Geocentricity in the last year of the twentieth century is what I call
"serious nonsense" when telling my students about it. I have a file on this
dating back to the late 1970s, when Pittsburgh Creation Society member
Richard Elmendorf issued a $1000 challenge for evidence "proving" the
earth's motion, either its orbital motion or diurnal motion. He explicitly
rejected a long list of classical arguments for such motion, including the
Coriolis effect, the aberration of starlight, stellar parallax, the Foucault
pendulum, etc. What it comes down to is this: unless someone can produce a
*logically necessary* proof, *or* a clear statement of scripture directly
referring to a moving earth, then it ain't good enough.
The "regular" creationists I know are shocked and embarrassed by this type
of nonsense, but there it is, and for (IMO) exactly the same reasons:
science and a literal Bible must be made to agree in detail. You pays your
money and you takes your choice. The comments about Galileo having had to
deal with this are correct, but we note that creationists reject Galileo's
approach to scripture although most of them accept his scientific
conclusions which influenced his biblical interpretation.
The earth's motion and the presence of death before the fall are in my view
the two most pregnant points of contact between the bible and modern
science. Scientific creationists accept one but not the other; ID advocates
generally (not all of them) accept both, but haven't come to terms
theologically with the second. Geocentrists reject both.
Ted Davis
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