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Modern geocentrism is the belief held by some extant groups that Earth is the center of the universe as described by classical geocentric models. This belief is often based on Biblical verses. This belief is directly opposed to the fact that the Sun is essentially the gravitational center of the solar system, and that the location of the Earth is not privileged.
In three polls conducted in 1996 and 1999, 19% of Britons, 18% of Americans, and 16% of Germans said that they believed the Sun orbits the Earth.[1]
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The most popular modern geocentric description consists of a stationary Earth (neither rotating nor orbiting the sun) at the center of the universe. As in the Tychonic system, the Sun is thought to revolve around the Earth once per day, and the rest of the solar system orbits the Sun with Keplerian orbits. This revolution is considered to be a physical reality, not simply the choice of a rotating frame of reference. At a more detailed level, modern geocentric beliefs divide into two logically distinct groups, although some geocentrists hold both types of beliefs simultaneously :
While geocentrism may be strictly taken only to refer to the unchanging position of the earth at the center, and thus only to deny the change of position involved in the annual revolution around the sun, generally it covers also the denial of the daily rotation of the earth on its axis. The only motion allowed is that of earthquakes and other local phenomena.
The Ptolemaic model of the solar system held sway into the early modern age; from the late 16th century onward it was gradually replaced as the consensus description by the heliocentric model. Geocentrism as a separate religious belief, however, never completely died out. In the United States between 1870 and 1920, for example, various members of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod published articles disparaging Copernican astronomy, and geocentrism was widely taught within the synod during that period. However, in the 1902 Concordia Theological Quarterly, Prof. A. L. Graebner claimed that the synod had no doctrinal position on geocentrism, heliocentrism, or any scientific model, unless it were to contradict Scripture. He stated that any possible declarations of geocentrists within the synod did not set the position of the church body as a whole.[2]
The most recent resurgence of geocentrism began in North America in 1967, when Dutch-Canadian schoolmaster Walter van der Kamp (1913–1998) circulated a geocentric paper entitled “The Heart of the Matter” to about 50 Christian individuals and institutions. From these seeds grew the Tychonian Society and its journal, Bulletin of the Tychonian Society.
In 1984 Van der Kamp retired as leader of the Tychonian Society and Gerardus Bouw, an amateur cosmologist with a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Case Western Reserve University and a B.S. in astrophysics from the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY) succeeded him. In 1991 Bouw reorganized the Tychonian Society as the "Association for Biblical Astronomy" and changed the name of the Bulletin to The Biblical Astronomer.[3]
Previous works include Bouw's earlier With Every Wind of Doctrine (1984), Walter van der Kamp's De Labor Solis (1989), and Marshall Hall's The Earth is Not Moving (1991). Other modern geocentrists include Malcolm Bowden, James Hanson, Paul Ellwanger, R. G. Elmendorf, Paula Haigh, and Robert Sungenis (president of Bellarmine Theological Forum, author of the 2006 book Galileo Was Wrong).
Modern geocentrists subscribe to the view that a literal reading of the Bible contains an accurate account of the manner in which the universe was created and requires a geocentric worldview. For this reason, modern geocentrists are also creationists, many of whom actively promote creationism in the creation-evolution controversy, and a few, such as Hall even argue against modern views of celestial mechanics, although most, particularly Bouw and Sungenis, use General Relativity against the modern view. However, many creationists hold that while the Bible makes explicit historical claims regarding the origin of the Earth and life in the creation account in Genesis, it does not explicitly endorse geocentrism. The most popular creationist societies (specifically Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International and the Institute for Creation Research) explicitly reject the absolute geocentric perspective, and creationist journals such as TJ (now Journal of Creation) have rejected modern geocentric articles in favor of geokineticism (moving Earth).[4] Geocentrists regard such groups as compromisers.[5]
Modern geocentrists believe that they are the true standard-bearers for an appropriate integration of science and religion. In particular, Gerardus Bouw has claimed "Invariably, those [creationists] who do take more than a cursory look [at geocentricity] become geocentrists". Many modern creationists disagree, including Ph.D. astronomers such as Danny Faulkner.[4][6]
Morris Berman quotes survey results that show currently some 20% of the USA population believe that the sun goes around the Earth (geocentricism) rather than the Earth goes around the sun (heliocentricism), while a further 9% claimed not to know.[7]
Modern geocentrists point to some passages in the Bible, which, when taken literally, indicate that the daily apparent motions of the Sun and the Moon are due to their actual motions around the Earth rather than due to the rotation of the Earth about its axis. One is Ecclesiastes 1:5:
Another is in Joshua 10:12–13, where the Sun and Moon are said to stop in the sky:[8]
At this point, the Wycliffe Bible Commentary says:
Psalm 104:5 (according to King James Version numbering):
A suggestion that the Earth is stationary (relative to Heaven) is Isaiah 66:1:
And another in I Chronicles 16:30
Creationists ascribing to an inerrant, literal reading of the Bible such as those at Institute for Creation Research would argue that interpreting the descriptions of heavenly/spacial events as phenomenological rather than strictly scientific or literal is important[9] and so assert that it is necessary to interpret the seemingly geocentric passages of the Bible as phenomenological because it is easily demonstrable that the Bible describes other heavenly events in similar language (the moon's light, stars falling from heaven, etc.).
They also argue that the Bible does not mix the phenomenological hermeneutic (or, interpreting the passage as being merely a description of the observer's point of reference) with the literal hermeneutic (or, interpreting the passage as what the observer saw, but also what literally happened). However, their critics would respond that Isaiah 13:10 does mix these two hermeneutics.
Critics argue that this passage includes literal descriptions (the sun going forth) as well as phenomenological descriptions (sun and stars darkened, moon actually shining light).
Those who allow for phenomenological descriptions can say that Amos 8:9 (“I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day”) simply means that the day will be dark at noon. Yet the geocentrist must hold that the sun literally doubles its orbit around the earth during the Tribulation period. However, even this would not solve it, because it says that the entire earth is dark. (See Amos 5:20—“Shall not the day of the LORD be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?”)
A faster-spinning sun would only mean that periods of consecutive daylight hours were shortened and would not plunge all the earth into darkness. Micah 3:6 and Jeremiah 15:9 are similar:
Yet the sun dictates night and day. This clearly is both metaphorical and phenomenological. Specifically, it is called Jerusalem's sun. This refers to the daytime over Jerusalem specifically. Yet if the sun truly did "go down while it was yet day", this would mean its orbit increased in speed, even in a geocentric cosmology. The passage is therefore interpreted as a metaphor for the arrival of darkness in the land.
In this passage, the only literal language is the "darkness upon thy land".
Recently, geocentrists have developed a new paradigm that God created the earth first and the heavens later, making the Earth incomplete at first and surrounding it with a "firmament" (a now-obsolete theoretical concept comparable to "sky") before completing it. This relates to geocentrism because it is claimed that God did not place the earth in the heavens, but rather created the firmament around earth, putting it in the center of the universe. However, not all geocentrists are in agreement on this position. The leading proponent of modern geocentrism, Gerardus Bouw, holds that planets and stars were created before the earth.[10] Hence, the heavens they are in must have been created prior to the creation of the earth.
Geocentrists tend to be careless or sloppy with their interpretations of passages, attempting to prove their own view of Biblical cosmology without keeping passages in their intended context. For example, geocentrists cite Psalm 119:90:
The word "abideth" means "to stand", and geocentrists claim this further proof of their position. However, critics point out that the context of this passage is about the Bible and its endurance. To claim this discusses a stationary earth seems out of place in this passage. Also, they would argue that the Hebrew word used here for established and abideth is also used in other passages to refer to the sun, moon, stars, and the heavens. For example:
Geocentrists take passages such as Psalm 96:10 to be geocentric:
Some geocentrists (such as Gerardus Bouw) identify Mercury and Venus as the "morning stars" of Job 38:7 and the "wandering stars" of Jude 14 as references to planets.[10] Given that these are planets, then they only appear to be stars.
Finally, the movement of the Holy Spirit during Day One of Creation is not orbital movement. It is translated as "hovered over" in most modern Bible versions and the words "moved upon" is translated as "fluttereth over" (Deuteronomy 32:11) and "shake" (Jeremiah 23:9) in the King James Version. This would seem to support heliocentricity rather than geocentricity, since it gives the image of a stationary Holy Spirit hovering above the earth. If the Spirit was shining light on earth, then the earth must be moving in order to create day and night, a point argued by Dr. Robert McCabe at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary [11].
The interpretation of scripture by the Church fathers is asserted by the geocentrists to be unanimously in favor of a geocentrist position . The early Church Fathers, such as Augustine and Origen, argued against the heliocentrism of the pagan Greeks before Copernicus' time. Modern geocentrists often quote these works, which seem to admonish that scriptural references about geocentrism not be interpreted as allegorical or phenomenological, since such an interpretation could lead to the appearance that the Holy Spirit (who inspired the Scriptures) might be lying.
Two Popes, however, have addressed this question of whether the use of phenomenological language would compel one to admit an error in Scripture. Both taught that it would not. Pope Leo XIII wrote:
Finocchiaro notes that this is "a view of the relationship between biblical interpretation and scientific investigation that corresponds to the one advanced by Galileo in the 'Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina.'[12] Pope Pius XII repeated his predecessor's teaching:
Some Catholics, such as Robert Sungenis of Bellarmine Theological Forum, hold to geocentrism on the basis of interpretations of the history and teachings of the Church. A statement was used in the 22 June 1633 condemnation of Galileo by the Holy Office: "The proposition that the Earth is not the centre of the world and immovable but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically and theologically considered at least erroneous in faith ".[13]
In 1664 Alexander VII republished the Index of Forbidden Books and attached the various decrees connected with those books, including those concerned with heliocentrism. He stated in a Papal Bull that his purpose in doing so was that "the succession of things done from the beginning might be made known [quo rei ab initio gestae series innotescat]."[14]
Modern Catholic geocentrists claim that these declarations have yet to be officially overturned by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and there have been no official declarations on the subject since that time. Others point to various official Church actions subsequent to Galileo's time:
In a papal encyclical written in 1921 Pope Benedict XV stated that, "though this earth on which we live may not be the centre of the universe as at one time was thought, it was the scene of the original happiness of our first ancestors, witness of their unhappy fall, as too of the Redemption of mankind through the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ."[15] In 1965 the Second Vatican Council stated that, "Consequently, we cannot but deplore certain habits of mind, which are sometimes found too among Christians, which do not sufficiently attend to the rightful independence of science and which, from the arguments and controversies they spark, lead many minds to conclude that faith and science are mutually opposed."[16] The footnote on this statement is to Msgr. Pio Paschini's, Vita e opere di Galileo Galilei, 2 volumes, Vatican Press (1964). And Pope John Paul II regretted the treatment which Galileo received, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1992. The Pope declared the incident to be based on a "tragic mutual miscomprehension". He further stated:
Of the various Jewish denominations, only a small minority of Orthodox Jews, particularly some followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe maintain a geocentric model of the universe, based on the aforementioned Biblical verses and their interpretation of Maimonides to the effect that he ruled that the earth is orbited by the sun.[18][19] This is an important basis in his calculation of Rosh Chodesh (the first day of the Jewish lunar month), however the great majority of Jewish religious scholars, who accept the divinity of the Bible and accept many of Maimonides' rulings as legally binding do not believe that the Bible or Maimonides command a belief in geocentrism [19][20] There is some evidence that geocentrist beliefs are becoming increasingly common among Orthodox Jews.[18][19]
The consensus of scientists today is that
All the known laws of physics can be formulated without reference to any particular place, as long as an inertial frame of reference is chosen for the description. That this is true, as far as we can tell, at all places and has been true for all times is illustrated by the agreement of the laboratory value of the fine structure constant with that derived from the spectra of stars billions of light years away. (For references, see Is the fine structure constant really constant?.)
Even if the laws of physics are independent of any particular place, one might still ask whether the arrangement of objects in the universe points to a special place for the Earth. But the Earth does not hold any obvious preferred place within the Solar System, nor does the Solar System appear to be in a preferred location within our Galaxy, nor is our Galaxy in a preferred location within the Local Group, which itself does not seem to hold a preferred location in the Universe. Furthermore, the consensus scientific opinion is that there is no evidence based on the distribution of astronomical objects that any particular position in the universe is special. (For references, see Large-scale structure of the cosmos.)
All the known laws of physics can be formulated without reference to any particular velocity, as long as an inertial frame of reference is chosen for the description. Therefore if, from the point of view of physics, there is a special velocity in the universe, it can only be observed because some group of objects move with that velocity. The most popular choice of a reference is the cosmic microwave background radiation, whose velocity relative to the Solar System is about 370 km/s. It is also possible, with some modeling, to consider the local value of the velocity field of all galaxies, which is found to agree with the velocity of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
If the known local laws of physics are formulated in various frames of reference rotating relative to one another, the mathematical formulation of these laws vary. Generally, a centrifugal force and a Coriolis force, dependent on a direction and rate of rotation, must be introduced. In classical physics, these two forces are called fictitious forces because they do not obey Newton’s third law of motion. There are some special frames of reference, known as inertial frames, where these forces vanish. The rotation of these frames may be considered special, and indeed inertial frames are the only special ones known to physics. Equivalently, there is only one rotational frame of reference in which the axes of gimbal-mounted gyroscopes remain fixed. The Earth per se is not in an inertial frame, as evidenced by measurable centrifugal and Coriolis forces experienced by objects on Earth's surface.
In the framework of general relativity, the formulation of the laws of physics is identical in all frames of reference, even in rotating and accelerating frames. The fictitious forces are then a manifestation of the gravitomagnetism associated with the acceleration of the mass of the universe. This is the same effect that results in frame dragging, only in frame dragging the effect due to a rotating body is local and small. If the entire universe is rotating, the effect is massive. Even in general relativity, the inertial frames of reference can be considered special, because they are the only ones that allow the laws of physics to be formulated without explicit reference to distant masses. Compared to frames of reference with linear or rotational acceleration, inertial frames of reference also preserve local causality.
Modern geocentrists have been known to point to certain astronomical observations as evidence which could be interpreted as placing the earth at the center of the universe. These observations also apparently have explanations that are compatible with the current scientific model of the solar system and universe.
One such observation is reported in "The Biggest Bangs: The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts", 2002 (ISBN 0-19-514570-4), by Jonathan I. Katz, professor of physics at Washington University:
Three pages earlier in the same book, Katz explains that one resolution of the dilemma would be that gamma ray bursts occur at cosmological distances:
Although for many years astronomers tended to resolve the Copernican dilemma by ignoring the evidence for a deficiency of faint sources, starting in 1986, the case for nearby sources "began to unravel" (Katz, p. 94) and "the Copernican dilemma was finally solved by statistical studies of rough positions of a large number of bursts, the same kind of data that created it". (Katz, p. 93) More recently, the cosmological distance of gamma ray bursts has been confirmed by direct redshift measurements of a number of optical counterpoints.
Another line of evidence referred to by modern geocentrists is related to supposed quantized redshift. If the universe violates predictions from the FRW metric derived from General Relativity, it is not expanding but has a redshift-distance relation, and the redshifts of particular types of astronomical objects only take on certain values, that would suggest that the objects are located on shells concentric around the Earth, that is, that the location of the Earth is special.
The first claimed observations of redshift quantization came from studies of galaxies. There have also been claimed observations of redshift quantization in quasar populations. Since these claimed observations were made, galaxy surveys have increased the quantity and quality of the redshift data enormously. Taken on the whole, it appears that the surveys do not show any quantization of redshifts, though many supporters of the idea have made the claim that the models are not applicable to the entire quasar sample. One study with a new database was specifically designed to test the most popular model of quasars associated with galaxies and that the redshifts of the galaxy pairings appear in regular intervals and are not homogeneous. The statistical methods were approved in advance by supporters of this model, but despite the prior approval, those supporting quantization still reject the result showing a lack of galaxy-quasar pairing.
Those scientists who still believe in quantized redshifts represent a very small minority. It is also believed by some scientists that effects like the evolution of the universe, large-scale structures in the universe, and local clustering can, in some circumstances, mimic the trace of redshift quantization.
The simplest way to define a theory of geocentrism is to apply the appropriate coordinate transformation to existing theory. Geocentrists generally believe there is additional substance to their worldview that can be expressed in a theory with explanatory and, ideally, predictive power. There is no theory that is accepted by all geocentrists, and no theory that is formulated well enough mathematically to be falsifiable, but some general comments can be made, as below.
The major observations to be explained, as expressed from a geocentric perspective, are
Bouw claims that most of these are readily explainable from a geocentric perspective by starting with the universe as a whole. He cites eight references to support his claim.[22]
Some geocentrists believe that at least part of these observations can be explained as a result of classical gravitation with a particular mass distribution. Indeed, a uniform distribution of dark (and otherwise unobtrusive) matter, coupled with a quadrupole gravitational field imposed from the “outside”, could provide the centripetal force associated with the daily rotation. Gravitational fields uniform throughout the universe and rotating monthly and yearly would result in those components of the motion. On the other hand, classical gravitational fields cannot provide the torque needed to account for the variations in the length of the day, nor can they provide the Coriolis forces observed in planetary motion and in physics experiments on Earth.
A different approach to account for the forces required to explain the observations is kinematic constraints. If all heavenly bodies (sun, planets, comets, stars) are rotating daily around the Earth, it is natural to suppose that they are embedded in a transparent but rigid material. Geocentrists generally believe in such a substance and refer to it as aether. This aether is not the same as the late 19th century concept of luminiferous aether, which was supposed to be the material through which light propagates. If a luminiferous medium does exist, then the null result from the Michelson–Morley experiment would imply a stationary Earth with respect to such an aether. Bouw stated in 2000 that he prefers the term firmament as being "the God-chosen name for the created aether".[23]
The aether hypothesis coupled with a huge rotating shell of matter at the outer position of the universe (similar to the "crystal spheres" of Ptolemy) provides for forces needed to explain the daily orbits of the stars and Sun as well as a way to synchronize the monthly and yearly motions. These periodic variations are claimed to result from gyroscopic precession, although the details of the model are not specified. When the finite speed of light is taken into consideration, the picture is more complex (at least assuming the enormous estimate of the size of the universe believed today – a point with which many geocentrists disagree). If we see all the stars moving at the same time, then the stars farther away must have moved earlier in order to allow their light time to reach Earth. This implies not a rigid aether but an aether supporting torsional waves that propagate with the speed of light and converge on the Earth. To explain the irregular or sudden changes in the length of the day in this way requires a reversal of the presumptive cause and effect, that is, the aether waves must cause the earthquake or weather pattern that is associated with that change in the length of the day. It is also difficult to reconcile the rigidity of the aether required to contain and synchronize the motions of the stars with the tenuousness implied by the fact that the proper motions appear to be uninhibited.
If simple aether theories might be able to explain some of the properties of the motions of the stars and Sun, more complex theories are necessary to explain orbits in the Solar System and experiments on the Earth. This is partly because the rigidity/tenuousness dilemma brought up for stellar motion is even more visible there, but primarily because a single centripetal force is no longer adequate. The observations can only be explained by separate centrifugal and Coriolis forces.
Some geocentrists believe that the difficulties in the types of theories discussed above can be overcome by rejecting some of the assumptions that were implicitly made in that discussion. In particular, some geocentrists believe that the universe is very much smaller than the billions of light years calculated by modern scientists.[24]