Quote from: OHCA

Quote from: cassini

[T]he Church . . . once defined belief in heliocentrism as formal heresy.

When did the Church do this and in what docuмent?  When did the Church undo it and in what docuмent?

I'm inferring from how you phrase this that you're saying the Church reversed herself in deeming something heretical.  I'm not sure I knew that was possible.

indeed! That sounded like a cat dropped on a set of piano keys to me as well.

If it was heretical, the Church wouldn't have been able to change it.

O.K., OHCA asks 'When did the Church do this and in what docuмent?'

First of all the fact that Copernicanism, previously Pythagoreanism, was defined as formal heresy. If I had a dollar every time this has been denied by Catholics, I would be a rich man today. Now before I tell you when OHCA, let someone else show you the truth of it.  

Galileo affair from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'In 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), describing the surprising observations that he had made with the new telescope, namely the phases of Venus and the Galilean moons of Jupiter. With these observations he promoted the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus (published in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543). Galileo's initial discoveries were met with opposition within the Catholic Church, and in 1616 the Inquisition declared heliocentrism to be formally heretical. Heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to refrain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas.

Sentence
On February 24 the Qualifiers delivered their unanimous report: the idea that the Sun is stationary is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture..."; while the Earth's movement "receives the same judgement in philosophy and ... in regard to theological truth it is at least erroneous in faith." The original report docuмent was made widely available in 2014

THEN CAME THE SPIN, THE CONTRADICTION:

In the end, Galileo did not persuade the Church to stay out of the controversy, but instead saw heliocentrism formally declared false. It was consequently termed heretical by the Qualifiers, since it contradicted the literal meaning of the Scriptures, though this position was not binding on the Church. ---WIKI.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To find the truth one has to go to the docuмents compiled by the Church on the history of the Galileo case.

 On Wednesday, February 24th 1616, the same propositions were qualified in virtue of the Pope’s order:
(1) “That the sun is in the centre of the world and altogether immovable by local movement, was unanimously declared to be “foolish, philosophically absurd, and formally heretical, inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the declarations of Holy Scripture in many passages, according to the proper meaning of the language used, and the sense in which they have been expounded and understood by the Fathers and theologians.”
(2) The second proposition, “That the earth is not the centre of the world, and moves as a whole, and also with a diurnal movement,” was unanimously declared “to deserve the same censure philosophically, and, theologically considered to be at least erroneous in faith.”  

The following day, the 25th Feb 1616 - the day on which Pope Paul V actively presided at the Holy Office as its prefect - the censures were reported to him by Cardinal Mellinus after which the Pope gave his two well-known orders, one to Bellarmine, and one to the Commissary of the Holy Office, Fr de Lauda. The first order was that Galileo was to be summoned and told of the decision and advised to abandon the heresy.  

On the 5th March 1616, the Congregation of the Index published the condemnations, under orders from Pope Paul V:

In time, 1633, Galileo was put on trial for HERESY.

The Inquisition’s Sentence dictated personally by Pope Urban VIII.

“Invoking, then, the most holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that of His most glorious Mother Mary ever Virgin, by this our definitive sentence we say, pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo, on account of these things proved against you by docuмentary evidence, and which have been confessed by you as aforesaid, have rendered yourself to this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, that is, of having believed and held a doctrine which is false and contrary to the sacred and divine Scriptures -to wit, that the sun is in the centre of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth moves, and is not the centre of the universe; and that an opinion can be held and defended as probable after it has been declared and defined to be contrary to Holy Scripture.'

So, according to the records from the secret archives released to scholars by Pope Leo XIII, Galileo was put on trial for his Copernican heresy and found guilty of suspected heresy (He said he did not hold copernicanism in his heart). It seems then, contrary to Wiki's version (though this position was not binding on the Church) the heresy was very much binding BY the Church.

In 1820, the Church records show that the 1616 decree by Pope Paul V was indeed binding heresy and was 'unrevisable.'

Matthew then says: 'If it was heretical, the Church wouldn't have been able to change it.'

True, absolutely true. The Church did not change it. The Copernicans in the Holy Office in 1820-1835 cheated their way out of it and got the popes of the time to sanction this farce. I can give you the details of how they did it if you want, the exact words recorded from the archives.

There seems to be no information available about the film being shown anywhere else.  Anyone have information that I'm missing?

Thank you Chicago! Due to your incredible support of The Principle this weekend, the Marcus Addison Cinema has extended the movie for a second week![/b] Get your tickets today!  :jumping2:

 ATTACKS ON THE PRINCIPLE CONTINUE.

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HomeAboutThe FaithScriptureCultureSpiritualityFamily Select Page Protecting Faith from Pseudoscience: A Review of The Principleby Guest Contributor | Oct 21, 2014 | The Faith | 15 comments

Camille M. Carlisle is the science editor at Sky & Telescope magazine.

I was recently asked to review a new movie called The Principle, being released this month. The film, produced by Catholic theologian Robert Sungenis, uses science to raise the specter of geocentrism — the theory that Earth is at the physical center of the universe. With breathtaking cinematography and intellectual one-two punches, it paints a compelling argument that geocentrism might be right and the world’s scientists are willfully blind to the evidence.

Compelling, that is, if you know nothing about astrophysics.

If you do, you’ll soon see that the movie is a combination of science, bogus science, and conspiracy theory, tied up in a Gordian knot that would take much more than a blog to fully unravel.

The reason I’m writing about it in a Catholic blog is this: the movie has the potential to erode the scientific literacy of believers and convince nonbelievers that science and Christianity don’t mix. No doubt the movie’s creators are well intentioned. But good intentions make hell-bound paving stones. This isn’t me, a science journalist, merely ranting about the movie’s deplorable lack of fact-checking. This is me, a Catholic, worried about the error it will seed in the minds of God’s little ones.

Because in watching the movie and having a dozen pages of e-mail back-and-forth with the producer and publicist, one thing became clear: the movie’s creators do not understand physics.

Let’s take their argument about center of mass as an example. The movie correctly says that, according to Newtonian gravity, bodies in the solar system orbit around their common center of mass. What that means is that, technically speaking, Earth and the planets don’t orbit the Sun; rather, the Sun and planets orbit their common center of mass.

But the movie then tries to make the argument that, if Earth sits at the universe’s center of mass, then it wouldn’t move and everything — Sun, stars, our Milky Way galaxy, the cosmic web of galaxies and galaxy clusters we see in the universe — would rotate around that fixed point. In other words, Earth is stationary in a giant, rotating celestial sphere.

However, gravitationally, that just doesn’t work. First of all, the Sun has 99% of the solar system’s mass, and so the center of mass for our planetary system lies inside the Sun. Second, there’s no gravitational reason that Earth would sit still where it is. For example, Earth can’t be as close as it is to the Sun and not feel our star’s gravitational influence. Earth is made of matter: it has mass. It’s also a mere 93 million miles from the Sun — astronomically speaking, right on top of it. And the Sun is roughly 300,000 times more massive than Earth. Therefore, even if Earth were at the universe’s center, our planet would still not evade the Sun’s pull. Why? Because the closer two objects are to each other, the stronger the gravitational pull is. And Earth is just too close to the Sun.

In addition, decades of velocity measurements, radio observations, and many other lines of evidence show that our solar system sits in the outer-ish part of a spiral galaxy that’s rotating around a center that isn’t Earth. Observations also show that our galaxy is in a group of galaxies, and that this Local Group is on the outer edge of a giant supercluster. Geocentrism simply doesn’t match the empirical evidence. Nor is there any coherent theory of gravity that can both explain all our observations and put Earth at the universe’s physical center.

There are many other examples in the movie like this one. One that might catch you off guard is the work by astronomer John Hartnett, whose analysis of cosmic structure seems to reveal concentric spheres centered on us. However, as astronomer Tom Bridgman explains in his several blogs on this subject, this is a flaw in Hartnett’s analysis. (Bridgman’s blogs are quite technical — the man really knows his analytic techniques! — but if you want a hard science analysis I recommend reading his blogs on Hartnett’s work and on The Principle.)

The movie also argues against what it calls “patches,” things such as dark matter and dark energy that, it accuses, astrophysicists invoke to try to “save” their theories. But this is a shortsighted argument: it’s equivalent to saying that, since we don’t know everything about the universe, we don’t know anything. Yet however much distaste you might have for dark energy, something is making the universe’s expansion speed up. “Dark energy” is the filler word for that something, until we figure it out.

The Principle’s creators really seem to have it in for Einstein. This is a common problem for those not trained in modern physics. Many think that Einstein’s theory of gravity (colloquially called general relativity, or just GR) is esoteric nonsense. But if you’ve ever used GPS, you’ve used GR. According to GR, Earth creates a gravitational well in the fabric of spacetime. Because of that, time runs slightly slower on Earth than it does for the GPS satellites in orbit. (The delay is about 38 microseconds per day.) In order to use GPS, we have to account for relativistic effects. A world without GR is a world without Google Maps.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

But my biggest complaint is the movie’s underlying philosophical argument. The movie claims that moving Earth from the physical center of everything implies that “man means nothing,” that if the universe doesn’t revolve around Earth, we aren’t special.

This dichotomy is a materialist lie. As Stephen Barr brilliantly lays out in his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, we need to separate scientific results from the philosophy that uses them to make its case.

Too many people buy into the mantra that science disproves faith. Wrong. Materialism uses science to argue that faith isn’t true. We can just as easily do the opposite. (Read Barr’s book for more info.) The movie quotes prominent scientists such as Lawrence Krauss and the deceased Carl Sagan to set up this geocentrism-or-insignificance choice, but both of these men are infamous militant atheists. Of course they’re going to interpret scientific results as proving we aren’t special.

The sad thing is, The Principle buys into this dichotomy, too. The question you should ask yourself is, Why? Why does not being in the middle of everything mean we’re not special? Who said the two have to go together?

In fact, salvation history suggests the opposite is true: God picks the least and the lowly. The Jєωs were a tiny little people among great peoples:  “It was not because you are more numerous than all the peoples that the LORD set his heart on you and chose you; for you are really the smallest of all peoples. It was because the LORD loved you and because of his fidelity to the oath he had sworn to your ancestors” (Dt 7: 7-8). Jesus Himself was from a backwater town in Israel. Heck, He picked fishermen as apostles. And think of the many saints who were not at the center of anything — the children of Fatima come to mind — yet He chose them. So why on Earth should we expect our planet to be the physical center of the cosmos? Is it not more amazing that we aren’t? Doesn’t it speak to God’s providence and love and tenderness, and the fact that He’s God and we aren’t?

Noted cosmologist Max Tegmark raises a useful point in the movie when he says, “We had this arrogance, and we got it knocked out of us. And we realized that we’re not the center of everything” — except we haven’t had it knocked out of us. Because if we had, we wouldn’t sin. Sin is (spiritually) putting ourselves at the center. That the weight of scientific evidence suggests Earth is not at the physical center of the solar system, the galaxy, or the local supercluster of galaxies doesn’t tell us anything theologically — ‘cause hey, it’s only physics, and physics only deals with physical reality, not metaphysics. But it wouldn’t hurt us to meditate on the point for a while.

Recommended reading:

•Stephen Barr. Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. 2003.
•Simcha Fisher. “But what if we’re not scientists?” blog, September 2014.
•St. Augustine of Hippo. Paragraph 39 of De Genesi ad Litteram. (If you think I’m harsh . . .)
•Pope Leo XIII. “Ut Mysticam” (motu proprio docuмent that founded the Vatican Observatory). 1891. Text in Italian. (Still trying to find it in English.)


 :reporter: :thinking:

You cannot separate cosmology from theology. In fact, you cannot separate any science from theology, because theology is the foundational science upon which all other sciences rest, as it deals with first principles of truth and being, and so if your understanding of truth and being are flawed it follows that your natural science shall also be flawed.

The separation of natural science from theology has been an integral part of the apostasy from the faith. The moslems have always held to a nonsensical "what is true in theology, can be false in philosophy", but Catholics have always held that theology and philosophy are consistent with one and other. Now, the Newtonian and Einsteinian cosmologies simply are not consistent with Catholic theology. Catholics always held the heavens to be a place of supreme beauty, order, and happiness; Newton turned the heavens into an abhorrent abyss called "outer space", an endless void with the odd speck of dust hear and there. Catholics try to balance this abhorrent image with the beauty of God but it results in the same mental dissonance as when they try to balance the mercy of God with the atrocities of eons of Darwinian "natural selection". When kids are taught the Newtonian cosmology at school I believe that they are implicitly being schooled in a deistic, if not atheistic, theology. The anxiety and neuroticism of the modern soul goes hand in hand with the emptiness and dread of the Newtonian Universe, as does Einstein's physical relativity align with its moral relativism. The pagans of old had a more human cosmology. Their cosmology was made not by a benevolent and omniscient Father but by the breeding and warring of many gods, which is impious and untrue but at least it is somewhat relatable and picturesque (it makes for nice fables and legends), whereas the void and blackness of Outer Space™ ruled not be gods or angels but by The Universal Force of Gravitation™ leads straight to the insane asylum. I remember being 16 and my friend - who wasn't a melancholic boy, he was quite normal - telling me quite bluntly that he thought his life was ultimately pointless because the Universe is an empty void and he would soon disappear into its blank emptiness for eternity. That's what I mean when I say cosmology and theology (and ethics, and every science) are inseparable. If I'm not mistaken the theologians who talk about "testing spirits" say unanimously that a spirit that causes anxiety and despair is certainly a wicked spirit. Well, I don't think this cosmic spirit Universal Gravitation has ever comforted anybody. Universal Gravitation would be one of Satan's, who, after all, is the God of this world, more amusing names.

....and E continue to rev around S-- which is something denied by Luther, Calvin, Bacon, James, De vere etc.... :reporter:

From the Facebook page:

We expect to open Los Angeles in the next few weeks, and possibly Dallas.

January is when we expect to be in a position to move into additional markets in which we can identify support:

http://www.theprinciplemovie.com/see-movie/bring-to-your-town/

I'm with Ladislaus on this one -- they should just "give it up" and release it on DVD already. That's the only feasible way to reach most people.

This obviously isn't going to be a wildly successful non-mainstream/independent film like "The Passion of the Christ". A lot of people saw that in theaters. That movie had a wider appeal, plus it had the name (and money) of Mel Gibson to back it up.

ATTACKS ON THE PRINCIPLE CONTINUE.

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HomeAboutThe FaithScriptureCultureSpiritualityFamily Select Page Protecting Faith from Pseudoscience: A Review of The Principleby Guest Contributor | Oct 21, 2014 | The Faith | 15 comments

Camille M. Carlisle is the science editor at Sky & Telescope magazine.

I was recently asked to review a new movie called The Principle, being released this month. The film, produced by Catholic theologian Robert Sungenis, uses science to raise the specter of geocentrism — the theory that Earth is at the physical center of the universe. With breathtaking cinematography and intellectual one-two punches, it paints a compelling argument that geocentrism might be right and the world’s scientists are willfully blind to the evidence.

Compelling, that is, if you know nothing about astrophysics.

If you do, you’ll soon see that the movie is a combination of science, bogus science, and conspiracy theory, tied up in a Gordian knot that would take much more than a blog to fully unravel.

The reason I’m writing about it in a Catholic blog is this: the movie has the potential to erode the scientific literacy of believers and convince nonbelievers that science and Christianity don’t mix. No doubt the movie’s creators are well intentioned. But good intentions make hell-bound paving stones. This isn’t me, a science journalist, merely ranting about the movie’s deplorable lack of fact-checking. This is me, a Catholic, worried about the error it will seed in the minds of God’s little ones.

Because in watching the movie and having a dozen pages of e-mail back-and-forth with the producer and publicist, one thing became clear: the movie’s creators do not understand physics.

Let’s take their argument about center of mass as an example. The movie correctly says that, according to Newtonian gravity, bodies in the solar system orbit around their common center of mass. What that means is that, technically speaking, Earth and the planets don’t orbit the Sun; rather, the Sun and planets orbit their common center of mass.

But the movie then tries to make the argument that, if Earth sits at the universe’s center of mass, then it wouldn’t move and everything — Sun, stars, our Milky Way galaxy, the cosmic web of galaxies and galaxy clusters we see in the universe — would rotate around that fixed point. In other words, Earth is stationary in a giant, rotating celestial sphere.

However, gravitationally, that just doesn’t work. First of all, the Sun has 99% of the solar system’s mass, and so the center of mass for our planetary system lies inside the Sun. Second, there’s no gravitational reason that Earth would sit still where it is. For example, Earth can’t be as close as it is to the Sun and not feel our star’s gravitational influence. Earth is made of matter: it has mass. It’s also a mere 93 million miles from the Sun — astronomically speaking, right on top of it. And the Sun is roughly 300,000 times more massive than Earth. Therefore, even if Earth were at the universe’s center, our planet would still not evade the Sun’s pull. Why? Because the closer two objects are to each other, the stronger the gravitational pull is. And Earth is just too close to the Sun.

In addition, decades of velocity measurements, radio observations, and many other lines of evidence show that our solar system sits in the outer-ish part of a spiral galaxy that’s rotating around a center that isn’t Earth. Observations also show that our galaxy is in a group of galaxies, and that this Local Group is on the outer edge of a giant supercluster. Geocentrism simply doesn’t match the empirical evidence. Nor is there any coherent theory of gravity that can both explain all our observations and put Earth at the universe’s physical center.

There are many other examples in the movie like this one. One that might catch you off guard is the work by astronomer John Hartnett, whose analysis of cosmic structure seems to reveal concentric spheres centered on us. However, as astronomer Tom Bridgman explains in his several blogs on this subject, this is a flaw in Hartnett’s analysis. (Bridgman’s blogs are quite technical — the man really knows his analytic techniques! — but if you want a hard science analysis I recommend reading his blogs on Hartnett’s work and on The Principle.)

The movie also argues against what it calls “patches,” things such as dark matter and dark energy that, it accuses, astrophysicists invoke to try to “save” their theories. But this is a shortsighted argument: it’s equivalent to saying that, since we don’t know everything about the universe, we don’t know anything. Yet however much distaste you might have for dark energy, something is making the universe’s expansion speed up. “Dark energy” is the filler word for that something, until we figure it out.

The Principle’s creators really seem to have it in for Einstein. This is a common problem for those not trained in modern physics. Many think that Einstein’s theory of gravity (colloquially called general relativity, or just GR) is esoteric nonsense. But if you’ve ever used GPS, you’ve used GR. According to GR, Earth creates a gravitational well in the fabric of spacetime. Because of that, time runs slightly slower on Earth than it does for the GPS satellites in orbit. (The delay is about 38 microseconds per day.) In order to use GPS, we have to account for relativistic effects. A world without GR is a world without Google Maps.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

But my biggest complaint is the movie’s underlying philosophical argument. The movie claims that moving Earth from the physical center of everything implies that “man means nothing,” that if the universe doesn’t revolve around Earth, we aren’t special.

This dichotomy is a materialist lie. As Stephen Barr brilliantly lays out in his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, we need to separate scientific results from the philosophy that uses them to make its case.

Too many people buy into the mantra that science disproves faith. Wrong. Materialism uses science to argue that faith isn’t true. We can just as easily do the opposite. (Read Barr’s book for more info.) The movie quotes prominent scientists such as Lawrence Krauss and the deceased Carl Sagan to set up this geocentrism-or-insignificance choice, but both of these men are infamous militant atheists. Of course they’re going to interpret scientific results as proving we aren’t special.

The sad thing is, The Principle buys into this dichotomy, too. The question you should ask yourself is, Why? Why does not being in the middle of everything mean we’re not special? Who said the two have to go together?

In fact, salvation history suggests the opposite is true: God picks the least and the lowly. The Jєωs were a tiny little people among great peoples:  “It was not because you are more numerous than all the peoples that the LORD set his heart on you and chose you; for you are really the smallest of all peoples. It was because the LORD loved you and because of his fidelity to the oath he had sworn to your ancestors” (Dt 7: 7-8). Jesus Himself was from a backwater town in Israel. Heck, He picked fishermen as apostles. And think of the many saints who were not at the center of anything — the children of Fatima come to mind — yet He chose them. So why on Earth should we expect our planet to be the physical center of the cosmos? Is it not more amazing that we aren’t? Doesn’t it speak to God’s providence and love and tenderness, and the fact that He’s God and we aren’t?

Noted cosmologist Max Tegmark raises a useful point in the movie when he says, “We had this arrogance, and we got it knocked out of us. And we realized that we’re not the center of everything” — except we haven’t had it knocked out of us. Because if we had, we wouldn’t sin. Sin is (spiritually) putting ourselves at the center. That the weight of scientific evidence suggests Earth is not at the physical center of the solar system, the galaxy, or the local supercluster of galaxies doesn’t tell us anything theologically — ‘cause hey, it’s only physics, and physics only deals with physical reality, not metaphysics. But it wouldn’t hurt us to meditate on the point for a while.

Recommended reading:

•Stephen Barr. Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. 2003.
•Simcha Fisher. “But what if we’re not scientists?” blog, September 2014.
•St. Augustine of Hippo. Paragraph 39 of De Genesi ad Litteram. (If you think I’m harsh . . .)
•Pope Leo XIII. “Ut Mysticam” (motu proprio docuмent that founded the Vatican Observatory). 1891. Text in Italian. (Still trying to find it in English.)


 :reporter: :thinking:

You mention "Gordian knot"

> The Fish signs (early Christian? encouraged to put on cars etc)

In occult 'circles' there is
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch%27s_ladder
> http://www.examiner.com/article/the-witch-s-knot