Earth at the Center? Not Hardly!

A while back, I posted material on geocentrism (the Ptolemaic "fixed earth" concept). There are people who still believe this, and reject that the earth goes around the sun. Some insist that the Bible teaches a fixed, immovable planet, but that is based on incorrect readings and bad hermeneutics. (A Sacred Name cult on Facebook that pretends to be Christian and creationist still insists on their odd view of it despite logic and evidence. Atheists sometimes misrepresent what the Bible teaches, and owlhoot cults like this add fuel to their fire.) What is called he geokinetic or heliocentric view that we know today is well established by science, and has been known for quite some time. The Bible does not call on us to deny practical, observable science!

Image credit: International Astronomical Union

The following article is more exhaustive than the one previously posted, and is very interesting. It discusses the history of the geokinetic view, gives evidence why most people accept it, and shows why there is no valid reason to claim that the Bible teaches a geocentric view.

Questions about how the universe works are not always easy to answer. For many centuries most people (scientists and philosophers included) thought the earth was at its center and that the planets, moon, sun, and stars revolved around us. This is called “geocentrism” or the “geocentric view of the universe”. It took years of painstaking work, spread out over multiple centuries, to show that this was false as an absolute claim. Today, we accept a “geokinetic” (moving-earth) view based on the work of Newton and Einstein. For the student of history and/or science, how we came to the modern view is an amazing exploration of how things work and a testimony to the amazing ability to reason that God uniquely put into people.

We live in a created universe, meaning its existence did not come about through naturalistic processes alone. We also live in a well-ordered universe; meaning it behaves according to a set of rules. This is consistent with it being created by an ultimate Lawgiver, who is not fickle and acts in a consistent manner, according to His very nature (c.f. 1 Corinthians 14:33, James 1:17) . Therefore, we can explore the way things work and expect rational results from our experiments.

To read the rest of this extremely interesting article, you may want to grab something to drink, a snack and the comfy chair, then click on "Why the Universe does not revolve around the Earth — Refuting absolute geocentrism".