The Siege Mentality and Peripheral Issues

In my last post I wrote about the "siege mentality" of traditional Catholics and the way it can lead to a lack of charity. Today I will write about another problem that the siege mentality can cause: the problem of peripheral issues becoming intimately linked in traditionalists' minds with their Faith, such that far too much attention is paid to issues that are at best dubious, at worst outright harmful, and always unimportant — that is, so peripheral to the Faith that it doesn't matter for one's own life of faith if one believes them or not. Examples include the denial of the holocaust, belief in conspiracies (such as those about one world government, the assassination of Kennedy, or 9/11), and allegiance to the Southern Confederacy. These issues really don't have anything to do with the Faith, but traditionalists sometimes present them as if they have everything to do with it: for example, the belief that the Southern Confederacy was more Catholic and was endorsed by the pope and that therefore every traditional Catholic should be a Confederate (though no such endorsement actually occurred — I should know, as I did my senior research paper on relations between Pius IX, the Confederacy, and the federal government). The reason these issues are taken so seriously and tied so much to Catholicism is because we, as traditionalists, must reject so much of what the modern world tells us that sometimes we go overboard and reject something which it is neither necessary, nor prudent, to reject. Our idea that the world is out to get us causes us to question more than is right.

The specific peripheral issue I'm going to write about today is a recurring one: geocentrism. Geocentrism, the idea that the earth is stationary and the sun revolves around it, is linked to Catholicism in traditionalists' minds for one big reason: the Galileo affair. Ironically, in this case the geocentrists are not rejecting the thinking of the modern world as much as they think: while they reject heliocentrism, they accept to some degree the modern understanding off the Galileo affair. They start with a prior belief that the Church must be vindicated in the Galileo legend, but they neglect to find out the actual history of the affair, so their idea of vindication is to say that the Church was right and Galileo was wrong.

I recently spoke with a group of traditional Catholic geocentrists who wish to sponsor in our area a public talk by Robert Sugenis, the head of Catholic Apologetics International and a famous, or rather infamous, geocentrist. Sugenis wrote a book called Galileo was Wrong; The Church was Right!, which tells you from which direction he approaches the issue. I expressed my belief that having Sugenis speak to a public audience about geocentrism and Catholicism, sponsored by a group of traditional Catholics, will be a disaster.

One of the geocentrists asked me if I wasn't just afraid of Sugenis. He told me we shouldn't be afraid of the truth, since as Catholics we believe that faith and science must always agree. It seemed he thought I was approaching the issue with a prior disbelief in geocentrism and wasn't willing to approach it as a possible scientific explanation.

Well, the geocentrists don't approach geocentrism as a matter of science, either, at least not primarily. They start with the idea that geocentrism is a belief the Church has been criticized for having held a long time ago. Add to that the fact that the Fathers spoke of mankind's centrality in the universe and used geocentrism to illustrate it, and that there are some scripture passages that used to be interpreted as implying a non-moving earth, and you get what must appear to them to be a strong religious case for geocentrism. Then they try to make science fit.

But none of these issues are strong enough to warrant a reexamination of the heliocentric model. Heliocentrism is not the same as, say, evolution, which is rife with both scientific problems and problems for the Catholicism, not the least because it is intimately linked with the philosophical worldview of metaphysical naturalism (the idea that all that exists is the natural world and natural cause and effect). Heliocentrism, on the other hand, is essentially neutral. Yes, the Galileo affair has been used time and again for hundreds of years as an illustration of the "war" between religion and science, but the way to deal with that is not to say "Galileo was Wrong; The Church was Right" as Sugenis does but to examine the Galileo affair in detail, as Dr. William Carroll does, and use the actual history of the affair to show that it was not a matter of religion vs. science, but of a man who had no proof slandering scripture at a time in which the question of scriptural interpretation and who had the authority for scriptural interpretation was very hot.

Anyway, the religious case for geocentrism is weaker than most people, whether modern atheists who use the Galileo affair to attack the Church or modern traditional Catholic geocentrists, think. Let's take scripture. The two big geocentric verses, it seems, are Joshua 10:12 and Psalm 103. Joshua contains the famous story of God stopping the sun for the duration off a battle: "Then Joshua spoke to the Lord, in the day that he delivered the Amorrhite in the sight of the children of Israel, and he said before them: Move not, O sun, toward Gabaon, nor thou, O moon, toward the valley of Ajalon." The movement of the sun is the language everyone uses, every day. When I say that the sun rises and sets I do not mean it literally. The author of that divinely-inspired text was not thinking of geocentrism, or heliocentrism, or anything like that — he was giving an account of a great miracle by God.

We have to be careful not to make an issue out of things that are incidental to the actual point or thrust of the biblical texts. For instance, the account of Creation in Genesis says that God made the world in six days, that he separated the waters, that he hung the sun, etc. The point of this account is not to give a literal, step-by-step account of Creation. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine both said that these passages can be interpreted outside of a strict, twenty-four-hour literalism. The point is simply that God created everything, and that everything owes its existence to God. The Hebrews had a radical conception of divinity, an idea of Godhead that the pagan religions had never seen, and Genesis is an account of the kind of God they believed in. This is a God who hangs the sun in the heavens — which means not only that He is greater than the sun but that the sun itself is really a big lamp, not a divinity. This ultimate Creator God is really a very revolutionary idea, and that is what Genesis is getting across.

As an addendum to discussing Joshua I'd like to mention the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima. This miracle was seen in one, local spot, meaning that looking for a scientific explanation for the movement of the sun during the miracle is impossible. Should we then look for a scientific explanation for Joshua in terms of either heliocentrism or geocentrism? No. The passage has nothing to say about science.

The second famous geocentrist Bible passage is Psalm 103, which states that God "founded the earth upon its own bases: it shall not be moved for ever and ever." The geocentrists claim that this supports the stable earth theory that geocentrism depends upon. I say that that is an extraordinarily literal interpretation that forces the passage into a subject — astronomy — that it is not even concerned with. All the passage means is that the earth is solid and dependable, and that this is evidence of the power of God. Two sentences earlier, we read that God "makest the clouds thy chariot: who walkest upon the wings of the winds." Obviously this is not literal — God does not ride around in a chariot made of clouds, or walk across wings that belong to the wind. It is just a picturesque way of talking. Or consider this passage from Job 41:9-10: "[Leviathan's] sneezing is like the shining of fire, and his eyes like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go forth lamps, like torches of lighted fire." Fundamentalist protestants struggle desperately to make this passage literal, hypothesizing fire-breathing dinosaurs. Catholics are supposed to be smarter than that.

Then there is the question of the Church Fathers. Of course the Fathers spoke of geocentrism: that was the accepted science and the best model of the day. That does not mean we have to accept geocentrism now that it has been shown to be false: even the modern geocentrists don't accept the Ptolemaic geocentrism that the Fathers believed in. This is not the first time we have disputed ideas, especially scientific ideas, that were held by the Fathers. St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas overthrew the old neoplatonic philosophical system that was used to great effect by St. Augustine, in favor of an Aristotlian philosophy that enabled them to believe in an intelligible universe and also in ultimate freedom for God, and which let the medievals establish a system of experimental science that still endures today — in fact, it was St. Albert the Great who first unlocked the scientific method from the writings of Aristotle! (That was the real scientific revolution, not the 17th century.) None of this would have been possible without their belief that St. Augustine's Christian articulation of neoplatonism was wrong because it failed to account for the new scientific knowledge that was streaming in from the newly-available works of Aristotle. Not everything the Fathers said must be accepted as dogmatic truths of the Faith, especially when the things they say that touch on science are, again, incidental to their main point. For instance, the Fathers sometimes illustrated the centrality of humankind by pointing to the Ptolemaic model. But today we can illustrate the centrality of humans in the mind of God far more effectively by pointing to the Anthropic Principle, the Penrose number, and other demonstrations from modern physics.

Finally, I'd like to point out that heliocentrism works better as a science. It doesn't need hundreds of adjustments and refinements to make it fit the appearances, as geocentrism does. It doesn't need to be forced into place. It just works. Think of the many, many scientific principles and data which support heliocentrism without any special interpretation: the coriolis effect, the equatorial bulge, stellar parallax, the aberration of starlight, and all of modern physics, to name a few. Think, too, of the fact that NASA launches satellites in the direction of the rotation of the earth to give them a little bit of extra sling. Think of the fact that satellites, missiles, an even long-range artillery all have to make compensation for the earth rotating beneath them (planes would, too, but they are guided by earth references rather than fired ballistic, so the adjustments of normal navigation negate the problem). Consider that NASA uses the heliocentric model to calculate their spaceflights — everything from launch time to payload to engine-burn time and angle — everything. For instance, probes sent to Mars are sent using the calculation that the earth and Mars both move in circular paths around the sun. Finally, consider the irrationality of the idea of the entire universe — the vastness of which is truly inconceivable — revolving around the earth. If that were true, the distant stars and galaxies — billions of them, light years apart — would be moving at an impossible speeds in order to make it back to their starting point in 24 hours. And what holds them in place? Certainly not the earth, with its relatively puny gravitational pull. To believe such a thing would require the suspension of all the laws of physics that God designed — in which case, why did He design them?

Geocentrism needs to be forced to work, because it doesn't start with data and look for an explanation but starts with an idea it wants science to say and doesn't stop until it thinks it has made science say it. Modern geocentrists use the Tycho Brahe system in which everything orbits the sun except the earth — the sun orbits the earth. The only reason to hold such a system is because one absolutely must have the earth as the physical center of the universe (though according to modern cosmological physics, for all we know the universe doubles back on itself and therefore has no center). One should invoke the principle of Occam's Razor — the simplest explanation is probably true. Rather than thinking that everything operates in a certain way except the earth, it is far simpler to admit that the earth is a part of normal system of operation, rather than an exception.

I'm sure the geocentrists have long and detailed arguments against these simple demonstrations of the earth's motion, but the point is, again, simplicity. Heliocentrism just works. Geocentrism has to be forced to work.

In this confused time, in which secular science holds as its principle dogma a decidedly anti-Christian theory, and the Catholic Church herself has been corrupted from within by the influence of modernism and of that same theory, it is only natural to question everything that comes out of both modern science and the modern Church. Sometimes, though, we can question too much. Rejecting modernism and evolution does not mean rejecting scientific concepts like heliocentrism. Doing so, in fact, can be very harmful to the traditional Catholic community.

The reason is loss of credibility. If any non-Catholic hears a Catholic like Sugenis talk about geocentrism and is not convinced — which is most likely, given the huge problems with geocentrism — and they later hear a Catholic talking about matters of faith and morals like homosexuality, abortion, or any of the dogmatically defined Catholic truths, they will lump these moral subjects in with the mistaken scientific subject and believe that Catholics are wrong about both. Just think of the Catholic teaching that contraception is wrong. That's a concept that is already considered by the world to be irrational and outdated — dating from those unenlightened times when people thought they had to have large families. Do you think anyone's opinion of contraception can be changed when they know that the person trying to convince them believes the patently outdated notion that the sun revolves around the earth? Of course not! It is almost as bad as saying that the earth is flat! Credibility is lost, and moral beliefs will be placed in the same category as that geocentric belief — the category with a big sign above it that says, "Warning: Dangerous Looniness Inside."

To sum up, I'm not afraid of the truth coming out. Unfortunately, the truth will not be the stuff that Sugenis is espousing. Instead, Sugenis and the Catholics he appears to represent will be irrevocably associated with a falsehood. And all the atheists who insist that religion is anti-scientific will have more ammunition to use to confuse uneducated Americans and students in colleges around the country.

We traditional Catholics do not need to make such a big deal out of geocentrism. It is a peripheral issue that is unimportant to the Faith except to vindicate the Church in the Galileo affair — and as I've said, a better way to do that is to look at the history of the Galileo affiar rather than the legend. We certainly do not need to link geocentrism and Catholicism, which is what Sugenis does. We should expend our energy trying to convince the world that the doctrines and teachings of the Faith are true, not that some obscure psuedo-scientific model that is only incidentally related to the Faith is correct.