I cannot see that the behavior of Venus necessitates a heliocentric model: one could have a geocentric model in which Venus simply orbits the sun, the effect would be the same.
For me, though, the biggest piece of evidence is the tropics: how does a geocentric universe explain that everything in the sky has that annual north-south motion? If the earth is actually stationary, this “vertical” motion is extremely difficult to account for.
Hebrews 11:1 is the famous one that’s often quoted: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
It specifically says that “faith” is believing what you hope for when there is no actual evidence.
That would be the which was developed to explain the Tychonic model which was developed to account for Venus. However, this model was destroyed by the discovery of star aberration in the 18th century, which was conclusive proof that the Earth moved around the Sun.
This was easier to observe than stellar parallax, and could be possible for someone to recreate.
So, my vote is for the phases of Venus to disprove the classic geocentric model and then star aberration for people such as For You.
You cant prove that its not all one big dream.
So what do you mean by prooving?
Prove that the Earth orbits the sun
Layman’s observation: The sun is always visible from some point on the earth. If the rest of the planets orbited the earth, they would also always be visible from some point on the earth, too, right? (at least the closer ones Venus and Mars).
They are not always visible, since sometime in their orbit of the sun, they are on the other side of it, and not visible to earth at all. Ergo, the planets do not orbit the Earth, but instead orbit the Sun.
It would not take too much more logic to conclude that the Earth is also a planet, and probably behaves the same way as the other planets in relation to the sun.
Science is basically an “explanation model” as to how physical phenomena work. It may not apply everywhere in the universe, there may be a specail exception for 10 square feet in the center of the Taj Mahal, etc. - but the explanation that does not allow for those divergences, still shows a remarkable consistency in explaining observed phenomena. You can make up anything and claim it is an exception - but without observations or a logical mechanism to explain why it diverges from the model that currently explains observed reality, no experiments to prove your exception - there is nothing to back up the claim. Ocam’s razor, simplest explanation is likely the most correct.
This is the problem. You can make up or say anything you want. If you can’t prove it, via observation or experiment, it’s not really science.
True. You can posit the whole universe circles the stationary earth, and physical phenomena are adjusted to compensate. But there’s no easy model that explains that. WHereas, the mass=gravity model explains the motions we observe, chemistry adds the observed changes in spectrum lines indicating earth motion, etc. Again, simplest explanation.
It can point out inconsistencies and possible alterations of the text which may help prove the assertions contradict and don’t make sense. But the basic tenets of the faith are still unproveable.
With all the evidence and observation apparently to only myself (only a layman), it would take much more faith to believe in something like Geocentrism.
What’s more than that, I would have to be willfully ignorant, and intellectually dishonest with myself to accept Geocentrism, et al, as the reality over our current modeling of our solar system.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but when gencentrism was “main stream” understanding, to say otherwise might get your head cut off.
Yehhh… But that wasn’t science so much as it was heresy.
I’ve begun to use the word “trust” in these kind of situations rather than “faith”. I trust that the sun will rise tomorrow. I don’t “believe” it, I “trust” that it will.
No, this point has been repeatedly refuted. We trust things, but the point of science is to challenge what we trust when a conflict arises.
This is not a hijack in that the letter writer was attempting to equate a belief in something which cannot possibly be tested with a hard scientific fact which requires deliberate ignorance in order to claim it’s a matter of “faith.”
Here, you are conflating the scientific method with religion. It doesn’t work, and it’s as erroneous as the letter writer.
Your “proof” is that, since “A” contains “some truth” that the supernatural elements (which cannot be proven) can also be claimed to be true.
You simply cannot go from the first part to the conclusion, without allowing the same argument to be used by everyone from Scientologists, Mormons, and a myrad of mutually exclusive religious groups.
Any process which allows mutually exclusive arguments fails.
I never had any such faith. Instead, I saw the limit switch that the door hits when it closes. I push the switch, the light goes out. Bingo. No faith required, just the expectation that the switch will tend to work the same way all the time (and when it doesn’t, as has happened, it’s broken.)
No, just tortured to death.
Specifically, this bit:
The story I recall reading is that there was a neo-Pythagorean cult (or school of thought, or whatever…) Buried in the quote there is the mention of Zuniga’s “On Job”. Pythagoras has pushed an theory that the earth and planets orbited a central fire. Zuniga’s contribution was to assert that there is a passage in The Book of Job that backs this up. However, this required an alternative translation and the assertion that the official translation/interpretation of the holy scripture was wrong.
So asserting the earth orbits the sun was a sign one belonged to a cult that contradicted official doctrine… sort of like trying to reconcile evolution and scripture nowadays - the Vatican dug in its heels and said the earth does not move, any assertion to the contrary is aiding this heresy.
While the church is busy trying to stamp out a cult of intellectuals who say they know better than the church officials, along comes an arrogant jerk (Galileo) who happens to publish scientific information that backs the Pythagoreans rather than the church and having been warned once, still won’t shut up about it. hence the second trial.
There was a whole thread about this a year or so ago. Quite a few intellectuals, even inside the church, recognized the science was pointing to Galileo being correct, and rote interpretation of scriptures did not work. The church recognized Galileo was not a heretic like the numerologists, but they had to shut him up because he was giving the wrong side a boost. They gave him all the warnings, they showed him the instruments of torture (but did not torture, from what we know) and when they sentenced him, it was to pretty lenient house arrest, not prison.
So like all “urban legends” of history, there’s more to this than the simplistic situation.
You clearly missed the bit where I pointed out that what is often described as religious faith by both Christians and non-Christians has no significant biblical basis. No I did not take you through a theological treatise on the subject. Neither the time nor the place.
Who says it can’t be tested. You can test the claims of the Bible easily. The book of Proverbs is full of if-then statements that can be tested. Admittedly, most require a level of personal commitment and the results of the experiment are things that are personally experienced. But that does not make them less real or less testable.
No such conflating.
I did not present a proof. Again, not the time nor place. I merely pointed out the elements that would be contained in such a proof. You are right to highlight the tricky issue of the supernatural. My comment at this juncture are twofold: Firstly that what we would commonly call supernatural occurrences are an essential component of the biblical message and not something to raise the eyebrows if the Bible is given by a supernatural God. Secondly, this is a matter that needs thorough treatment and proper examination of the evidence. Hearsay of so-called modern miracles will not suffice. Nor will a fly-by posting in a message board. Perhaps I will open up a discussion in GD. But it is not going to be this week – I have too much other stuff to do.
Surely one evaluates truth claims on the strength of the evidence presented. If a Mormon ever presents me with some solid archaeological evidence, I will look at it. At this point however I would peg the truth claims of the Bible as being of a higher calibre than any other world view or religion that I have encountered.
I am not presenting mutually exclusive arguments. I was trying to not actually present arguments. This isn’t GD. I am merely claiming that a proper treatment of evidence is warranted.
Rebuttal done (for now anyway). Back on to the topic.
In the brief comments of the letter writer that DrumGod mentioned, as far as we can tell, the writer was stating that belief in the Bible was similar to belief in the heliocentricity of the solar system on the following grounds:
Both require acceptance of some claims of truth as facts because we are unable to check them out for ourselves.
My comment is
Back to our letter writer: the truth claims of the Bible can be verified (or refuted) in a manner similar to the geometry of the solar system. I am not sure that my treatment of the subject is exactly what the writer had in mind, but that statement of similarity certainly is true.
I don’t think the OP’s original antagonist was suggesting that the Bible said that the earth didn’t move about the Sun. Earth-Sun motion was simply a rhetorical device as a proxy for all scientific theories - basically that most people take these theories on trust - and for the most part don’t have the means to verify them for themselves. He could have substituted the Higgs Boson, but the esoteric nature of that would have weakned the impact of the argument.
Where I think the sticking point with scientific argument versus Biblical study is that the basic nature of the logical steps are different. A scientific argument is as strong as its weakest link. You can’t get to a scientific theory if any step does not fit a very stringent set of requirements. Further, some arguments in the steps are simply not accepted. Appeals to authority is one. Very careful avoidance of recursive or circular reasoning is critically important. The creation of an internally self consistent set of reasoning does not in and of itself create science. Finally, a scientific theory must be testable. If not, it isn’t science. So, whilst there may be a long history of theological reasoning (and it would be foolish to discount the very real contribution to logic and philosophy made by some of these theologians), if there is a logical derivation of a result, it isn’t enough to assert the result, it needs to be testable. A difficulty with logical derivations from holy texts is that at some point there always seems to be a step that involves the entire text being assumed, or in some sense - proven, to be entirely true. That step usually seems to involve an invalid step of circular reasoning. (A friend of very devout faith, once simply said to me, “The Bible must be true, because if God to created it, he wouldn’t mess up.” He seemed oblivious to the logical fallacy here.)
Now to be fair, if you delve into the underpinning philosophy of science, there are clear components where arguments are built on sand, and like any philosophical question, you easily reduce to the fundamental question of philosophy, and it all comes to a grinding halt. But, if you step up, and look at the accepted nature of science as practised in the modern world, and the reasonably clear understanding of what science is and isn’t, the disparity between scienctific logical argument, and and rhetorical arguments in theology, there is a very clear and absolute dividing line.
The thing is, all knowledge is contextual. You can’t change something like the workings of our solar system without having to adjust our thinking of other things as well. And you can’t change those things without having to adjust our thinking of other things. Soon, all our knowledge is challenged, including things that we KNOW are true.
Suppose we change the Pythagorean theorem or the value of pi. In doing so, we have fundamentally altered everything we know about the world around us. It’s all interconnected and mutually dependent.
Since this is now more about the nature of knowledge than about scientifically demonstrating that the Earth moves about the sun, let’s move this to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
We need a set of words which people can agree on the definitions in order to have a discussion. If you and I are using different meanings for the same words, the discussion will go nowhere really fast.
People in the thread are proposing to use the word “faith” in the religious sense of a belief in a god. They are also proposing to use the word “trust” in the sense of taking someone’s word for something. Scientist A says that X is Y. I trust Scientist A, so I believe that X is Y.
In the opinion of many in this thread, myself included, we believe that the letter writer was using ambiguous terms which could be confusing. In the interest of fighting ignorance, I believe that clarity is essential.
If you disagree with the terminology or believe that there isn’t a significant difference between our definitions, then please suggest something else.
This is all too vague. What are you testing for? How do you test things? You talk about archeological evidence, but what does that mean and how does it demonstrate?
I take it you are a Christian, so I hope you feel that way. Just like I expect a Muslim to believe that their truth claims are the best.
What science tries to do, (and scientists aren’t perfect, so they don’t always do this)
is to make it so that things can be objectively looked at.
What are the facts that can be tested and what do they show?
When used the way the OP does, the word “faith” becomes so diluted as to be worthless. I have “faith” that there’s such a place as Australia, because I’ve never been there. I have “faith” that other minds exist, that reality itself exists, that this isn’t all a massive sim, etc. etc.
I even have to have “faith” that two plus two equals four, because I might be being deceived when I sit and count up the change in my change basket. Maybe those “four” dimes are actually “five” and my mind is tricked via some kind of hypnosis.
Solipsism is the only philosophy that is absolutely devoid of “faith” – assumptions. And it’s the most pointless damn idea that anyone ever came up with.
To try to compare, directly, faith in the existence of Australia and faith in the existence of God, is grossly fallacious.
Foucault’s Pendulum shows that Earth rotates, a feature which ought to greatly complicate argument on behalf of any model other than heliocentric.
However, I am not sure the geocentric hypothesis may ever be considered disproven, in the sense of demonstrating that its underpinning mathematics are impossible to construct-- ridiculously complicated and unaesthetic yes, yes, but mathematically impossible, no. I would like to be mistaken on that point, and I hope that the combination of all that is known about planetary motion makes all geocentric models mathematically impossible to the same degree that the phases of Venus apparently make the Ptolemaic model mathematically impossible.
Although much interesting information has been related in this thread by several members it would be nice to obtain comment from a scientist having knowledge of astrophysics, or to obtain a link to some site where the subject is examined in detail (as in a few thousand words, and some nice illustrations would be helpful too) by a professional astrophysicist.