Weird Earth. Donald R. ProtheroЧитать онлайн книгу.
outside bend. From the inside driver’s perspective, the outside car appears to slow down and fall back as it is passed, even though from the spectators’ view, all the cars are moving forward. We travelers on the race car that is earth are on a faster-moving vehicle on the shorter inside bend from outer planets like Mars and Jupiter, so each time we come up from behind and pass them, they briefly appear to be falling back.
This simple but elegant solution first came to Copernicus shortly after his observations in 1515, but reluctant to publish, he spent a lot of time writing it up and tinkering with it. Some of his students wrote and published short summaries of his ideas, so they were known to many scholars and some Church officials. Copernicus himself wasn’t in any hurry until late in his life, when he finally wrote it all down as De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (“On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres”). Copernicus was justifiably afraid of criticism from the Ptolemaic astronomers of the time and especially from the Church—so much so that he dedicated the work to Pope Paul III in hopes of placating religious authorities. The book finally went to press in 1543, just as Copernicus was dying of a stroke and paralysis at age seventy. Legend has it that he was shown the final printed pages of his book just before he died, knowing that his work would be published.
Once he died, Copernicus was safe from the firestorm of anger, criticism, and censure that his work provoked and from the torture of the Inquisition. After his death, his work was mostly ignored as purely theoretical for decades, and not until people like Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake for his heretical views) and Galileo revived it did the Church consider his work a threat and ban Copernicus’s book. As we just discussed, it was not until the 1990s that the Church finally made official peace with Copernicus and Galileo, even though their work had become the foundation of modern astronomy with the work of Newton in the early 1700s.
“Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right”
Most readers of this book might be thinking, “OK, so much for the history of how the heliocentric solar system was discovered. After all, scientists proved it in the 1700s, and even the Catholic Church finally recanted, only 350 years late.” That’s what I thought too, until I was startled to find mention of a seminar held at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, on November 6, 2010, titled “Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right.” At first I thought it might be some kind of clever satire, but once you clicked on the web page (since taken down), it was clear that they were dead serious! Who were these people, and how is it that they have a significant following in the twenty-first century?
Robert Steinback of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors racists and antisemites, attended the meeting and described it as follows:
“Seminar” might be generous phrasing: The presentation was a mind-numbing, 15-hour-long sermon-cum-pep rally for radical traditionalist Catholic apologists desperate to debunk any science that suggests the Bible shouldn’t be interpreted literally. Numerous biblical passages describe the earth as at rest, with the sun in transit around it. About 90 mostly Catholic devotees, curious skeptics and feisty college students who converged on South Bend endured a series of one-sided monologues declaring that theorists from Copernicus and Galileo to Einstein and Hawking were wrong about celestial physics. Though much of it was difficult for mathematical mortals to follow, the presenters’ gambit was clear enough: Can anyone really prove the earth isn’t sitting still? That’s tougher than it sounds: Even though astrophysicists tell us that every body in the universe is in motion, it will always appear that the thing you’re on is standing still relative to everything else.
“If we’re saying that the earth is in the center of the universe and it’s not moving, that means Someone, with a capital S, put it there,” said the conference’s principal speaker and emcee, Robert Sungenis, founder of Catholic Apologetics International….
Some of the South Bend presenters have taken their certainty about what they see as literal biblical truth to hateful extremes far more consequential than dismissing Galileo: Sungenis has published a number of venomously anti-Semitic screeds that drew official church condemnation and have rendered him unwelcome in most mainstream Catholic circles.
E. Michael Jones, who also was at the gathering, has used his South Bend-based magazine Culture Wars to viciously denounce the “Jewish world view” and has expressed enthusiasm for many core Nazi ideas about Jews (a sampling of his magazine’s cover stories: “Judaizing: Then and Now,” “The Judaism of Hitler” and “Shylock Comes to Notre Dame”). Martin G. Selbrede, who also spoke, is vice-president of the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading think tank of the Bible-literalist Christian Reconstruction theology; the foundation has never renounced the racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views of its late founder, R. J. Rushdoony….
The best moments of the gathering came when 15 or so bright college students finally got to confront the purported experts at the end of the long day. The panel struggled with and occasionally mocked their questions and host Sungenis at times seemed to bristle at the students’ audacity.
If such an attitude is typical of all like-minded theorists, it’s easy to scientifically postulate that geocentrism is a lot of solar hot air.1
The summary of the seminar also captures the main features of the modern geocentrist movement. They’re a tiny group of extreme Catholics (sometimes called traditionalist Catholics) who reject most of the changes in their Church in the past few decades, including the pope’s apologies to Galileo and acceptance of modern science. As the article also states, they fall back to an even earlier phase of Church history, when antisemitism and persecution of Jews was one of their main habits (many Jews were tortured and executed by the same Inquisition that tried Galileo).
Their leader is a man named Robert Sungenis, who got a bachelor’s degree in religion from George Washington University and a master’s degree in theology from Westminster Theological Seminary. He calls himself “Dr.” Sungenis because he got a “doctorate” from an unaccredited online diploma mill that calls itself “Calamus International University,” incorporated in the Republic of Vanuatu. He began in a Catholic family, then converted to Protestantism as a young man, and then swung back to the extreme form of Catholicism in his later years. Sungenis attributes his conversion to geocentrism to reading the book Geocentricity by the creationist Gerardus Bouw in 2002. (Ironically, most of the modern creationists who are literalist about every other part of the Bible reject geocentrism.)
By 2006, he had become a major advocate of geocentrism; had self-published (with Robert Bennett) a three-volume book, Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right; and was running a website, www.galileowaswrong.com.2 The site is full of slick video clips, blog posts, and a forum promoting their ideas. One video audaciously claims that geocentrism is “the coming scientific revolution.” Just like creationist websites, it is full of attacks on scientists and scientific ideas, wild claims with only minimal fact-checking from anyone outside their community, and a distinct sense of paranoia that the entire world is against them because they are on to the truth.
Sungenis’s organization has done their share of stunts to please their following and thumb their nose at the rest of the world. In 2006, they offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could prove that the earth moves around the sun. Like most such contests by pseudoscientists, the conditions of the award are so restrictive that no one can satisfy them, and those who have successfully demonstrated heliocentrism have been rebuffed on one technicality or another.3
Their most outrageous stunt was a 2014 ambush film called The Principle. Using a different tentative film title and concealing their true motivations, Sungenis and executive producer Rick DeLano obtained interviews with numerous distinguished scientists, including Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Max Tegmark, Julian Barbour, and George F. R. Ellis, and they paid actress Kate Mulgrew (best known for her appearances on Star Trek: Voyager) to narrate it. They asked the right kinds of questions to make these scientists think that it was a genuine, honest documentary, let their guards down, and say things that could be edited to emphasize the uncertainty of science. These included questions about controversial topics like dark matter and multiverses as well as segments edited to sound like the scientists support