No, I referenced articles on your topic. I also included a few references on another common false te meme.
You said:
It is often claimed by certain TEs that to be consistent, a person who accepted that the Bible clearly teaches a literal 6 day creation should also be a flat earth geocentric proponent. Typically this happens because the person does not understand the distinction between conservative Biblical scholarship and non-discriminating literalism.
Do you not agree that your comments would have been quite inappropriate if I had never actually intended to introduce a flat earth, and that they would be entirely unnecessary if creationists would actually
demonstrate that geocentrism is rightly not a doctrinal issue instead of just asserting that it isn't?
In any case, I did answer to the AiG articles. Let's pick it up from there.
Reposting from #8:
Do you notice that your first two [AiG articles] actually contradict each other at points? Danny Faulkner says:
Bouw does correctly point out that Galileos argument about the phases of Venus does not distinguish between the heliocentric and Tychonian models, but this needlessly clouds the issue since the Tychonian model was not even being discussed at the time. 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. 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. Nevertheless, Bouw does a clever slight of hand trick. He 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
. 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.
[emphases added in this post] But Thomas Schirrmacher says in Thesis 9:
In Galileos time, science did not have to decide between Ptolemy and Copernicus. Ptolemys view that all planets and the sun orbited the earth, was no longer a real option. Rather it is important, that the choice now lay between Copernicus and Brahe, because everybody believed that other planets orbited the sun. The question was, whether or not the earth was moving itself or was staying in the centre of the universe. Nearly no expert believed in Ptolemaic astronomy any longer. The conflict was between Tycho Brahe and Copernicus.
Tycho Brahe, predecessor of Kepler as German Imperial Court astronomer, held to the central position of the earth, while at the same time integrating the observation of the other planets moving around the sun.The arguments and observations which Galileo referred to, were acknowledged, but they denied only the Ptolemaic system, but did not favor in the same way the Copernican system. They were compatible with the Tychonian system, which had the advantage that the central position of the earth was maintained.
Galileo never took a position on this issue nor presented arguments against Tycho Brahe with the exception of his polemical and totally distorted description of Brahes system in his work against Horatio Grassi.
[emphases added in this post]
So what is it now? Were the geocentrists of the time Ptolemaic? Or Tychonian? This is important. The Tychonian system abandoned the Aristotelian notions of incorruptible heavens with crystal spheres. The old creationist canard is that geocentrism wasn't Biblical, it was Aristotelian. You see Faulkner trying to hold that out. Yet at the same time you see Schirrmacher saying that the strongest contemporary geocentric theory wasn't even Aristotelian - so if not Aristotle, what influenced them to hold to it? (The truth is that both camps were quite strong at the time - while the scientific establishment was largely Ptolemaic, there were a few outspoken Tychonists, notably Cardinal Bellarmine who held a similar model in which the heavens were fluid.)
This example alone demonstrates that creationists aren't really out to understand the geocentrists; they're out to distance themselves as much as possible. Why the fear? The geocentrists are an interesting and complex bunch. They aren't the Aristotle-enslaved crones that creationists often paint them to be. They were heavily influenced by Biblical literalism, which was itself an interesting product of the times of the Counter-Reformation.
So, does anybody here actually want to discuss why the geocentrists felt that geocentrism was doctrinally important? Or are the creationists instinctively running for cover?
(As shown above, read creationists - and rabid anti-creationists! - on Galileo with a very large pinch of salt. For balanced treatments try "Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible" by Richard J. Blackwell, and "Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology" by James M. Lattis.)
