (except a few closest ones) is redshifted.

The redshift can be explained by either by distance or acceleration. Either way, to keep the earth out of the center of the phenomenon, the universe has to be isotropic, acentric and unbounded.

 

The geocentrism of Ptolemy and the heliocentrism of Copernicus doesn't transfer.

I am not saying the earth is in the center of the solar system and that it holds the sun and planets in orbit around it, and that is not what modern geocentrists are saying either. And heliocentrism is moot. So what that the sun is the center of the solar system? Relativity is not heliocentric. It is acentric. And, no, the GPS does not depend on knowing the motion of the earth. Since the earth is the reference, it is assumed to be stationary.

But GPS doesn't feed the hungry or clothe the naked or heal the sick, or raise its voice for the widow and orphan. Some GPS phenomena was cited as evidence against the special theory of relativity*, which, if falsified, means that the luminiferous ether (which is asserted in the General theory, though of a different nature) may exist, and if it does exist, The Michelson-Morley experiment failed to detect it, which would mean the earth is stationary.

*https://www.ion.org/publications/abstract.cfm?articleID=754

 

No, you cited him to shore up your JW and Mormonish ideas.

Cite it.

It was a depravity that God responded to with total destruction, like that of Sodom. Egypt hadn't gotten there.

Noaic authorship. There's a new one. You're just pulling stuff out of your butt and calling it scholarship.

So? You're assuming Adam Noah and Shem were historians that committed things to writing. What in particular in the text is a phrase or idiom or part of speech that is indicative of that culture?

I keep asking, and you keep not answering.

I didn't say anything about Noah. I said something about Ham.

I'm done. I don't have time to discuss the fairy tales of your imagination and Jewish fables.

 

I haven't studies the nuances of these things and am not likely to. What I've been told is settled science is arguable and based on arbitrary assumptions, and the systems are still being studied and tweaked because of predictions that haven't panned out.

Maybe, maybe not. You can't know. The bottom line is this: Even if it is moving, a universe with a center and an edge is not allowable, and it is rejected solely on philosophical grounds, because observations of astronomers put us in close proximity to that center and that implies purpose and design, and that is a most unwelcome implication.

 

It has everything to do with relativity. You've asserted the truth is otherwise, so saying the sun rises is relative terminology. So when Christ said His Father causes His sun to rise, if the truth is that God's earth is rotating:

1) Christ is describing the phenomenon in relative terms.
2) Christ was ignorant of the motion of the earth, like his Apostles and ministers in the following years
3) Christ knowingly perpetuated a fallacious notion to make a theological point.

Those are the only possibilities. I can't imagine we know something that Christ did not. To, me, the Truth would never perpetuate a falsehood. So if the earth is rotating, and the sun isn't really rising, the Relativity is the truth, and we know God prefers an earth-centered coordinate plane.

Galileo.

But the stories are told, because 'heliocentricity' puts God's revelation on the defensive. All efforts to explain the geocentric language of the Bible sound contrived and shallow. That is the main thrust of it.

The Grand Poobahs of cosmology explicitly state that the heliocentric and geocentric models contain no truth value, as if one model is obviously true and the other is not. That's not the case. Both models can be assumed to be true with equal justification.