The Galileo ‘twist’
by Russell Grigg, M.Sc.(Hons)
Creationists are often accused (by Christians opposed to their view) of making the
same mistake as the Roman Catholic Church did at the time of Galileo. Then, the
institutional Church insisted that the Bible taught that the sun went around the
earth. After it was shown by Galileo that the opposite was true, believers found
that they could comfortably accommodate this new fact, without any problem to their
belief in the Bible. However, the historical events surrounding Galileo should be
a warning to theistic evolutionists and long-agers, not to the Genesis creation
movement.
The background
Image Wikipedia.org
Galileo Galilei
Over two millennia ago, Aristotle (384–322 BC)
taught that the earth was the centre of a ‘perfect’ universe in which
the movements of the stars were circular and never ending.
Ptolemy (AD 2nd century) expanded these
ideas into what became known as the Ptolemaic system (see box).
Then in the 16th century, Copernicus (1473–1543)
postulated as a better explanation that the earth and planets revolved around the
sun.1,2
In the 17th century, Galileo (1564–1642), with his telescope, was
able to carry out repeated and repeatable observations which refuted Aristotle and
Ptolemy, and supported Copernicus. For example, he observed that the sun had spots
which moved across its surface, showing that the sun was not ‘perfect’
and it itself rotated; he observed the phases of Venus, showing that Venus must
orbit the sun; and he discovered four moons that revolve around Jupiter, not the
Earth, showing that the Earth was not the centre of everything. In 1618, he observed
three comets pass effortlessly through Ptolemy’s crystalline spheres (in which
the planets and stars supposedly moved around the Earth), showing that these spheres
must be imaginary.
The heliocentric (from Greek helios = sun) or Copernican system opposed
the views of the astronomer-philosophers of the day, who earned their livelihood
by teaching Aristotle and Ptolemy, and so were biased against change. They therefore
either ignored, ridiculed, destroyed, or hostilely opposed Galileo’ ’s
writings. Many Church leaders allowed themselves to be persuaded by the Aristotelians
at the universities that the geocentric (earth-centred) system was taught in Scripture
and that Galileo was contradicting the Bible. They therefore bitterly opposed Galileo
to the extent of forcing him on pain of death to repudiate his findings.
This was because:
-
The Church leaders had accepted as dogma the belief system of the pagan (i.e. non-Christian)
philosophers, Aristotle and Ptolemy, which had become the worldview of the then
scientific establishment. The result was that Church leaders were using the knowledge
of the day to interpret Scripture, instead of using the Bible to evaluate the knowledge
of the day.
-
They clung to the ‘majority opinion’ about the universe and rejected
the ‘minority view’ of Copernicus and Galileo, even after Galileo had
presented indisputable evidence based on repeatable scientific observations that
the majority was wrong.
-
They picked out a few verses from the Bible which they thought said that the sun
moved around the earth, but they failed to realize that Bible texts must be understood
in terms of what the author intended to convey. Thus, when Moses wrote of the ‘risen’
sun (Genesis
19:23) and sun ‘set’ (Genesis
28:11), his purpose was not to formulate an astronomical dictum. Rather
he, by God’s spirit, was using the language of appearance so that his readers
would easily understand what time of day he was talking about.3 And it is perfectly valid in physics to describe
motion relative to the most convenient reference frame, which in this case
is the earth. See the sub-article Sunspots, Galileo and
heliocentrism.
This plain meaning (the time of day) is perfectly satisfied by the language of appearance
and does not demand the secondary deduction that it is the sun itself which moves.
Indeed, this is exactly the same thing that scientists do today in weather reports
when they give the times of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’. They
are using the language of appearance, and using the earth as the reference frame.
A convenient figure of speech does not invalidate science; nor does it invalidate
the Bible.
Likewise verses such as
Psalm 19:6 and
93:1, which the writer(s) clearly meant to be poetic expressions, were
given a literal meaning.4,5
Today
Today we live in a world where most of the scientific establishment is heavily biased
in favour of naturalism (the belief that everything can be explained by natural
causes) and long ages. The scientific establishment propagates this belief system
by claiming that everything in the universe originated in a big bang, and that all
things are the result of evolution over billions of years. Indeed, many astronomers,
scientists and teachers today have built their careers and earn their livelihood
by teaching these theories.
However, these ideas, like Ptolemy’s, although ingenious and possibly plausible
to atheists, are loaded with complications and contradictions, and are simply wrong.6
At the same time there is a minority of scientists, the creationists, who hold the
opposing view that the Bible provides a better explanation of how the universe and
life came into existence—created directly by God—and that the evidence
from design, the fossil record, information theory, etc., is what one would expect
if this is so. All such evidence, like Galileo’s, is ignored, ridiculed, concealed,
or hostilely opposed by the establishment.
And once again many Church leaders have allowed themselves to be persuaded by the
‘science’ taught at the universities; they get around the atheistic
part by telling all that the big bang, billions of years, and evolution are all
compatible with Scripture. This inevitably leads them to oppose the minority (creationist)
view.
This is because:
-
Such Church leaders have accepted as dogma the belief system and philosophies of
non-Christian (i.e. pagan) scientists, like Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Stephen
Jay Gould, et al. Thus, like their 17th century predecessors,
they are using the ‘knowledge’ of the day to interpret Scripture, instead
of using the Bible to evaluate the knowledge of the day.
-
They cling to the majority opinion and reject the minority view, despite the fact
that there are many observations that uphold a young age and speak against an old
age of the earth and universe,7 and
there is no experiment that any evolutionist has ever done (much less a repeatable
one) either to observe or to confirm the theory of evolution.
-
They explain away the Genesis record of creation as myth or they introduce long
ages into the account, but they fail to realise that Genesis, too, must be understood
in terms of what the author intended to convey. Thus, a plain reading of the text
shows that Moses’ purpose was not to set down a collection of myths or camp-fire
stories, as is often claimed; nor are the days of Genesis 1 meant to be a metaphor
for something else like long ages, or a simplistic way of explaining billions of
years to a primitive culture.8 Rather,
the text shows that Moses wrote Genesis as a literal account of the history of the
world from the beginning of creation to the arrival of the Hebrews in Egypt.
This is an interesting ‘twist’ on the Galileo situation. Back then,
the Church leaders said that Bible verses which were written in poetic format and
meant to be poetry should be taken literally; today they are saying that Bible passages
which were written as prose and meant to be literal history should be taken as poetry!
The real lesson
No, creationists are not making the same mistake as the the Church did in the 17th
century, i.e. claiming that the Bible says something which is contrary to fact.
But the Church, by and large, still is! The Church has not learnt the lesson of
history and still insists on taking a popular worldview as its authority, instead
of upholding the Bible and allowing it to be its own interpreter.
Although the Church leaders of Galileo’s day mistakenly thought that the Bible
supported a geocentric system, there was nothing intrinsically atheistic in the
notion that the earth moved. Furthermore there are no other doctrines that depend
on the relative motions of the earth and the sun.
By contrast, the theory of evolution is an atheistic explanation of origins and
is the justification for the anti-God system of
secular humanism which pervades society today. It also makes God the author
of death and suffering.
Furthermore Christians who do not accept the Genesis account as literal history
and the days of Genesis as literal earth days need to explain away a host of other
Bible passages and doctrines, e.g. the green plants being the food of the animals
before the Fall (Genesis
1:30), the Sabbath Commandment (Exodus
20:9–11), Jesus’ teaching that God made man and woman
‘at the beginning’ (Matthew
19:4), Jesus’ teaching about marriage based on a literal
first man and woman (Matthew
19:3–9), Paul’s exposition of the Gospel based on the fact that
Adam was literally the first man (Romans
5 and
1 Corinthians 15), etc.
Thus the lesson from Galileo is not that the Church should not oppose the
theory of evolution, but rather that it should, because science has not
proven evolution; rather evolution is contrary to proven science and opposes the
plain Word of God.
The Ptolemaic System
According to Ptolemy, the sun, moon, planets, and stars all revolved around a fixed
earth in a series of hollow, inter-nesting, crystalline spheres. This is called
a geocentric or earth-centred system, and is known as the Ptolemaic system.
There were some problems which Ptolemy’s geocentric system did not fully explain,
notably the to-and-fro motion of the planets across the sky, as seen from the earth.
He therefore postulated a number of mechanisms that were ingenious and initially
plausible, but ultimately impossibly complicated and scientifically wrong. For example,
each planet was said to move in its own small curve called an epicycle,
while all the epicycles moved around the earth in larger circles called deferents.
Return to text.
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[Ed. notes:
- The article by Dr Thomas Schirrmacher,
The Galileo Affair: history or heroic hagiography, Journal of Creation
14(1):91–100, 2000, shows that ‘Contrary to legend,
Galileo and the Copernican system were well regarded by church officials. Galileo
was the victim of his own arrogance, the envy of his colleagues, and the politics
of Pope Urban VIII. He was not accused of criticising the Bible, but disobeying
a papal decree.’
- See also Dr Danny Faulkner’s article
Geocentrism and Creation and other articles under Astronomy and Astrophysics Q&A]
Related articles
References and notes
- His book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the
Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in 1543, challenged Aristotle’s
(and thus also at that time the Church’s) teaching that the earth was the
centre of all change and decay, and that around it were the changeless heavens.
Return to text.
- In the Copernican system the earth and planets circle the sun,
with the earth taking one year to do so; in the Ptolemaic system the sun, planets,
and stars are all required to circle the earth every 24 hours. A huge problem with
the latter system is that the nearest star, Proximus Centauri (also known as Alpha
Centauri C), is 4.3 light years away, so that if this star circled the earth every
24 hours, its speed would need to be nearly 10,000 times the speed of light (and
much greater speeds would be needed for the more distant stars). Return
to text.
- Similarly, Joshua was using the language of appearance in
Joshua 10:12–13. For a discussion on this miracle, see my article
Joshua’s long day: Did it really happen—and how? Creation
19(3):35–37, June–August, 1997. Return to
text.
-
Psalm 19:4–6 metaphorically describes the sun as coming forth from a tent
in the heavens, and also personifies the sun both as a bridegroom and as a strong
man running a race. One would have thought that even the inflexible literalists
of Galileo’s day might have allowed the writer of this Psalm to have meant
it to have had a poetical meaning. Return to text.
- In
Psalm 93:1, the phrase ‘the world also is established,
that it cannot be moved’ needs to be read alongside v. 2,
‘[God’s] throne is established of old’,
where the same Hebrew word [kown = ‘established’] is used and
has the meaning ‘set up’, ‘stable’, ‘secure’,
‘enduring’, ‘confirmed’, etc., not ‘immobile’
or ‘stationary’. Likewise the Hebrew word for ‘moved’ (v.1)
is used in
Psalm 16:8, ‘I shall not be moved’,
meaning that the writer would not stray from the path of the Lord, not that he was
rooted to any one spot. Return to text.
- For example, the exponents of the big bang fail to say where the
energy originally came from, where the laws of science came from, and what it was
that ‘quantum fluctuated’ before there was anything there to fluctuate,
and so on—see What about the big bang?
and If God created the universe,
then who created God?. Molecules-to-man evolution is contrary to the principles
of thermodynamics, as well as to the law of biogenesis (life comes only from life),
the fossil record, and much more. Return to text.
- See, for example, John Morris,
The Young Earth, Master Books, Arizona, 1994, and
Evidence for a young world by Russell
Humphreys. Return to text.
- Top-flight Hebrew academics, e.g. Professor James Barr of the University
of Oxford, are unanimous that the plain meaning that the Hebrew text is intended
to convey is that ‘creation took place in a series of six days which were
the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience’. (See
Six days? Honestly!) Return to text.
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