Another consideration is relevancy. Does it matter one way or another the way space works or the distant past of the earth? In my opinion pretty much no, anything that is not working towards the salvation of souls is ancillary at best and totally irrelevant at another end of the spectrum.
One final aspect of the question you asked Durango, is the part it plays in the very first dogma found in Ludwig OTT's
Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma.
‘God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural light of reason from created things.’ (De fide.)
‘For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen – His everlasting power also and divinity - being understood through the things that are made. And so they are without excuse, seeing that, although they knew God they did not glorify Him as God or give him thanks, but became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds have been darkened.’---St Paul’s Letter to the Romans.Saint Thomas Aquinas explained and developed this dogma. He advised any search for God should begin with the things we can realise, the things that can be perceived by the senses, things all around us as we live out our lives. These are the first things we can know, because they exist; things like the universe, the Earth, sun, moon, stars, sky, clouds, oceans, mountains, landscapes, trees, flowers, fruits, animals, birds, fish, insects, minerals and fuels, but especially fellow human beings. To most, these are things taken for granted today, but for St Thomas they generated wonder. The first question he asked was ‘Where do all these different things get their existence from, what causes them all to be?’ Thus begins a journey in some cases from cause to cause until we reach a point where we can go back no further. It is then we have to acknowledge a Cause that did not receive its existence from outside itself otherwise all that is would never have come into being to be comprehensible to our minds and senses. St Thomas examined in detail what kind of being this original or supreme cause would have to be. The answer, of course, is an omnipotent Creator.Now Revelation and the senses show us God created the Universe to turn around our Earth at the centre. This showed mankind they are special because of it. As time went by, this geocentric doctrine was developed further to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of man and the infinite theology of God, a synthesis of thought found in the reasoning refined and articulated in a Christian way over the centuries by all the Fathers and Doctors of the Catholic Church, especially Dionysius the Areopagite (1st century AD), St Clement of Alexandria (150-215AD) - who held that the altar in the Jєωιѕн tabernacle was ‘a symbol of the Earth placed in the middle of the universe,’ - Peter Lombard (12th century), and then, ‘with great power and clearness,’ wrote Andrew White, ‘St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the sainted theologian, the glory of the mediaeval Church, the “Angelic Doctor,” brought the whole vast system, material and spiritual, into its relation to God and man,’ a composite of theology and metaphysics that resulted in ‘a sacred system of cosmology, one of the great treasures of the universal Church.’ In this way Saint Thomas brought about a universal change in emphasis. Up to his time philosophy had been the centre of knowledge since the great Greek thinkers, but with the application of Christian revelation and infused wisdom, Christian theology and metaphysics found its place in the intellectual world, with all the other humanities and disciplines, including ethics, logic, politics, and economics subservient to it. Thomism then, became the vehicle for a system of learning and education. Hence with the scholastics, the primacy of a teleological explanation for the existence of man, his nature, place, purpose and destiny was established more fully.
Dante Alighieri, famous for his The Divine Comedy, a poem divided into a journey of three parts of a geocentric world, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Heaven), reflects medieval Catholicism when the Catholic faith had reached it peak of blessed understanding.. Pope Benedict XV in his 1921 In Praeclara Summorum did praise Dante’s medieval geocentric Catholicism but questioned the integrity of its geocentrism if ‘the progress of science’ had shown us Dante’s old world order had been proven false by science.
Cardinal Bellarmine wrote his De Ascensione Mentis in Deum, The Mind’s Ascent to God (by the Ladder of Created Things). Published in 1614, Bellarmine devotes seven of his fifteen steps to ‘The Consideration of the Heavens, the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.’
Topic: Is Cassini a Sedevacantist? (Read 1855 times)