http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/3692/circling_the_new_geocentrists_an_interview_with_karl_keating.aspx

Circling the New Geocentrists: An Interview with Karl Keating
A new book by the founder of Catholic Answers addresses the scientific mistakes, theological errors, and conspiracy-minded promoters of geocentrism
February 13, 2015 03:22 EST

Karl Keating is founder and senior fellow at Catholic Answers (www.catholic.com), the country’s largest apologetics and evangelization organization, and the author of several books of apologetics, including Catholicism and Fundamentalism and What Catholics Really Believe. His most recent book is The New Geocentrists (Rasselas House, 2015). He spoke recently with Carl E. Olson, editor of CWR, about the book.

CWR: Your new book, The New Geocentrists, takes on a topic you’ve followed and addressed for many years. First, what is geocentrism? Second, when and why did you first become interested in it?

Keating: Just as heliocentrism is the theory that the Sun is the center of our planetary system, so geocentrism is the theory that the Earth is the center. Geocentrism is the ancient understanding, best known in the formulation given by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. The Ptolemaic theory was modified substantially in the sixteenth century by Tycho Brahe. Most modern geocentrists adhere to a variant of the Tychonian theory.

My interest in geocentrism goes back to my university days. I took a course in the history of science from Prof. Curtis Wilson, then and until his death in 2012 considered the top American expert on Johannes Kepler, who started out as Tycho’s assistant.

In Wilson’s course we took the ancient observational data, worked through the calculations, and discovered that, as observations became ever more precise, the Ptolemaic and Tychonian theories failed to account for the movements of the celestial bodies. It was this failure that led Kepler to develop his three laws of planetary motion, and it was this course that sparked my interest in geocentrism.

CWR: Why the need for a book-length treatment of geocentrism and its main proponents?

Keating: This movement has been gaining adherents for several decades—since the 1980s among very conservative or Traditionalist Catholics and since the 1960s among Fundamentalist Protestants. Despite being at loggerheads on many theological issues, these groups have joined forces to promote their idea that the Earth is not only at the center of our planetary system but is motionless (that is, it neither moves through space nor spins on its axis) and is at the absolute center of the entire universe. In their thinking, all other bodies—planets, the Sun, the distant stars, galaxies—revolve around the Earth each 24 hours.

There are two things wrong with these notions. First, the science is wrong. That’s bad enough. Worse, for Christians, is that the new geocentrists insist that the Bible (in the case of the Fundamentalists) or the Bible and the Church (in the case of the Catholics) teach infallibly that these scientific theories are true and must be accepted by faithful Christians. They are laying on Christian shoulders burdens that the Bible and the Church don’t really place there.

CWR: You note that your book, while addressing many of the arguments, focuses on the persons involved, hence the title. Why this particular approach?

Keating: In The New Geocentrists I critique many of the scientific arguments proffered for geocentrism but make no attempt to critique them all. I deal chiefly with the ones that most clearly show the failure of the geocentrist position, such as the complete inability of geocentrists to explain how geostationary satellites can remain suspended above an Earth that doesn’t rotate.

But most of my book is a look at the new geocentrists themselves: their backgrounds, their contradictory arguments, their conspiracy theories, their scholarly sloppiness, their plagiarism, their simple inability to “do” the science. In the book I repeatedly challenge their claim to be reliable explainers of science and religion.

CWR: Is it correct to say this topic is, in many ways, just as much about biblical exegesis and issues of authority as it is about science and cosmology?

Keating: Very much so. The new geocentrists hold themselves out as experts not only in science but in religion. They attempt to position themselves as authorities, and more and more people are accepting them as such. The result is that people end up subscribing not just to bad science but to bad religion. The danger is that eventually, when these people realize the scientific errors of geocentrism, they will conclude that truth is to be found neither in science nor in religion.

CWR: What do you hope readers will learn in reading The New Geocentrists?

Keating: I hope they will find a lively account of how people can become fixated on an idea that, while wrong, can seem right from certain angles and how such a fixation can lead to a cascade of incorrect inferences.

I have written The New Geocentrists for the lay reader, not for the expert in science, though I have had experts review the manuscript. Of course geocentrism is very much a minority view, but it is gaining adherents, and the average Christian ought to know about it so that it doesn’t become a stumbling block for him. In my book he will see the truth of the maxim that “ideas have consequences”—or, perhaps I should say, that “bad ideas have bad consequences.”

The problem with this lot is that they think the G/H subject relies on science to resolve. In the Preface of the Earthmovers, it sorts out that idea:
 
'Yes, since the beginning of the twentieth century, science has conceded that there is no empirical way of knowing the true order of the universe - and therefore its laws - for the simple reason that man cannot verify for certain that ‘one firm point’ in space from which to determine any absolute movement between the earth, sun and stars. In other words, even with modern scientific technology, man has never been able to resolve whether the sun and stars rotate around a fixed earth or if the earth turns about a fixed sun within a fixed stars cosmos. '

So, all that is necessary is to show relativity prevails, and thus science cannot prove heliocentrism, so geocentrism is thus as scientifically viable. We can of course go on to show geocentrism has far more evidence for it than arguments against it.

Which takes us to a different level to establish its truth or not, theology. My favourite 'proof' is because ALL the Fathers believed in biblical geocentrism. Thus the Church of 1616-1633 had to define it as formal heresy.
 
So, like many things, it is a matter of faith, a matter long rejected with others since Isaac Newton, and once again in our time by Karl Keating and others.

http://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/1551-a-new-stage-in-the-neo-catholic-witch-hunt

Thanks for this website Ivuenalis, very interesting.

Again, In THE EARTHMOVERS, a full account of the subject privy to this forum only, written long before Keatings ever thought of the subject. In the Introduction we read:

'As a consequent of the above, new readers will first endeavour to ignore this synthesis, and that failing will dismiss or censor it out of hand according to their needs. The credibility of four hundred years of Copernicanism and its promulgators in Church and State will be defended on every ground. They will do this with an arrogance we can easily predict, for things like the Catholic faith, reasoning, facts, data, demonstrations, logic, records, etc., and, as you will see for yourself, the very ‘scientific method’ they claim to adhere to, will mean nothing to them because their belief in Copernicanism is ideologically and psychologically based, not theologically and empirically founded. Accordingly they will resort to a censorship of kind and the tried and tested ‘ad hominem’ ploy, that is, either an unqualified rejection of the disclosures, or rhetoric designed and directed against the author or subject of this book to avoid actually having to address the evidence contained within. The entrenched Copernicans will also point out in no uncertain manner that the content of this book is outrageous, imbecilic according to science as well as an unwarranted criticism of the post-1741 Church authorities, of Vatican Council II and the opinions of Pope John Paul II. They will then claim the author is this or that, not a trained scientist, cosmologist, mathematician, historian or theologian like they are, so what could he know? It must be answered that if one were a coached professional in any such institution of Church or State around today, one could never have written this exposé in the first place, for, quite simply, one would have been fired for it, as many today are dismissed from their educational institutions because they place doubt on old-age evolutionism. It was of course freedom from such peer-pressure and peer-review that enabled this work to be recorded.'

Note all, including Ferrara and other 'traditionalists' found in the comments, see no significance in the subject under discussion. To them, and millions of other Catholics, it can all be dismissed by saying 'it was never a de fide dogma of the Church.' They ALL place 'assumptive science' before the beliefs of ALL the Fathers, a rather unCatholic way to truth. Since when did science determine if a teaching was infallible or not?

They have to say this because it is probably the only time in the history of the Church that a defined and condemned heresy was 'U-turned.' Vatican II was not the moment Modernism entered the Church, it happened in the years 1741 to 1835. This is unacceptable to traditionalists. U-turns are not Catholic but this one even traditionalists see to have no problem with. The main reason of course is because not one Catholic in history has the facts of that U-turn, until today that is.

For example, Ferrara'a piece quotes Pope Pius XII. Now while such popes can be said to be teaching traditional teaching, at the same time he was saying the Church does not forbid belief that the human body could have come from monkeys. Oh I know he never put it that way but when you interpret those pious words of Humani Generis that is what they mean.
Another example is Pope Leo XIII. He said many wonderful Catholic things while at the same time gave 'science' the right to overturn previous Catholic beliefs.

And that is why the Keatings do not want a Catholic on earth accepting a biblical or material geocentrism. But the cat is now out of the bag and when the finished version of THE EARTHMOVERS is published that will give Keating a further run for his Modernism.

 :smoke-pot: