OK I abbreviated my evidence but even so I do not think you were very fair with it.
Sorry if you think I am being unfair, by its very nature internet discussions involve abbreviated versions of the evidence. The thing is, I am aware of the evidence available at the time, there was good, though very very incomplete, evidence and arguments supporting heliocentrism, as well as bad arguments made supporting it. Galileo was particularly bad a coming up with wrong arguments in support of good theory. And the geocentrists rightly rejected his bad arguments. I am not aware the moons of Jupiter were used to argue smaller objects orbit larger so the sun is logically at the center because it is the larger. If the idea did not occur to them it does nothing to change the circumstantial nature of the evidence for heliocentrism, and even if it did occur to them, it would have been highly circumstantial as well as a non sequitor.
The moons orbit, yes. Jupiter is larger then the moons, yes. But how do you know that they orbit Jupiter because it is larger? Mars is smaller than Jupiter but does not orbit it. How can you go on to say that because a handful of moons orbit a planet, the planet therefore orbit the sun? It simply does not follow.
What the moons of Jupiter do show is that they fit Newton's gravitational theory. But that is exactly the kind of confirmation we have with evolution. The data fits beautifully. But like with evolution in the creationist argument, no one had ever gone there. No one can travel back in the past to see long scale evolution happen or radioactive decay happening 100 million years ago. Until 50 years ago no one was able to go out into space to see if gravity even operates there.
Think about it. All we are saying with radioactive decay is that the rate was the same back then as it is now, a fact which has been confirmed by other methods, though still ones that do not involve travelling there.
But no one had ever gone into space to see how gravity worked there, and Newton's claim was that gravity operated in a very different way to what we actually observe on earth. Most radically, we see gravity pull apples in straight lines, the claim of heliocentrism is that gravity can make planets travel in circles and ellipses. We had only ever seen gravity pull objects
to earth, heliocentrism, at least Newton's version, claimed the sun, moon and planets all had gravity of their own. Complete speculation that. Really, until Neil Armstrong took his first hop, or the lunar module blasted off the surface of the moon, we had no direct experience of gravity anywhere else in the universe other than earth.
There were a load of observations here including the telescopic evidence that smaller objects tend to orbit larger ones in our solar system.
There was also the irregular movements of the planets and the way sometimes they would appear to reverse direction.
For Copernicus at least, you still had a bad fit because he proposed circular orbits rather than the ellipses Kepler described. It was a better fit than heliocentrism, but still circumstantial evidence and still needed epicycles. Even with Kepler's elliptical orbits, Mercury and Neptune still did not follow the orbits they should have. I am sure if it was YECs, they would have been claiming heliocentrism was in disarray over a detail like that. It was only with Einstein's relativity and the discovery of Neptune that we have an explanation for these erratic orbits.
There are the trigonometric calculations about the size and distance of objects.
Adding all these evidences together my conclusion is a logical one. Neither aristarchus or Calvin had gallileos observations on the moons of Jupiter to work with.
I am afraid no measurement of size and distance will be able to tell you which object is moving and which is standing still.
About your idea it follows logically smaller objects orbit larger. It is not actually true. It is the mass of the objects rather than their size that determines who is in the centre and who is in orbit.* You can actually have very large objects orbiting tiny ones as long as the tiny object has more mass. At the centre of our galaxy there is a supermassive black hole. Stars orbit it, the whole galaxy spins around it, yet its size is a single point, a singularity.
Now the moons orbit Jupiter because of its enormous mass, and we can even measure the mass of Jupiter by their orbit and the mass of the moons by the way they interact with each other. But we only know the mass of Jupiter because science tells us Newton's laws of gravity apply to the system. If you wanted to use a YEC argument against it, the evidence is being interpreted based on Newtonian and Heliocentric presuppositions.
No but the circumstantial
evidence and observations were quite substantial by this point. But true it was just a working theory until the space craft confirmed it.
Yes they were substantial, just as the evidence for evolution and the age of the earth is. But no one had every actually gone into space, or sent an object there to even show that gravity operated outside of earth, that it pointed in any direction other than down to earth, or that other astronomical bodies exerted a force of gravity like we saw on earth. All we had was observations of a handful of objects already out there and out of our control, moving more or less according to the predictions of the theory and a few odd observations like pendulums swinging around cathedrals that fitted the theory, but really, proved nothing.
And the church, after some initial embarrassing hiccups, accepted the science simply because it was good science, the best science we had, long before the confirmations came in. Thank God it did. Thank God the church got down and re examined its literal interpretation of scripture that said the sun move round the earth and found new ways to read these passages. Can you imagine if the church held fervently to geocentrism and was still preaching literal geocentrism when Sputnik the Luna probes and Neil Armstrong showed Copernicus Kepler and Newton were right?
But hey, sputnik was launched by atheists, doesn't that show if you accept heliocentrism you are buying into an atheist lie?
No because even without direct physical contact and spacecraft arriving as expected using heliocentric mathematical models the evidence was overwhelming by this point. I have not even begun with my poor abbreviated version of the argument to document all the observations in itsfavour _ e.g observations on the phases of venus, of sunspot activity and movements etc. But there was little doubt in any ones mind by the time the space craft was launched.
Just as there is no doubt about evolution and the age of the earth. We have vastly more evidence evolution and the age of the earth than science had about heliocentrism when the church accepted that science.
*Even then, you actually have both objects orbiting around a common centre, the earth and moon orbit a point in between them. The point is inside the radius of the earth, but not it's centre so earth's orbit around the common centre consists of a wobble while the moon orbits much further out.
