Science vs Science, Exegesis vs Exegesis

Yesterday, I saw Dominic Statham's article:

The truth about the Galileo affair
by Dominic Statham Published: 8 November 2018
https://creation.com/galileo-church

It was nearly all good, unlike some earlier things I had seen. This is the bad part or two of them:

It was only many years later that scientists were able to confirm that he was right. ... It wasn’t until Isaac Newton (1643–1727) that the matter could be settled. Newton’s law of gravity and his three laws of motion made clear that the planets (including the earth) had to orbit the solar system’s centre of mass. Because the sun is so massive the centre of mass can be treated as being at the sun’s centre. Kepler’s model, then, was proven to be the correct one—there was neither need for nor a physical mechanism to produce epicycles.

This is: 98 words. The whole article, skipping images and image texts, is: 4640 words. Is there a third bad part? Not yet seen except skimming what was said of Joshua.

So, for a CMI-article on Geo-Helio-issue, it is really good. It linked to Hartnett's review of a book, let's find the reference ...

Graney, C.M., Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. See also review by Hartnett, J.G., J. Creation 32(1):45–47, 2018.

Now, I will quote one passage from that one too:

In 1651, the Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli published his book New Almagest wherein he outlined 77 arguments against the Copernican system and 49 arguments in favour of it. Most arguments against the Copernican system could be answered, at that time, but Riccioli, using the then available telescopic ‘observations’ of the size of stars, was able to construct a powerful scientific argument that the pro-Copernican astronomers could not answer without an appeal to the greatness of God.

I suspect Graney only read what he thought most relevant and not all of New Almagest. Neither did I. I have not found the 77 vs 49 vs new star size based "by Riccioli himself" (I think it was brought up in Galileo defending his book before Bellarmine, but I could be wrong).

However, I read another part of New Almagest. A passage which answers the above appeal to Newton (which was also basically the one of my physics teacher back in 9th or 10th grade) - in a very elegant Christian way.

New blog on the kid : What Opinion did Riccioli call the Fourth and Most Common One?
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-opinion-did-riccioli-call-fourth.html

Celestial mechanics as per St Thomas Aquinas

God moves the primum mobile (sphere of fix stars, probably, or perhaps just outside it) westward each day. It moves diverse spheres down to sphere of moon and to some extent atmosphere (winds of passage) and seas (oceanic currents at Equator). Each sphere moves the one inside it and is moved by the one outside it except the outermost that is moving which is moved by God. This means movement depends in this ultraobvious example as well as in other ones, in the present, on a finite series of moved movers moved by the unmoved mover, God. Each celestial body within its sphere is moved Eastward by an angelic mover.

Celestial mechanics as per Riccioli

God orders angels to move Celestial bodies westward each day.

He prefers appeal to Anselmian proof over the via prima, at least in its astronomic version. Tycho had disproven solid spheres, meaning celestial bodies move in a void.

Celestial mechanics as per me

God moves the aether westward around earth each day. Celestial bodies and for that matter objects standing still on Earth and those moving at moderate speeds are moving east through the aether, and the celestial bodies are moved by angels, as both Riccioli and St Thomas agree, and more precisely eastward, as on St Thomas' view.

Aether is the medium of place (outside earth and inside Empyreic heaven moving westward), of vectors (that is why an object falling does not move westward with aether, it already had an eastward vector through it, this is also relevant for Geostationary satellites, and of light, meaning that

"no object can move faster than speed of light" is:

True

of movement in relation to aether.

False

about compound speed including that of aether.

Pluto may be moving faster than speed of light locally, but nearly has no movement on a daily basis vectorially through the aether.

I hope you can see how this is tying in with St Thomas Aquinas. Now, in response to the paragraph I quoted from Statham, Newton's two-body problem for earth and football ball if football ball is placed at earth surface = football ball lies still. Whether you mean American football, rugby or the "association football" usually called soccer in English (the usual meaning of "football" in non-English countries), the players are modifying Newton's two body problem. So are angels and God moving aether in relation to the astronomical one.

Oh, yes, one more. While St. Robert was holding up Galileo's book for somewhat adverse scrutiny, he was not moved by a science motivated limitation of freedom of speech as if there were no theological reasons. You see, back then there was no real such thing as "scientific establishment" or at least its beginnings were not as mighty as today.

Cardinals Bellarmarine and Conti, for example, had both agreed that Scripture might legitimately be interpreted differently, allowing for a moving Earth.

For St Robert, Robert Sungenis (who wrote extensively on the affair in Galileo Was Wrong, the Church Was Right) gives a quote which is more negative than just "might", it is more like irrealis modus.

Joshua's long day came up. A line of argument would have been Galileo saying Joshua 10:13 refers to how it looked from earth, while St Robert would reply, why did then the moon stop too?

Another line of argument would of course be, Joshua 10:12 makes Joshua adress sun and moon as the entities which were to miraculously change behaviour. As he spoke inspired by the Holy Ghost, he would not have adressed the miraculous command to the wrong entities.

Now, Newton was one line here, Foucault (mentioned in Hartnett) is already virtually answered by aether being medium of vectors and vector relevant movements, and here is another thing:

Of course, if the stars are so enormously distant and if their ‘measured’ sizes are spurious, then the major scientific argument the geocentricists had against the heliocentrists evaporates. By 1720 Edmund Halley argued that the star sizes were spurious, but some astronomers still maintained the argument. A century later English astronomer George Airy developed a full theoretical explanation for the spurious disk of stars. It explained both the appearance of disks and why they varied in size for different stars. This effect is known as an ‘Airy disk’ and results from diffraction effects in the objective lens of the telescope.

Apart from the fact that Airy is also known from Airy's failure ... in star distance and geocentrism I take the opposite approach.



Without heliocentrism, we cannot know parallactic distances to be true ones, we have no reason to believe α Centuari is 4 lightyears away and therefore, other methods of measuring distances, including the crucial next step of Herschel (applied backwards it is a part of stellar distance, you identify "type", you think you know real size, you measure distance by apparent size), fall with this parallaxis "measure". Hence, no Distant Starlight problem. 2001, night to St Bartholomew (24.VIII.2001), I reached this conclusion. Some of above I have elaborated since and even changed my mind (my early debate material will include attempts to deny Newtonian gravitation totally and I think portal tides are too complex when concretely occurring to be certainly tied down to gravitation, while oceanic ones would be problematic to measure, so they would not necessarily prove its reality either), but angelic movers, I already knew since a somewhat extensive reading of St Thomas under a few years of solitude 1996 to early 1998.

And, this makes Geocentrism one relevant option in exegesis of Mark 10:6. While Galileo in a famous letter to a princess is prefiguring the infamous NOMa of Gould.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Dedicace of Our Saviour's
Basilica in Rome on Lateran
9.XI.2018