Creation Ministries International are peer reviewed ... a bit too much

Alas, this does not merely mean they have the same advantages as the Evolutionist peer reviewed media (National Geographic, Nature, science et vie ...) such as those advantages might be, but also some of its faults.

There is on that site a rhetoric about the real lesson of Galileo affair being that the Church should not be too bound up with the scientific consensus.

First of all, a scientific consensus is only bad if it is wrong. A scientific consensus about 2+2=4 is something mathematicians should cherish. A scientific consensus about man having 23 chromosome pairs with two chromosomes in each (I have also come across what seems to be a terminology with 23 chromosomes, two chromatides in each, but it is less usual), and sex being determined by the sex chromosomes, for female in case of XX, male in case of XY, such a consensus should be cherished by geneticists.

Second, this is not at all true. That is not what the Galileo process was ultimately about. Nor even how ecclesiastic procedrues started.

Third, in defense of this, they use what amounts to at least some degree of dishonesty - just as an evolutionist site would against a cretionist argument.

Here is the story:

I read this:

Do I have to believe in a historical Genesis to be saved?
by Shaun Doyle
http://creation.com/genesis-gospel

I agree, generally speaking. I want to add a remark and do add it:

About what I feel about Geocentrism - not believing it is inconsistency, it has led people away from the faith to approve too devoutly of Galileo (who had at least at times a Bible view in which God would not reveal scientific truth in the Bible) or of Isaac Newton (who was an occultist). But non-Geocentrics are often also Christians. Even Catholics.

As I am a Catholic, the last short sentence should not be expanded as "even Catholics are also Christians", but as "non-Geocentrics are often also even Catholic Christians".

Now, there is this thing about comments on that site, they have to be approved in advance. Mine was not. I get this mail:

Dear Hans-Georg Lundahl,
Thank you for your comment (see below) about the article on creation.com titled Do I have to believe in a historical Genesis to be saved?.

Please see Galileo, Geocentrism, and Joshua’s Long Day Questions and Answers.

Kind regards,
Shaun Doyle
Creation Ministries International

Your original comment: etc [which I copied above.]

I click the link given and chose this essay:

Geocentrism and Creation
by Danny Faulkner
http://creation.com/geocentrism-and-creation

Now, Danny Faulkner is in a way the man to write such an essay. He stood up against Hugh Ross about the Distant Starlight Problem. And he did not use Geocentrism as a solution. I do.*

If Earth is the immobile center of the Universe, the annual movement of proxima Centauri is a movement really in the star rather than apparently in the star and really in our base. But if so we have no triangle with one known side and two known angles. And therefore not any evidence for the first set of stellar distances, the one on which all the others are based. And we can therefore not have any evidence for such and such a star being 13.5 billion lightyears away either. Which means that my basic answer to Hugh Ross is less convoluted than Danny Faulkner's. That does not mean Danny Faulkner did not have any arguments I did not have. I cherish his argument about comets. But he neglects the most basic defense against the distant starlight problem.

I will add that I once did believe that starlight was created in transit. Even if a star was so far away that what light shone immediately from it on day four has not reached us yet but we are still seeing light that was created along the ray between it and us, that is no problem to me. But if a star explodes before our eyes, and it is so far away it must have exploded before it was created, that makes God a liar for creating the starlight in transit from a star which can never have existed. Note, the implication is not "after what we see, God is a liar if we see it and universe is young", but "after what we see, God is a liar if he created a spectacle of what never existed". So, there is a real problem with distant starlight - if it is all that distant.

And Geocentrism says stars need not be at all as distant as that. Because Geocentrism does not accept the phenomenon best observed in proxima Centauri as parallactic and this implies that there is no triangulation basis for saying it is about four light years away.

Danny Faulkner must have been aware of this solution, since he is an astronomer, and I am not. Still, he does not take it. So, in a sence, he is the man to write an essay like that. Now, to the essay he wrote, I will not cite and refute every sentence in detail, but concentrate on a few crucial matters.

However, the Church did support the wrong side of a scientific issue four centuries ago. That issue was the question of whether the Sun went around the Earth (geocentrism) or if the Earth went around the Sun (heliocentrism, which could be called geokineticism since the Sun is not regarded as the centre of the universe either, as discussed below). Being based upon real history, creationists in theory could be accused of repeating this mistake by rejecting evolution.

As he is a Protestant, and as the Galileo affair was a Catholic affair, I wonder what exactly he means by saying the Church supported the wrong side. As a Catholic, I identify the Church of Christ, as such, as visible ("a city on a mountain cannot be hidden") and as "pillar and foundation of truth", with the Roman Catholic Church - or, at broadest, adding the Orthodox Church as well. There may be souls outside that Communion, which rightly should be inside it. C. S. Lewis may have been such a soul. Danny Faulkner and Jonathan Sarfati may today be such souls - and in their case it is not too late to become Catholics. But since Danny Faulkner cited the Belgic Catechism, he is obviously a Protestant and as such he does not make that identification of where the Church is. And though both Luther and Calvin rejected Copernicus and Kepler, neither did so "ex cathedra" or even "ex officio judicis" (whichever dignity a Catholic might give to the decision against Galileo in 1633). Calvin "condemned" Kepler in one sense and condemned Servet in quite another sense. Kepler was perhaps condemned in a Catechism or Summa by Calvin and Copernicus only in the Tischreden of Luther. It was Catholicism - or at least its officials at the time - which condemned Giordano Bruno as Calvin condemned Servet, it was Catholicism which condemned two theses that Galileo had supported and which as to his person was content with him giving an abjuration of those two - but put him in a house arrest. So, I have some difficulty in seeing how Danny Faulkner can say "the Church" did support the wrong side. Unlike me, he is not habitually identifying the Catholic Church as historical entity, called Papist by its denigrators of the time, with the Church that is the bride of Christ.

But let us go to the important points. Biblical and Scientific.

I first note that Danny Faulkner did not adress the fact that Joshua when working a miracle - not a writer when explaining to people with little scientific instruction, but a man performing a miracle when adressing the entities involved in it - told precisely Sun and Moon rather than Earth to stop moving.

But let us adress what Danny does adress:

Bouw quotes part of Psalm 93:1 from the KJV, ‘… the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved’. [...] This is fallacious. The Hebrew word for ‘moved’ (mowt) is in the niphal stem, which often refers to the passive voice, as indeed it does here. This is reflected in the English translations—to be moved or not to be moved suggests the action of an external or causative agent to bring about change in position, but does not exclude the possibility of motion apart from an external agent.

OK, Danny. I am no Hebraist, I trust you on what niphal means in Hebrew grammar.** The earth cannot be moved by any outside agency, but it can and does move itself ... so you mean the earth is a living creature with a will? I suppose you do not pray to Gaia (as I for my part do not pray to the angels holding the Sun and alpha Centauri, I unite myself in prayer with them whenever I attend Mass and hear the preface "una cum angelis atque archangelis ... cum cherubim quoque et seraphim ..." and intellectually think these angels belong to a choir above archangels but below cherubim), but do you think "she is complaining" about things? Would the evils be overpopulation or abortion in that case?

Or do you think the Earth is orbitting the Sun by a balance of two forces working out that way: inertial movement after previous motion on the one hand, gravitational pull from the Sun on the other?

Hold it ... gravitational pull would be an outside agency! Earth would be moved - passive, niphal.

In Newton's view (but not in Aristotle's) if the Earth was moving at same speed in same direction through space, it would be as firmly established and not moved (in the niphal meaning pure passive) as if staying in one single spot. But in Newton's physics the change of diraction and certain changes of speed would be accelerations and due to - outside agency.

In Galileo's view, earth could have a circular motion around the sun, a motion which never stopped because there was no friction ... but in Newton's physics, circular movements are never the mere continuation of a previous movement.

In Newtonian physics and astronomy, there would indeed by an outside agency moving the earth through gravitation, and that outside agency would be the mass of the Sun.

It is important to note that the same Hebrew word for ‘moved’ (môwt) in the same niphal stem is used in Psalm 16:8, ‘I shall not be moved’. Presumably even Bouw wouldn’t accuse God of poor communication if he didn’t believe that the Bible taught that the Psalmist was rooted to one spot! Rather, the passage teaches that he would not stray from the path that God had set for him.

What is said about earth not being moved is said literally in the one psalm. What is said about David in psalm 15 not being moved is said metaphorically in the other psalm. Introducing the word "path" in the interpretation of that other psalm is changing the metaphor. The metaphor chosen is precisely the metaphor of being rooted in one spot, only that spot is not a locality, but the truth of God. Exactly as in Matthew 16 Peter is made into "this rock" (which is of course not moved from the true doctrine of faith and morals).

In Psalm 15 and Matthew 16 there is no path at all in the metaphor chosen. Rock and not moved are synonymous. That is why I cannot believe a true successor of St Peter truly speaking ex cathedra could do anything except expose the true doctrine of faith and morals once given.

Next to history.

Bouw claims that heliocentrism has led to all sorts of moral degeneracy. The example he discusses is astrology. This is a bizarre assertion, given that astrology flourished for millennia before the heliocentric theory became popular, and seems to have decreased where heliocentrism has flourished. Ironically, the dominant geocentric theory of history, the Ptolemaic system, was devised primarily as a tool to calculate planetary positions in the past and future as an aid for astrological prognostications.

Bouw got it a bit backwards, true. It was when astrology was reflourishing that Copernicus and Kepler and Newton were seen as an improvement on Ptolemy for that precise purpose.

astrology [...] seems to have decreased where heliocentrism has flourished.

Not nearly as much as it had decreased in the West between St Augustine and the wave of Averroism in Sorbonne, against which St Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Tempier fought.

Kepler comes under great criticism by the geocentrists because of the great role that he played in the acceptance of the heliocentric model. Some of this criticism is quite strained. He is blasted for having dabbled in astrology, although it was common and, as shown, hardly confined to heliocentrists.

Kepler and Geocentrics were both categories of astronomers often enough astrologers. I do not think that Clavius the Jesuit and friend of St Robert Bellarmine was an astrologer, though. But the point is, it is heliocentrism rather than geocentrism which is rooted in astrology. Precisely as Catholics and Protestants have both persecuted, but Catholics start with 280 years of being persecuted, Protestants start persecuting pretty immediately at the Reformation. St Peter did not treat Jews loyal to Kaiaphas as Luther and Knox treated Catholics loyal to Papacy. St Peter did not reposition the Arc of the Covenant, as Luther and Zwingli repositioned altars and tabernacles. So, of Catholics and Calvinists, it is Calvinists that start with brutality, not Catholics. And likewise it is Heliocentrics that start with astrology, not Geocentrics. Kepler and Newton were occultists. Copernicus may have done no horoscopes himself, but he was popularised by people doing such.

I do not need Tycho Brahe to have lived a good life to accept his corrections of Ptolemy and his faithfulness to a stationary earth. St Robert Bellarmine lived a good life and he accepted Tycho Brahe's astronomy.

Another example of Bouw’s poor logic is the observation that ‘… the first heliocentrists were pagans who did not hold the Bible in high esteem’. While this statement is technically true, it plants a very false and misleading impression. Such a statement plants in the minds of many people that the near converse is true, that is, that the first geocentrists were not pagans and held the Bible in high esteem.

Aristarchus the Pythagorean was indeed a Pagan and may have held the even then extant books of the Old Testament in no esteem at all. He may have not even have known about them. But he was also a Pythagorean who held divination in very high esteem. Ptolemy was not the first Geocentric, Aristotle was so before him.

Now, let us get to Galileo.

While he did not invent the telescope, Galileo was apparently the first to put the telescope to use observing celestial objects. He found a number of things in the sky that ran counter to what the church, parroting ancient Greek ideas, said. Examples are the craters on the moon and spots on the Sun. Greek philosophers had reasoned that the moon and Sun, as celestial objects, had to be perfect. As such, they ought to have been free from blemishes such as craters and spots.

The Church as such did in fact not say these things. The proof is that Galileo was not condemned for even one of the things he saw in the telescope. The two sentences condemned in 1633 resume as non-movement and centrality of sun, movement and non-centraily of earth. The four moons of Jupiter are not among the condemned items. The craters on the Moon were not so either. The spots on the Sun were not so either. As to Galileo's claim the Milky Way was made up of small stars, Clavius confirmed that there were many stars not seen by the naked eye in it, but refused to decide whether this is so for all the matter of the Milky Way or whether there is also some kind of other matter involved - cloudy or dusty or whatever. This claim was not on the list of condemnations either. A list of two items is very short and it is pretty easy to verify that this other thing is not in it.

In fact, Danny Faulkner is parrotting prevalent ideas of how the Church was Aristotelian in those days. He did not get this conclusion from studying the texts of the historic period we are talking about. Except, possibly, those of Galileo himself.

One was the discovery of four satellites, or moons, that orbit Jupiter. Galileo used this to counter the objection to heliocentrism that the moon would be left behind if the Earth moved. It is obvious that Jupiter moves, and it is also obvious that its motion does not leave behind the satellites of Jupiter. Bouw is correct that this is an argument by analogy, but one cannot so easily dismiss this argument. The critics of heliocentrism must explain how the motions of Jupiter and its moons and the Earth and its moon are different.

God put us on Earth, not on Jupiter. It is on Earth and not on Jupiter that millions and billions of human eyes and inner ears testify at least prima facie for a stability of the big thing on which they are posed. It is on Earth and not on Jupiter that millions and billions of eyes testify to the movement (daily first of all, but at a closer look also periodical) of the big things in the sky we are not posed on. That is the main difference, epistemologically speaking.

I wonder if Danny Faulkner meant any hint of uniformitarian duty of physically explaining the difference. But if so, he is introducing a premiss which was possibly irrelevant at the time and which even now is more closely associated with Atheism than with Christianity - the assumption that the movements involved are automatic and mechanic, like things falling to the ground or like water falling and falling gallon after gallon over a waterfall, rather than voluntary like dancers holding lamps in their hands.

And stars having voluntary movers is supported by the Bible - unless one wants to say the texts are more closely supporting the actual personal life of the stars themselves. Ramandu and Coriakin, like in Voyage of the Dawn Treader or Oyerasu like in Out of the Silent Planet, but not functioning as overseers of life on planets, rather as movers (and therefore Earth has no Oyarsa, and Satan is not Oyarsa of Earth, unlike that Space Trilogy). There is a very clear text in Baruch 3, speaking about Wisdom, my added emphasis:

[31] There is none that is able to know her ways, nor that can search out her paths: [32] But he that knoweth all things, knoweth her, and hath found her out with his understanding: he that prepared the earth for evermore, and filled it with cattle and fourfooted beasts: [33] He that sendeth forth light, and it goeth: and hath called it, and it obeyeth him with trembling. [34] And the stars have given light in their watches, and rejoiced: [35] They were called, and they said: Here we are: and with cheerfulness they have shined forth to him that made them.

[36] This is our God, and there shall no other be accounted of in comparison of him. [37] He found out all the way of knowledge, and gave it to Jacob his servant, and to Israel his beloved. [38] Afterwards he was seen upon earth, and conversed with men.

The last verse is of course the reason we do not see Baruch in the Jewish canon of OT, as well as the reason why this chapter is read on Holy Saturday in the Catholic Liturgy.

But even in texts accepted by Jews and thus also by Protestants like Faulkner we find this idea:

[7] When the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody?

That is from Job 38. If you wish for modern fantasy literature parallels, I think Ainulindale is as much a reflection on this verse as Akallebêth on a verse from Matthew 24.

Or this one:

[58] O ye angels of the Lord, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [59] O ye heavens, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [60] O all ye waters that are above the heavens, bless the Lord; praise and exalt him above all for ever.

[61] O all ye powers of the Lord, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [62] O ye sun and moon, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [63] O ye stars of heaven, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [64] O every shower and dew, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [65] O all ye spirits of God, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever.

Daniel 3. Note that of all the list only Earth is not adressed in a vocative or a second person imperative:

[73] O ye lightnings and clouds, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [74] O let the earth bless the Lord: let it praise and exalt him above all for ever. [75] O ye mountains and hills, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever.

[76] O all ye things that spring up in the earth, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [77] O ye fountains, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. [78] O ye seas and rivers, bless the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever.

Do lightnings happen as acts of spirits? God speaking in Job seems to think so too:

[38:35] Canst thou send lightnings, and will they go, and will they return and say to thee: Here we are?

So, no, there is no purely mechanistic view of heavenly movements that obliges Christians. Therefore Danny Faulkner is wrong to say "[t]he critics of heliocentrism must explain how the motions of Jupiter and its moons and the Earth and its moon are different" if thereby he means giving different purely non-voluntary mechanisms.

But to return to Daniel, earth is not seen as able to herself hear the words "bless and exalt him forever".

What was it again in Psalm 92 [1 b]?

For he hath established the world which shall not be moved.

Danny explains, I cite again:

Bouw quotes part of Psalm 93:1 from the KJV, ‘… the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved’. [...] This is fallacious. The Hebrew word for ‘moved’ (mowt) is in the niphal stem, which often refers to the passive voice, as indeed it does here. This is reflected in the English translations—to be moved or not to be moved suggests the action of an external or causative agent to bring about change in position, but does not exclude the possibility of motion apart from an external agent.

But in Daniel 3 it seems earth as such cannot do things on its own:

[74] O let the earth bless the Lord: let it praise and exalt him above all for ever.

All other creatures enumerated are adressed as if capable of hearing the words of the three young men in the furnace - which is at least true of the guardian angels. Earth seems to have none. Hills do. Cattle do (think of the donkey of Balaam).

If Jupiter and its four moons (and those discovered after Galileo) have such, they can very clearly have Jupiter moving around Sun, its Moons moving about itself for purely æsthetic reasons - as part of the praise they are doing to their maker. That is the physical reason why Earth is different from Jupiter.

It cannot be moved from spot because it has no angelic mover.

Moon has one, Jupiter has one, each of its moons has one, earth no.

Let us contrast earth and heaven now, back to Psalm 92:

[2] Thy throne is prepared from of old: thou art from everlasting.

It is not said of God's throne that it cannot be moved. Heaven is prepared but not made unable to be moved from by outside agencies. And the mover of Heaven's daily motion is God. How I know Heaven is meant in this verse, and not Earth? Well, we have the passage "swear not be Heaven, it is the throne of God, nor by Earth, it is his footstool". And the God-man who said that was of course familiar with His human ancestor King David's psalm. Earth's immobility is in the psalm put into parallel with God's beauty, just as the throne's preparation is put into parallel with God's strength:

[1 a] The Lord hath reigned, he is clothed with beauty: the Lord is clothed with strength, and hath girded himself.

The throne of God - i e Heaven - is daily moving around us because God is strong. The daily movement of Heaven has for immediate physical causation the strength of God. God girds himself when moving Heaven, because in moving Heaven he serves our needs of day and night and our need for knowing him as the mover of day and night. Precisely as in human form he girded himself when about to serve the Apostles with a foot bath.

However, Bouw misses one of the most important points of Galileo on this. The geocentric model of Galileo’s day was that all celestial objects orbited the Earth. Here Galileo had found four celestial objects that did not directly orbit the Earth, but instead orbited something else. The geocentrists were not willing to give up an inch on this, because their already overly complicated Ptolemaic model had already endured a tremendous amount of tinkering. They feared that surrendering this would lead to the discovery of other objects that did not orbit the earth, which would further chip away the geocentric model.

Here Faulkner is again conflating Geocentrism with the Ptolemaic model. He is also conflating Ptolemaic model with the stance of Galileo's "enemies" - which include Christians like St Robert Bellarmine. And again, in 1633, his second trial, he was not harrassed about the moons of Jupiter.

If this discovery does not strengthen the Ptolemaic model it certainly strengthens the Tychonian one against it. Which was known and supported by St Robert Bellarmine in the first trial.

Bouw completely misconstrues Galileo’s third evidence for heliocentrism, the phases of Venus. The full set of Venereal phases can happen only if Venus passes both in front of and behind the Sun as seen from Earth (Figure 1, left). The Ptolemaic model placed Venus orbiting the Earth closer than the Sun, but always near to the Sun as constrained by observations, but that would preclude gibbous phases from being seen since that would require the Earth to be roughly between the Sun and Venus. On the other hand, moving Venus’ orbit beyond that of the Sun would allow gibbous phases, but would not permit crescent phases to be seen.

This is of course a clear evidence against Ptolemy, but it does not cut the issue between Heliocentrism and Tychonian astronomy.

The truth of the matter is that the Tychonian model was a far less significant contender than either the heliocentric or the Ptolemaic theories than modern geocentrists would have us believe.

It was important enough for St Robert Bellarmine to consider it.

But it is true that it was not known outside astronomical circles, mostly, and also that it was not satisfactory to their sense of "system", mostly.

It is even true that Copernicus and Ptolemy were for the most people concerned "the only serious contenders." If Tychonianism had been more important, socially speaking, Heliocentrism might not have won the day.

The reason is that the Tychonian model was a sort of halfway house for geocentrists. Geocentrists could hold on to a stationary Earth while discarding virtually everything else that was in the Ptolemaic model. Like so many other compromises, the Tychonian model failed to satisfy many on either side.

We might happen to think Ptolemaic model wrong but Geocentrism as such - the obverse of the condemnations of 1633 - right.

[Bouw] insists that heliocentrists of four centuries ago did not offer real proofs and further claims that they improperly attempted to shift the burden of proof to the status quo.

I agree they have offered no real proof - except such as is so only due to atheistic methodology. If astronomers can dismiss my explanations as "irrational appeals to magic" (as they have done) that is because they do science in a paradigm where God and angels are not considered as causes of physical phenomena on a regular basis.

The currently presumed proofs for earth's rotation can be explained as æther following Heaven's rotation. The proof by direct observation (from Moon) can as easily be explained as the Moon moving with observers around a non-moving and non-rotating earth.

The proof from annual aberration can be angels dancing with the stars. The proof from parallax (which also involves us with the Distant Starlight Problem) can also be angels dancing with the stars. Movements which are explained by exotic appeals to gravity distorting the light rays can be angels dancing with stars and planets. Movements or variations which are explained as star covered periodically by an exo-planet can be angels dancing with their stars or doing something with them.

That is, in the absence of a real challenge to the status quo, the status quo should prevail. Bouw claims that that status quo was geocentrism, so his favoured geocentric model, the Tychonian system, should prevail. This is preposterous. The Tychonian system was not the status quo then; the Ptolemaic model was.

I do not know exactly what Bouw meant by status quo. I do know what I mean by prima facie evidence. In absence of real challenge to it, it should prevail. Now, earth may seem flat prima facie viewed, but there is a real challenge to it. Earth also seems non-moving to two of our senses, prima facie. Since there is no real challenge to that, it should prevail. Semen prima facie seems to be a liquid and as such life giving. There is a real challenge to that from the microscope: what gives life is not the liquid per se, but small solid bodies swimming around in it, carrying about half the genome of the potential parent. And so on for any other scientific question as long as we deal with questions of fact rather than with questions about what paradigm to adopt.

And Geocentrism is a question of fact, not just a deduction or item of Ptolemaic system and separated from that also a deduction or item of Tychonian one. It is a question of fact which is prior to either system. Aristotle refuted Aristarchus before Ptolemy did.

[W]hile [Bouw] correctly notes that the failure to detect stellar parallax was an argument against the heliocentric model, he quickly concludes that this was circumstantial evidence for geocentrism (or as he prefers, the Tychonian model).

It was circumstantial evidence for Geocentrism and used as such in the first process of Galileo. And the first process was not vindicating the entire system of Ptolemy : it was not vindicating Ptolemy at all, except in so far as he was a Geocentric, and it was not attacking but actively using Tycho. Who indeed had argued that absence of parallax was evidence against Heliocentrism.

Galileo was answering that parallax would be detected with better telescopes if such could be had.

But let us note what parallax they were talking about. Least uncautiously (as I did myself for long) we conclude the "parallax" discovered in 1838 is evidence for Heliocentrism.

Of course the heliocentric model can explain the lack of trigonometric parallax if the stars are at incredible distances. This turned out to be the case, and there is compelling evidence that even the nearest stars are more than 200,000 times farther from us than the Sun is. If lack of parallax was evidence against heliocentrism and for geocentrism, then one would expect that when parallax was finally detected in the 1830s, trigonometric parallax would be taken as evidence against geocentrism and for heliocentrism.

I am not defending Bouw, I am defending St Robert's position.

If stars - not counting Sun and planets - are the rim of the visible Universe, then the parallax would be pretty uniform for each direction. In Autumn we are on the Pisces side of the Sun just as the Virgo is on the Sun side away from us. Pisces and all other stars in that direction would then have greater angular distances if we were the ones moving. In Spring, we are on the Virgo side of the Sun and Pisces on the Sun side away from us. Virgo and all stars in that direction would be observed with greater angular distances if we were the ones moving.

It would be either us moving around the Sun or the Fixed Stars moving around us with the Sun if that was what we observed. In Aristotle the latter would be excluded, since one does not speak of containing places moving around what they contain, but of things moving in the place that contains them.

Only this is not the parallax we get in 1838. What we get one which shows either - if we are supposed to move - that stars have very different distances from us, or, if we do not move, that if they move with the Sun, they are not doing so at same distance from it and at same time in same extent as it. And if we accept that angels can dance with their stars (those that have stars, that is), to honour their maker, just as that of the Sun stopped to honour Joshua and went back to honour Hezekias and went dark to honour the namesake of one and legal descendant of the other, then we can conclude, that stars are moved by their angels for æsthetic reasons, one of them being to dance in time with the Sun.

However, this is not Bouw’s conclusion. Instead, Bouw modifies the Tychonian model so that the Sun in its annual motion drags along the distant stars.

In Faulkner's text "this" means parallax being observed proving Heliocentrism. But of course Bouw's conclusion is not what I offered as commenty below that either. And in Bouw's model, which in this respect I do certainly not share, the "parallax" would be trigonometric exactly as on Heliocentric standard assumptions and so it would also land us with Distant Starlight Problem. Since the distance between star at two positions would equal distance of sun at two positions. But if 1838 what was discovered was not parallactic as far as observation goes but a proper movement of stars (moved by their angels, dancing in time with the sun), there is nothing trigonometric about parallax and it gives no basis for distant starlight problem either.

And therefore Geocentrism - though not exactly the model of Bouw as far as parallax is concerned - is a solution to the distant starlight problem. And a simpler one than the ones offered by Danny Faulkner in his debate against Hugh Ross.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
Octave of All Saints
8-XI-2013

*Video here:

GeneralHanSolo : Hugh Ross vs Danny Faulkner - How Old Is The Universe?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaiAomEVpKY

My comments with debates (you remember when youtube allowed one to do real debates in comboxes?) here:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Angels and Men in Hugh Ross Context
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2013/08/on-angels-and-men-in-hugh-ross-context.html

**Maybe I should not have:

The Niphal stem usually denotes the passive or the reflexive voice. However, some verbs, such as nacham (meaning “to repent” in the Niphal), may be better translated with the active voice.

Wikipedia : Niphal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niphal

In Swedish repent is actually reflexive - ångra sig. But true enough, verbs are not always same diathesis in different languages.

So, the passage would be meaning (if you analyse instead of translating fluently) "shall neither be moved by outside agency nor move itself" - literally in Psalm 92, metaphorically in Psalm 15.

The verb of moving when referring to "state of being in movement" rather than "action of putting sth else in state of being in movement" would in Latin be passive (moveri, the psalm has "non com-movebitur"), while French has the active form "bouger". In Swedish and German it is reflexive for being in movement: "röra sig", "sich bewegen".