The Blasphemy of Heliocentrism

By Daniel Mocsny at 11/25/2024

The Pareto distribution of bible verse citations

If you’ve listened to many church sermons, you may have noticed that they often cite verses from the church’s preferred translation of the bible, or allude to verses indirectly. If you were to write down all these verses, over time you’d build up quite the list. But you might need a lot of sermons before you could reconstruct an entire bible that way. That’s because many verses in the bible sound a bit problematic to modern ears, and don’t feature in a lot of sermons. Instead you might notice that your pastor is like a long-time touring musical act, well past its hitmaking heyday, which keeps on playing its hits. What people liked in the past, they can probably like again. A cynical or perhaps realistic observer might note that the most important skill for any church pastor is fundraising (“No bucks, no Buck Rogers”), and some bible verses work better than other verses for separating the marks I mean congregants from their money. Among the more successful pastors - in terms of attracting congregants and extracting money from them - we have Joel Osteen, whose preaching style, or so I’ve read, leans heavily into “uplifting” and away from “challenging.” Thus we wouldn’t expect to see successful pastors like Osteen engaging seriously and frequently with bible difficulties, as these seem to be bad for business.

If we were to extract the bible verses from a large corpus of sermons, and plot their frequencies on a histogram, we might find that the bible verse citations follow something like the Pareto principle (or 80:20 rule, or the “law of the vital few”). That is, we’d find many mentions of a small number of popular verses like John 3:16, and fewer mentions of many less popular verses. If the bible verse citations follow the 80:20 rule exactly, then we would find 20% of the verses in the bible accounting for 80% of verse appearances in sermons. I have no idea of what the real distribution is; it might be even more lopsided than that.

Bible difficulties

As one might gather from the title of this blog, at Debunking Christianity folks are distinctly interested in the bible verses that are least popular with Christians. These are the verses that inform Isaac Asimov’s famous quotation:

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”

Asimov was a prolific writer or editor of over 500 books on a wide range of topics, making him one of the more literate people to have ever lived. Thus to read the bible in the same way that Asimov “properly” read it would be difficult for most mortals. However, a very first step toward reading the bible (or any book) “properly” would be to read the whole thing from start to finish. And quite a few professing Christians have not even done that, depending on which of the many online survey articles you believe.

The unmoving Earth

Among the problematic verses being commonly ignored are those which appear to support the geocentric model. These verses include (citations from the ESV):

  • Psalm 104:5 “He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.”
  • Psalm 93:1 “The Lord reigns; he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed; he has put on strength as his belt. Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.”
  • 1 Chronicles 16:30 “Tremble before him, all the earth; yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.”
  • 1 Samuel 2:8 “He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.”

The writers who wrote those verses, and most of the readers who read them, right up until the 1600s, evidently took them to mean what they clearly say: that the Earth is fixed in position, as a building resting on pillars, and does not move. This accords with human intuition, informed by our unaided human senses. Stand in an open field on a clear night, and your senses assure you that the Earth you stand on is solid, substantial, and unmoving, while those tiny lights in the sky clearly move around you.

Ptolemy thought the solar system looked like this
Ptolemy thought the solar system looked like this, image from Wikimedia Commons

From our modern perspective, “we” now know that the Earth is moving in a stunning variety of ways. Plate tectonics continually creates new ocean floor at mid-ocean ridges, and recycles it at subduction trenches, shoving continents around in the process, raising mountain ranges (orogeny) and erupting volcanoes, in a constant battle against the forces of erosion. Since erosion works faster where there is more vertical relief, mountains are actually among the most temporary of Earth’s features, contrary to the prescientific view of mountains as being eternal. Mountains are generally much more durable than individual humans, so you can have much the same view of mountains as your great-grandparents did. But on a geological time scale, mountains spring up and wear down faster than most other parts of the land. Today’s Appalachians, for example, top out around 2000m, and are a far cry from the heights they may have attained when young, perhaps similar to the modern-day Rockies and Alps. Naturally, the bible is wrong about mountains as about so much else:

  • Psalm 125:1 “A Song of Ascents. Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.”

In addition to Earth’s surface structure being constantly on the move, the entire Earth itself rotates on its axis daily, and revolves around the Sun yearly. The Earth wobbles on its axis, like a top, causing subtle changes in insolation that gave rise to cyclic glaciations in the past. (Humans may be preventing the next glacial maximum by extracting and burning so much fossil fuel.) The Sun pulls the Earth with it on its very long revolution around the center of the Milky Way galaxy where a supermassive black hole resides, sucking in entire stars and planetary systems that stray too close. And the entire galaxy moves relative to other galaxies, with a predicted collision with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy in about 4.5 billion years.

Heliocentric blasphemy!

As anyone with even faint knowledge of science history knows, geocentrism gave way to heliocentrism after Galileo Galilei learned of the newly-invented telescope, designed and built his own improved model, and pointed it at the night sky. Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius in 1610, and it was a seminal document in the Scientific Revolution. Galileo is considered by many to be the father of modern science, in that he changed the way people approached the study of Nature. By publishing his results in vernacular Italian as well as scholarly Latin, and by disclosing his methods in detail and inviting other people to replicate them, he set the model for the next 400+ years of modern science.

Geocentrism didn’t give way easily, though. The Roman Catholic Church via its infamous Inquisition took vigorous (and often combustible) exception to anyone who dared challenge Church teaching. Shortly before Galileo took the dare, Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600 for heresy. There is some debate among historians as to whether and to what degree Bruno died as a martyr for science, but in my wholly amateur opinion he gets the benefit of the doubt.

Galileo’s bold decision to risk his life for the truth triggered what came to be known as the Galileo affair. The Church resisted admitting error for a long time. After the trial of Galileo, the Church placed books about heliocentrism on its banned list (the Index Librorum Prohibitorum), only removing the last one in the year 1835, roughly 200 years after geocentrism had been proven wrong. The Church has since sent mixed messages about Galileo, with Pope Benedict XVI among others continuing to throw recent shade.

The bible is not a science book, no really

You might wonder why, if the bible is not “meant” as a scientific work (a common modern Christian apologetic argument to explain away the scientific errors of the bible), it nevertheless contains verses clearly meant to awe the hearer with razzle-dazzle about the wonders of Nature. One possible explanation is that this is what worked in the ancient world. Before the bible, there were similar works such as the Enūma Eliš. After humans invented agriculture, they began growing in numbers, building the first cities, accumulating wealth, and becoming less equal. The humans who had more wealth needed a way to justify their status to the humans who had less. Religion filled that need perfectly, which is why all the early civilizations were theocratic, and why ancient human leaders frequently claimed to be gods.

Some books about religious razzle-dazzle and/or inequality

Why geocentrism still matters

Even though the geocentrism/heliocentrism debate played out centuries ago, it’s still relevant today.

Some people still believe it

For starters, some people still believe the Sun goes around the Earth. From Wikipedia (follow the link to see the links to citations):

According to a report released in 2014 by the National Science Foundation, 26% of Americans surveyed believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Morris Berman quotes a 2006 survey that show currently some 20% of the U.S. population believe that the Sun goes around the Earth (geocentricism) rather than the Earth goes around the Sun (heliocentricism), while a further 9% claimed not to know. Polls conducted by Gallup in the 1990s found that 16% of Germans, 18% of Americans and 19% of Britons hold that the Sun revolves around the Earth. A study conducted in 2005 by Jon D. Miller of Northwestern University, an expert in the public understanding of science and technology, found that about 20%, or one in five, of American adults believe that the Sun orbits the Earth. According to 2011 VTSIOM poll, 32% of Russians believe that the Sun orbits the Earth.

If you are like me, you may find this hard to believe, even if you’ve read books about the science of human intelligence differences which document the diversity of cognitive capacities out there. But geocentrism? I had thought that mistake was pretty much done and dusted, but apparently it’s still alive and kicking.

Epistemic ontogeny recapulates phylogeny, sort of, and epistemic fossils

In the biological sciences, Ernst Haeckel famously promoted recapitulation theory (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”), “claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species’ evolutionary development, or phylogeny.” While this has fallen out of favor among biologists as a general principle, something like it seems to hold when it comes to human beliefs. A child begins life with a number of naive beliefs, perhaps including belief in imaginary gods like Santa Claus, gradually replacing them with rational beliefs through formal and informal education - or some beliefs, anyway. We normally think in terms of “human knowledge” in the abstract, as the collection of facts that “are known.” But human knowledge in this sense exists nowhere; what really exists is each individual human’s unique collection of particular truths and falsehoods. And different humans get off the epistemic train before it reaches its current end of the line. This makes some people the equivalent of epistemic fossils, analogous to so-called living fossils in biology, like the coelacanth. The coelacanth was known only from fossil specimens for decades until someone caught a live one in 1938.

Thus a “modern” person who continues to believe geocentrism, proven false in the 1600s, is like an epistemic fossil today. You’d expect to only find such misconceptions in a history book, not living and breathing in front of you.

What use might this concept be, you wonder? It may be handy for remedial education. I suggest identifying a person’s oldest incorrect belief, because that should be the easiest one to correct. For example, most educated people had abandoned a belief in the Flat Earth centuries before modern science. Galileo was able to destroy geocentrism with extremely primitive technology by modern standards, at the very dawn of modern science. If someone believes in Noah’s global flood, that will take a bit more to correct, because scientists didn’t manage that until around the year 1800. And if someone believes in Young Earth Creationism, correcting that will require science from the mid-1800s to early-1900s (up to the modern synthesis). If someone still believes that “refrigerator mothers” cause schizophrenia, you’ll need science no older than some living people. And if someone still believes that burning fossil fuels is harmless, you’ll need science that is newer (and thus more complex and harder to grasp) than the last time you used a rotary phone or typewriter, if you’re old enough to remember those.

It’s a lot of work to spoon-feed a science education to someone who doesn’t want it. Therefore I think the goal of persuasion should be to get people to read books (in this case, science books), which can do the bulk of the heavy cognitive lifting for you. Granted, that’s a huge challenge, because people are generally ignorant of science because they don’t like reading science books in the first place. But maybe you can start them off with colorful science books from houses like DK Publishing or Imagine which are written for “young readers.” Hey, don’t laugh (or do laugh), I still enjoy reading them in my doddering dotage. They’re a lot more enjoyable than the typical philosophy text with all the excitement of a telephone directory meets insurance policy.

Religions both appeal to tradition and hide from it

An elderly religion like Roman Catholicism likes to have it both ways: it will appeal to its long lineage as if that somehow confers authority, while at the same time fleeing from the unflattering bits of its history (and they are legion). Catholics like to claim Peter as the very first Pope, making them the Real McCoy when it comes to Christianity, unlike those Protestant Johnny-come-latelies. But wrapping oneself in the mantle of history isn’t great when the history is as checkered as Church history. The business of burning heretics for telling the truth about the Earth going round the Sun is not a great look. In contrast, when corporations find that their brand has gotten soiled, they re-brand to make the bad history go away. But not the Catholic Church. It’s still the religion of Torquemada.

But aside from the checkered history, the colossal error of geocentrism shows the unreliability of faith as an epistemic method (i.e., a method for deciding what is true). Faith is essentially the belief that believing something said by some authority makes it true. We can test the reliability of that method by examining the record. And the record is not good. Faith has taken some big swings, and had some big misses, on rather important issues like geocentrism, Young Earth Creationism, slavery, women’s rights, gay rights, etc. This calls into question other religious claims that rely solely on faith, such as ensoulment of the zygote, libertarian free will, dualism, and perhaps all other claims that various religions disagree on (because they can’t settle their differences with evidence).

Looking at the history of religion is like a hybrid outsider test for faith. It’s an “inside” look at the “same” religion, but from the “outside” perspective of what the religion has evolved into after a few centuries of having some of its errors corrected by science and social progress.

Science denial is far from dead

Galileo was far from the last person to be persecuted for telling the truth. Today we have giant industries of science denial. They don’t usually burn people to death, but their tools are just as effective for spreading anti-science beliefs. See Galileo: And the Science Deniers in the list below.

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