The new geocentrists say your cosmology is wrong. The Earth does not revolve around the Sun. Instead, the Sun revolves around the Earth—and not just the Sun, but all the planets and stars. Indeed, in their telling, the whole universe revolves around the Earth each twenty-four hours.
You might scoff at such notions, but over the past forty years, Catholic and Protestant geocentrists have been gaining converts. While many of their arguments have been couched in terms of physics and astronomy, their fallback position is religious. They say the Church and the Bible mandate geocentrism. Their movement remains tiny, but more and more people are coming to agree with them.
Many Protestant geocentrists push the King James Only school of thought: only the Authorized Version, produced under James VI (of Scotland) and I (of England), is valid Scripture in English, and that translation should be read in a particularly literal way. Their Catholic counterparts are not so much concerned with a preferred translation as with literal interpretation both of the sacred text and of magisterial documents. They say that the Church in the past infallibly taught geocentrism and still teaches it today.
Unhappy consequences
That is wrong, and wrong ideas can have unhappy consequences. People can live with bad science more easily than with bad religion. No one ever became a bad man for believing the Moon is made of green cheese, but bad men have been made from bad religion—just as good men, particularly saints, have been made from good religion.
When a crabbed reading of Scripture is joined to an insupportable understanding of the physical world, today’s adherent may become tomorrow’s agnostic, both in science and religion. After spending time as a follower of the geocentric gnosis, he may conclude that sure knowledge is not attainable in either realm. The new geocentrists are keen on having people accept the truth as they understand it to be, but in the end they will leave some people wondering whether truth can be ascertained at all.
For Catholic proponents of the theory, geocentrism seems a necessary consequence of the need to protect the Bible from flaccid interpretations. To interpret scriptural passages today in a way different from that of four centuries ago—or of seventeen centuries ago, if one considers the Fathers of the Church—risks undercutting the whole of Scripture. To understand a verse now in a figurative way, when it was understood in earlier times in a literal way, opens the door not only to the abandonment of biblical inerrancy but even to the abandonment of the Church itself.
Protestant geocentrist Gerardus Bouw lists the two “strongest geocentric passages” of Scripture from the Authorized Version (see sidebar p. x). The verse from Ecclesiastes is representative of many in the Bible. It is easy to list dozens of verses that refer to the Sun rising and setting. Ecclesiastes 1:5 is as plainspoken in this regard as any other verse. But how should these verses be taken, literally or figuratively? Today’s geocentrists say they all should be taken literally. They think the multiplicity of such verses results in a strong argument in favor of their position. Stronger still, in their minds, is Joshua 10:13.
Bouw says that “God could have said, ‘And the Earth stopped turning so that the Sun appeared to stand still,’ but he didn’t.” Bouw fails here to refer to literary types used in Scripture. The Bible is replete with imagery and symbolism. Jesus says, “I am the door” (John 10:9). Not a single Fundamentalist Protestant thinks that he is a slab of wood with hinges on one side and a latch on the other. Would Bouw claim that Jesus “knew it not to be true” when he said he was a door? Was it a matter of it being “inconvenient for [Jesus] to tell the truth”? If Bouw’s exegesis of Joshua 10:13 is the best he can muster, then his biblical arguments will fail to impress anyone who is not already both a geocentrist and a Fundamentalist. (All quotes from the essay “Geocentrism: A Fable for Educated Man?” at reformation.edu.)
Wrong—literally
Geocentrists list many scriptural passages—most of them come from the Psalms, a highly poetic book. In not one of the passages does Scripture actually teach that the Sun revolves around the Earth, and not a single verse says that the Earth is at the center of the universe—a fact that the geocentrists do not advert to. Each passage uses phenomenological language to describe what is seen. This is done even today by professional astronomers, who unanimously accept heliocentrism, when they refer to the Sun rising and setting. In using such language, the astronomers deceive no one, neither themselves nor others.
It is no more wrong for an astronomer to talk about the Sun setting than for a poet, standing on a western shore, to write that the Sun sinks beneath the water. No present-day poet believes, as some of the ancients believed, that the Sun’s fires are quenched each evening in the sea, only to be reignited the following morning, but it is not wrong for a poet to employ such figurative language. So with Scripture, which throughout uses analogies, similes, and metaphors.
Today’s Catholic geocentrists, like their Protestant counterparts, insist that the sacred text must be taken in its most literal form whenever there is a reference to cosmology. This is not what is taught in Providentissimus Deus (Leo XIII, 1893) or in Divino Afflante Spiritu (Pius XII, 1943). Neither papal document insists that a reader must shoehorn a literalistic interpretation into Scripture.
Providentissimus 19, for example, says: “The unshrinking defense of the Holy Scripture, however, does not require that we should equally uphold all the opinions which each of the Fathers or the more recent interpreters have put forth in explaining it; for it may be that, in commenting on passages where physical matters occur, they have sometimes expressed the ideas of their own times, and thus made statements which in these days have been abandoned as incorrect.”
Hertz: so bad
Catholic author Solange Hertz’s rejection of heliocentricity comes not from a study of celestial measurements and the crunching of numbers but from a study of Scripture. She is “fully aware of heliocentricity’s potential for destroying the faith by attacking the inerrancy of Scripture.” In the end, “both heliocentricity and geocentricity are naturally unprovable”—that is, unprovable by natural means, such as scientific observation. “Geocentricity, however, can be proved theologically, whereas heliocentricity cannot.”
This for Hertz is the clincher: science is unable to settle the question, so it is proper to defer to Scripture, which, in certain passages, must be taken in a literalistic sense that can imply only that the Earth is the motionless center of the universe. This argument was raised most famously in the Galileo case, in opposition to the famed scientist, who argued for heliocentrism.
Galileo proposed his theories after Copernicus, a lifetime earlier, had proposed that the Earth circled the Sun. Galileo was brought to trial, but Copernicus was not. The latter even had his work praised by a cardinal, Nicolaus Schoenberg of Capua, who in 1536 encouraged Copernicus to “communicate your discovery to the learned world.” Why the different treatment? As Hertz puts it, “until Galileo came along, no one dared seriously pretend that [heliocentrism] reflected reality.” (All quotes from the essay “Recanting Galileo” at yumpu.com).
That is a loaded sentence, with “dared seriously pretend.” What actually had been happening is that it was generally agreed that no theory of the movement of the heavenly bodies, neither heliocentrism nor any variant of geocentrism, “reflected reality.” In the absence of later-invented scientific instruments, there was no way to prove one theory over another.
It was expected that an astronomer would lay out a theory, showing how well it “saved the appearances,” without asserting that the theory accurately illustrated what one would see if one were positioned a vast distance from the visible cosmos. This is where Galileo overstepped. He was unable to prove his theory—he knew he could not, even with the help of the recently invented but still modest telescope—but he wrote as though heliocentrism not just accommodated observations but explained them.
Galileo’s main fault in the Church’s eyes was that he arrogated the interpretation of Scripture to himself. It was not that he expounded the Copernican theory—after all, Copernicus himself did the same and was not brought up on charges before the Inquisition—but that he presumed to say how Scripture should be interpreted. He compounded his problems by presenting his thoughts in ways guaranteed to annoy those in authority, including the pope.
In 1992 John Paul II acknowledged that errors were committed by the tribunal that judged Galileo’s scientific writings. The Pope’s rehabilitation of Galileo came in consequence of a report issued by a committee of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. True, the Pope did not abrogate the Holy Office’s 1633 decree against Galileo; the decree was not erroneous in all its parts, nor were the penalties imposed necessarily unreasonable, especially considering the times. But the Pope noted that Galileo had the underlying science basically correct, even if he overstepped his bounds in trying to interpret Scripture.
Silence of the Fathers
Solange Hertz’s friend Paul Haigh adds another angle. “Galileo well knew that the Fathers of the Church held to a geocentric view of the universe and taught the same in a unanimous way as any other view would have been immediately recognized by them as against Scripture and common sense or reason” (“Galileo’s Heresy,” ldolphin.org). It is not easy to demonstrate that many of the Fathers ever wrote about cosmology at all; it is not easy to show a unanimous consent when most of them apparently had nothing to say on the topic. Like everyone else in ancient times, when they wrote about the heavens, they wrote in terms of appearances (the Sun rises and sets; the stars move through the sky) without any attempt to formulate astronomical theories.
Haigh’s error is thinking that the Fathers of the Church taught geocentrism as they taught christological or sacramental doctrines—as beliefs to be held as matters of Catholic Faith. Did they accept geocentric cosmology? Yes, as did probably everyone at the time. There was no unreason in that. A geocentric view is the default position of people living in an era prior to the development of the physical sciences and scientific instruments.
But did the Fathers teach geocentrism as part of the Faith? There is no evidence for that. Did they demonstrate a consensus of opinion regarding geocentrism? Yes and no.
They all wrote as though geocentrism were an accurate explanation of what they saw around them, but they did not write in favor of that theory over against a competing theory. Astronomy was not their concern, and they made no attempt to teach it. Similarly, they accepted the ancient understanding that the visible world is comprised of four “elements”—earth, water, air, and fire—but nowhere did they teach that this was accurate science. The Fathers accepted also the notion of the four humors—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic—that in Greek thinking were the four basic personality types, but they nowhere attempted to define these as accurate psychology.
Geology was then a nonexistent science, and medicine was rudimentary. The term geology was first used in 1603. Bacteria were unknown until discovered by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676, and aspirin—the world’s first effective analgesic—was not developed until the end of the nineteenth century. The Fathers of the Church likely would have set aside the notion of the four elements if they had had at their disposal even the geologic knowledge available at the time of Galileo, and they likely would have dropped the notion of the four humors if they had been able to look through van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope or had been given one of the first bottles of the Bayer company’s new drug.
Index not infallible
Hertz and Haigh and other Catholic geocentrists expand their argument by saying that the Church’s condemnation of Galileo and the placing of his writings on the Index of Prohibited Books amounted to an infallible declaration that geocentrism is true and that heliocentrism is false. What is false is the geocentrists’ understanding.
The Index and its prefatory documents, whether in the form of bulls or letters from popes, are disciplinary, not definitional. At any one time the Index included books on a wide range of subjects. Some of those books later were removed from the Index, and some subjects were no longer listed as being off-limits for writers.
One such subject was heliocentrism. A pope cannot bind his successors in matters of discipline. One pope can put a title on the Index, and another pope can remove it. One pope can prohibit discussion of a certain topic, and a later pope can encourage discussion. Infallibility does not come into play in any of this.
Less than a century after Alexander VII wrote the bull that prefaced the 1664 edition of the Index, in which Galileo’s writing was suppressed, Benedict XIV lifted restrictions on some books that taught the Earth’s motion (Galileo’s work remained on the Index), and in 1822 Pius VII ratified an 1820 decision by the Holy Office to drop the prohibition on books about that topic. These two popes, having equal authority with Alexander VII, unraveled an earlier pope’s disciplinary decision—something popes had been doing for centuries.
The new geocentrists do not see this as a legitimate exercise of papal power but as a craven collapse before the forces of the modern world. But if a pope can err in lifting a disciplinary decision, one should argue that it equally is possible for a pope to err in affirming the decision in the first place. The fact that two popes undid what an earlier pope had done should tell us that there was no exercise of papal infallibility at any stage in the process.
If a pope makes formal use of his extraordinary charism, as Pius XII did in 1950 when defining the dogma of the Assumption of Mary, no later pope would try to undo that definition with his own infallible dogmatic definition—because the Holy Spirit would prevent him from doing so. Once an infallible pronouncement is made, the issue is closed. But if later popes reverse a disciplinary decision by an earlier pope, that is a strong indication that the action of that earlier pope did not involve anything beyond his ordinary powers to issue disciplinary decrees.
This never seems to be acknowledged by the new geocentrists. They are convinced that the modern Church has forsaken definitive teaching regarding cosmology. They say the Church misunderstands Scripture and misunderstandings its own disciplinary powers, but it is the new geocentrists who labor under misunderstandings.