CONT.On a lesser level, an absolute universe allowed Newton to define a straight line—a most vital component of his “laws of motion” outlined in his 1687 book,
Principia Mathematica. A line could only be straight if the space within which it was drawn or travelling was absolute and did not curve or move. Accordingly, in positing the smaller body had to revolve around the larger, Newton said this difference occurred because the greater gravity of the larger body would pull on the smaller body, and the smaller body would resist, at least partially, by seeking to move away in a straight line, which resistance he called “inertia.” The result of the two vectors (
i.e., gravity and inertia) would produce a curved path for the smaller body around the larger (although, more technically, both bodies moved around their mutual center of mass, but since the center of mass was very much closer to the sun, the result is the Earth revolving in a slight elliptical orbit around the sun). As Newton summed it up:
Thence indeed the Copernican system is proved a priori. For if a common center of gravity is computed for any position of the planets, it either lies in the body of the Sun or will always be very near it.
[27]This little system seemed to work quite well and it seemed safe to assume that the universe and its stars had little to say about the solar system’s mechanics. As long as the universe is not included, Newton’s local laws of motion still work today, at least within a comfortable margin of error.
But then doubts about the validity of Newton’s “presupposition” began to haunt modern physics. Was Newton allowed to assume the universe was “absolute” and inert in regard to our solar system? What “law” said it had to be absolute? And what about this mysterious thing called “inertia” that supposedly makes a body move in a straight line? What is it, and where does it come from? Moreover, if space were not absolute but either moved or was curved, could we really say that a body in motion moves in a straight line? And what about all those stars in the universe? If our sun has gravity and pulls the Earth, would not trillions of stars and galaxies (which we were now able to see by powerful telescopes in the 1900s) have proportionately more gravity than our small sun and thus have some effect on our solar system?
All of these questions began to surface by the time of Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein. As Ratzinger himself notes: “…an absolute space; that’s an opinion that, in any event, has been cancelled by the Theory of Relativity.” This is a very profound statement, especially coming from the Catholic Church’s prefect of doctrine. If Newton’s “absolute space” has been falsified, that means Newton’s whole system of mechanics has been upset, since all of it depended on space being absolute. This also means that the gravitational equation
F =
GM1m2/r
2 and the force equation
F =
ma, since they are also dependent on there being an absolute space from which to measure both the forces and straight lines, are either in error or woefully incomplete.
Ernst Mach was the first to discover this conundrum of Newtonian theory. In brief, he said Newton had no right to assume the universe was absolute. Mach began from his insight into the tremendous effect the gravity of all the universe’s stars should have on our solar system. Whatever their combined force—even if it was neutral at the center—Mach said it was like a web surrounding our solar system such that “inertia” was the result of a body trying to move through the web. Essentially, the gravity web of the stars would prohibit a body from accelerating (
i.e., prohibit it from gaining more speed than it already had). This was the beginning of the ‘general principle of relativity’ in which no body in the universe can be considered isolated from any other body but all move relative to each other, dynamically and kinematically. Whatever moved locally (
e.g. the Earth around the sun; Jupiter’s moons around Jupiter) was also moving in relation to the rest of the universe.
In the final analysis, Mach came to two vital conclusions. The first dealt with the geometrics of the universe; the second with the dynamics:
Obviously it matters little if we think of the Earth as turning about on its axis, or if we view it at rest while the fixed stars revolve around it. Geometrically these are exactly the same case of a relative rotation of the Earth and the fixed stars with respect to one another.
[28]All masses, all velocities, thus all forces are relative. There is no basis for us to decide between relative and absolute motion….If there are still modern authors who, through the Newtonian water bucket arguments, allow themselves to be misled into differentiating between relative and absolute motion, they fail to take into account that the world system has been given to us only once, but the Ptolemaic and Copernican views are only our interpretations, but both equally true.
[29]Although in this treatise Mach does not himself adopt geocentrism, he repeatedly challenges modern science that geocentrism is not only a viable alternative, but it substantially answers the famous 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment—the experiment that forced a choice between a stationary Earth and the Special Theory of Relativity. Albert Michelson, having already been confronted by the 1871 experiment of George Biddell Airy that suggested the Earth was not moving in space, based his 1881 and 1887 experiments on the fact that if the Earth were moving around the sun, then a light beam discharged in the direction of the presumed revolution would necessarily experience resistance from the substance of space, which at that time everyone from Maxwell to Hertz understood as “ether” and which was the basis for both their electromagnetic equations. To his surprise, Michelson did not measure any appreciable resistance on the light beam.
[30] If there was no resistance, then a possible interpretation is that the Earth is not revolving around the sun. But since Einstein and the rest of the world were now 400-years deep into Copernicanism, he was more or less forced to interpret Michelson’s results to mean there was no ether to create a resistance; and if there is no resistance, then light speed must be constant, both of which became the basis of his 1905 theory of Special Relativity.
[31]But thirty-eight years later (1925), Michelson did another experiment, but this time he sought to measure the Earth’s rotation rate instead of its revolution around the sun. He used the same scientific principle, namely, that a light beam going through ether should experience resistance against the direction of the Earth’s movement. Michelson could do so because he never accepted Einstein’s postulates nor that ether was non-existent. To his total surprise, and in total contrast to the 1887 results (which were null for a revolving Earth), this time, when measuring for a daily rotation, Michelson found his results were accurate to within 98%, thus confirming the presence of ether as well as a daily rotation, not to mention an apparent nullification of Special Relativity’s insistence on no ether and a constant speed of light.
[32]Using Mach’s relativistic terminology, the 1925 experiment thus confirmed, in terms of relative motion, that either the Earth was daily rotating in a fixed universe or the universe was rotating around a fixed Earth. It also revealed that although the empirical evidence from Michelson’s two interferometers (which was based on the same principle of light interference with ether), showed a relative daily rotation in 1925, it did not show an annual revolution of the Earth around the sun in 1887. The consequences of these two facts were not good for Copernicans. Since heliocentrism requires
both an annual revolution
and a daily rotation of the Earth; but geocentrism requires only a daily rotation of the universe around a fixed Earth, obviously Michelson’s experiments lent themselves to confirming the geocentric system and nullifying the heliocentric.
Not surprisingly, there is no admission of this fact in the physics literature. Those promoting Einstein excused themselves from Michelson’s 1925 results by claiming Special Relativity does not deal with non-inertial or accelerating frames (a rotating frame). But this excuse exposed the fact that Special Relativity was formerly used to explain Michelson’s 1887 experiment, even though a revolving Earth around the sun is also a non-inertial frame. In this case, what is good for the goose should also be good for the gander. But if Special Relativity was surrendered in the 1887 case, modern science would have no answer to Michelson’s experiment and the only option left would be a non-moving Earth—something no one was ready to accept, which allowed Special Relativity to remain king.
As for General Relativity, although it allows for the non-inertial rotational frame used in the 1925 experiment and does so by using multi-dimensional complex tensors in space-time and non-Euclidean geodesics, it wasn’t much of a physical explanation of the results as it was a mathematical one; and in any case, Occam’s razor favors the much simpler explanation, namely, that ether caused the speed of the light beam to change. But at this time in history, Copernicanism ruled with an iron hand and not even empirical evidence to the contrary would convince anyone the Earth was fixed in space, neither revolving nor rotating.
[33] As Feyerabend notes:
…the idea of free and independent research is a chimera….we have seen that even the liberal climate of the modern age has not prevented scientists from demanding the same kind of authority which Bellarmino possessed as a matter of course but exercised with much greater wisdom and grace.
[34]In retrospect, after Mach turned the world upside down, both literally and figuratively, Einstein took it to the next step, but he knew there was no way to avoid Mach’s reasoning. If the universe is not absolute, that means it can move; and if it moves, it can rotate; and if it rotates it will do so around a fixed Earth. After all, this duality is precisely the nature of “relativity.” Hence we have either a rotating Earth in a fixed universe (ala Newton) or we must also allow a rotating universe around a fixed Earth (ala Mach, Einstein). The problem with relativity, of course, is that it can’t tell us which one is the reality, only that both systems can work by the laws of physics now known. But at least everyone agreed it was wrong for Newton to assume the universe was absolute and fixed, since his system would not allow the universe to rotate around a fixed Earth—in defiance of the laws of relativity. As such, Einstein said Newton’s system had a “defect.” This defect was spelled out in one of his most famous paragraphs on his theory of General Relativity:
Let K [the universe] be a Galilean-Newtonian coordinate system [a system of three dimensions extending to the edge of the universe], and let K’ [the Earth] be a coordinate system rotating uniformly relative to K [the universe]. Then centrifugal forces would be in effect for masses at rest in the K’ coordinate system [the Earth], while no such forces would be present for objects at rest in K [the universe]. Already Newton viewed this as proof that the rotation of K’ [the Earth] had to be considered as “absolute,” and that K’ [the Earth] could not then be treated as the “resting” frame of K [the universe]. Yet, as E. Mach has shown, this argument is not sound. One need not view
the existence of such centrifugal forces as originating from the motion of K’ [the Earth]; one could just as well account for them as resulting from the average rotational effect of distant, detectable masses as evidenced in the vicinity of K’ [the Earth], whereby K’ [the Earth] is treated as being at rest.
If Newtonian mechanics disallow such a view, then this could very well be the foundation for the defects of that theory…
[35]Cardinal Bellarmine, more or less, used the same “relative motion” argument against Fr. Foscarini in 1615:
You might tell me that Solomon spoke according to appearances, since it appears to us that the sun revolves when the earth turns, just as it appears to one on a ship who departs from the shore that the shore departs from the ship.
[36]We see that even at this early time, the “relative motion” argument was in vogue, although neither side knew that relative motion incorporated dynamic forces. They only knew the geometry of relative motion.
Einstein mentions at least one of the dynamic forces as he notes “the existence of such centrifugal forces” in the previous paragraph. In another place, he mentions the Coriolis force in a June 25, 1913 letter to Ernst Mach:
Your happy investigations on the foundations of mechanics, Planck’s unjustified criticism notwithstanding, will receive brilliant confirmation. For it necessarily turns out that inertia originates in a kind of interaction between bodies, quite in the sense of your considerations on Newton’s pail experiment. The first consequence is on p. 6 of my paper. The following additional points emerge: (1) If one accelerates a heavy shell of matter S, then a mass enclosed by that shell experiences an accelerative force. (2) If one rotates the shell relative to the fixed stars about an axis going through its center,
a Coriolis force arises in the interior of the shell, that is, the plane of a Foucault pendulum is dragged around.
[37]What Einstein is saying is there are two basic forces generated from the angular momentum of a rotating universe, the centrifugal and the Coriolis forces. These two forces, in combination, will cause all the celestial bodies to revolve daily around the universe’s central axis. Although the centrifugal force makes the celestial bodies move outward, the Coriolis force, registering twice the power of the centrifugal, forces the bodies inward, and the result of the two unequal vectors will be a net centripetal force making all the celestial bodies circle the universe’s center of mass at their respective declinations and ascensions.
[38] Moreover, a fixed Earth will necessarily share the same center of mass with the universe, and viola! we have Einstein’s alternative universe that is demanded by his General Relativity theory.
The problem with the Newtonians, however, was that they could not engage in a “relative motion” argument, since they had to insist on an absolute universe if their equations (
F =
GM1m2/r
2 and
F =
ma) were going to pan out. But insisting on an absolute universe as the reality still meant they were required to answer how their equations would fit into a non-absolute world. After all, we see rotations and accelerations almost everywhere we look. What the Newtonians found was that if the system under observation is accelerating (
i.e., rotating), the only way Newtonian mechanics could account for the acceleration was by mathematically adding in, by hand, the centrifugal and Coriolis forces. Modern science still does the same today when they send space probes to the planets.
F = ma won’t work unless they add in the inertial forces.
[39] The equation then becomes
F = ma +
centrifugal +
Coriolis forces. This situation, again, tells us there is a defect in the Newtonian system. If the system claims it is comprehensive and is taking everything into account, then it shouldn’t need to add in foreign figures its original equations don’t include.
To be fair to Newton, he did at one point consider the viability of a system in which the Earth could be fixed and the sun and planets revolve around it. Newton said such a situation would require an “external force” outside the solar system that would offset the gravity of the sun. He writes:
In order for the Earth to be at rest in the center of the system of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, there is required
both universal gravity and another force in addition that acts on all bodies equally according to the quantity of matter in each of them and is equal and opposite to the accelerative gravity with which the Earth tends to the Sun. For, such a force, acting on all bodies equally and along parallel lines, does not change their position among themselves, and permits bodies to move among themselves through the force of universal gravity in the same way as if it were not acting on them. Since this force is equal and opposite to its gravity toward the Sun, the Earth can truly remain in equilibrium between these two forces and be at rest.
And thus celestial bodies can move around the Earth at rest, as in the Tychonic system.
[40]At that time, and in the face of his insistence on an “absolute” universe, this was the best Newton could do. Hence it would never click in his mind that the very forces he relegated as “fictitious” (
i.e., centrifugal, Coriolis) would become the very forces that are the essence of his “another force in addition” to gravity that would allow a Tychonic Earth-centered system.
Now that we know the science and its development from Newton to Einstein, we can sympathize with Cardinal Bellarmine in how he determined to deal with the Galileo affair. Since, as we noted, Bellarmine was aware of the “relative motion” argument and, unlike Newton and like Einstein, did not insist on an absolute universe but considered both a universe rotating around a fixed Earth and an Earth rotating within a fixed universe, how was he to choose between the two “relative” possibilities? There was only one solution. Hence Bellarmine would answer today as he did to Fr. Foscarini on April 12, 1615:
Second, I say that, as you know, the
Council [of Trent] has prohibited interpretation of Scripture contrary to the common agreement of the Holy Fathers.
[41] And if Your Reverence will read not only the Holy Fathers but also the modern commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will find that
they all agree on the literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and rotates around the earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from the heavens and stands immobile in the center of the world.
[42] Ask yourself then how could the Church, in its prudence, support an interpretation of Scripture which is contrary to all the Holy Fathers and to all the Greek and Latin commentators.
Nor can one reply that this is not a matter of faith, because even if it is not a matter of faith because of the subject matter [ex parte objecti], it is still a matter of faith because of the speaker [ex parte decentis].[43] Thus anyone who would say that Abraham did not have two sons and Jacob twelve would be just as much of a heretic as someone who would say that Christ was not born of a virgin, for the Holy Spirit has said both of these things through the mouths of the Prophets and the Apostles.
[44]Reading between Bellarmine’s lines, Cardinal Ratzinger, as
Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was saying the same to the people of Parma in 1990 that the Cardinal Inquisitor, Robert Bellarmine, said to his in 1615. By the “Theory of Relativity,” as Ratzinger put it, Newton’s system was abolished and with it his Copernican universe so that he could thus conclude, “Then as now, one can suppose the earth to be fixed and the sun as mobile.” Ratzinger’s use of “Then” refers to the debate between Bellarmine and Galileo. Bellarmine knew instinctively the “relativity” issue would never allow Galileo to have proof of a moving Earth, and he also knew that “relativity” had no power over the consensual testimony of Catholic history. In the end, “relativity” was just an illusion, since everyone knew only one system could be the true system, which made the other merely an imposter who preyed on “relativity” to give it equal say.
Unfortunately, although Ratzinger had his eureka moment, the people of Parma were not ready to have theirs. Three hundred and fifty years of the same Galileo drumbeat deterred them from entertaining any other theory than the Copernican and thus no amount of pleading could win them over. Ratzinger was literally run out of town and told never to come back to Parma, which he did, in fact, try as Pope Benedict XVI but was rebuffed.
The 1992 Papal Speech on GalileoTwo years later, John Paul II gave his “apologetic” speech to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1992, an attempt to mollify the Galileo problem that had hampered the Church for the last four centuries. Here a new twist in Galileo apologetics made its first appearance. The speech tried to lay the blame for the controversy on “the error of the theologians” in Galileo’s day. This was a subtle yet obvious attempt to insulate the 17
th century popes and their Holy Office’s from blame. Five times the 1992 papal speech refers to these unidentified “theologians” as the cause for the controversy, pretending as if there was a stark difference between what the “theologians” were teaching in the 1600s and what the magisterium believed and defended. As Fr. Coyne puts it:
The “theologians” in both discourses are unidentified and unidentifiable. There is no mention of the Congregation of the Holy Office, of the Roman Inquisition or of the Congregation of the Index, nor of an injunction given to Galileo in 1616 nor of the abjuration required of him in 1633 by official organs of the Church. Nor is mention made of Paul V or Urban VIII, the ones ultimately responsible for the activities of those official institutions.
[45]For example, in 1633 Galileo was told directly by Pope Urban VIII that his idea the Earth moved around the sun was, “an absurd proposition and false in philosophy and formally heretical,” to the point that he sought the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo Medici II, to help him silence Galileo a year before Galileo’s trial. After the trial, Urban sent letters to all the papal nuncios and universities of Europe requiring their acquiescence to the Vatican’s decree against Galileo. Over a period of six months, an intense correspondence took place between Urban VIII and the ambassador to the Duke of Tuscany, Francesco Niccolini. In it Urban details his outright rejection of Galileo’s “assault on Holy Scripture, religion, and Faith,” wherein Urban implored the Grand Duke to help in “shielding Catholicism from any danger” because “this work of his is indeed pernicious, and the matter more serious than his Highness thinks.”
[46]Similarly, in 1616, the name of Pope Paul V was attached to the canonical injunction given to Galileo forbidding him to speak or write about Copernicanism for the rest of his life. His papal commission of eleven cardinals found heliocentrism “a proposition that was absurd in philosophy and formally heretical, which contradicts the express meaning of Sacred Scripture in many places.” As noted, seventeen years later the 1633 sentence against Galileo stated heliocentrism was: “
è propositione assurda e falsa in filosofia, e formalmente heretica.”
[47] Every pope thereafter, including Alexander VII’s banning of Galileo’s book in his 1664 encyclical,
Speculatores domas Israel, and barring one incident of clerical chicanery in 1820,
[48] issued or accepted the same or similar requirements to the Church universal, and no pope ever made a formal and official reversal of the condemnation of either Copernicanism or Galileo. In light of this revealing history, it was rather unconscionable for the author of the 1992 papal speech to pass the buck off to unidentified “theologians” who supposedly imposed on the Church some unheard of hermeneutic of Scripture when, in fact, the same hermeneutic had been fostered by the Church Fathers and medievals in total consensus and made part of the
Catechism of the Council of Trent in 1566—which defended geocentric doctrine in four places—just 50 years before Galileo was confronted by the Church.
The Manipulation of Vatican II’s Dei VerbumOf course, much consideration must be given to the fact that the 1992 papal speech was written by Cardinal Paul Poupard of France, a progressive theologian from one of the most liberal schools in Europe. Accordingly, at one point the speech says,
The upset caused by the Copernican system thus demanded epistemological reflection on the biblical sciences, an effort which later would produce abundant fruit in modern exegetical works and which has found sanction and a new stimulus in the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum of the Second Vatican Council.
[49]That is, the modern prelature’s belief that the “Copernican system” had long ago been proven correct became the basis for the content, or at least the interpretation of the content, of the Vatican II docuмent,
Dei Verbum, which outlined Scripture’s authority regarding our knowledge of the world. What we now know, however, is that discrete wording had been surreptitiously placed into
Dei Verbum that would seemingly allow the liberals to claim the right to reject not only Scripture’s testimony against the “Copernican system,” but to reject the tradition and the 1616-1633 magisterium’s decisions as well.
[50]As noted, in 1962 Ratzinger believed one of Vatican II’s presumed responsibilities was to correct the so-called “errors” of the traditional Church. One of the foremost “errors”—the only error that received special mention in his 2013 papal farewell speech—was the Church’s decision against Galileo. Since Fr. Joseph Ratzinger was present at the Council in 1962 and personally knew many of its major participants, his inside knowledge of what we can now call the “Galileo mentality” of Vatican II, must be taken as a reliable testimony. Due to his unique witness, it may be safe to conclude that if the prelature of 1962 had not concluded the Church of 1616 made an “error” in the Galileo case, perhaps Vatican Council II may never have happened. It is an interesting question to ponder. Whatever the case, there is no denying the gauntlet had been thrown down. Either the 1616 Church was in error for condemning Galileo or Vatican II’s liberal prelature was in error for thinking the medieval Church was in error.
Interestingly enough, when it came time for the Vatican II peretti to follow through with their plans to exonerate Galileo and apologize for the Church, the docuмents of Vatican II presented nothing. Apparently, those who had wished to exonerate Galileo were stymied. The only statement that even touched upon science was a short paragraph in
Gaudium et spes saying this:
Consequently, we cannot but deplore certain habits of mind, which are sometimes found too among Christians, which do not sufficiently attend to the rightful independence of science and which, from the arguments and controversies they spark, lead many minds to conclude that faith and science are mutually opposed….The recent studies and findings of science, history and philosophy raise new questions which effect life and which demand new theological investigations.
[51]As it stands, it appears the Holy Spirit played His part in curtailing the Church from going down the wrong path. What Ratzinger realized in 1990, namely, there was no way the Church could exonerate Galileo due to modern science’s advocacy of the ‘general principle of relativity,’ would stand in the way of anyone who desired to reject Scripture’s, tradition’s and the magisterium’s testimony on geocentrism. But the damage had already been done. By inserting ambiguous phrases in Vatican II’s docuмents, the liberals were ready to challenge every traditional interpretation that had been given to Scripture up to that time, and they would continue to use Galileo as their Poster Boy in the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond.
Adding to these breeches of protocol, six years later (1996) John Paul II made his infamous statement concerning the modern belief in evolution as being “more than a hypothesis.” At this point, popular science was not only in charge, they seemed to have put another nail into the Church’s coffin.
The upshot of this ecclesiastical history is to show that in the liberal revolution spawned after Vatican II, the presumed “defect” of the Church in its handling of the Galileo affair 350 years earlier played a large part in how the prelature and the pope viewed the universal Church overall. It was no longer considered the invincible and impregnable fortress it was in the past. A chink in the armor had been found in the case of Galileo and it seemed at the time there was no way to repair it except to admit defeat, for everyone “knew” the Earth revolved around the sun.
In this light, Archbishop Lefebvre referred frequently to the liberal revolution against Scripture as well. For liberals, Scripture is no longer considered comprehensive in its authority. The liberal byword is that Scripture is only authoritative, if that, when it “speaks about salvation,” which is the bastardized interpretation they forced on the ambiguous phrase, “for the sake of our salvation” in paragraph 11 of
Dei Verbum.
[52] Lefebvre writes:
The Catholic liberals have undoubtedly established a revolutionary situation. Here is what we read in the book written by one of them, Monsignor Prelot a senator for the Doubs region of France. “We had struggled for a century and a half to bring our opinions to prevail within the Church and had not succeeded.
Finally, there came Vatican II and we triumphed. From then on the propositions and principles of liberal catholicism have been definitively and officially accepted by Holy Church.”
[53]And the books of Holy Writ? For the modernists, they are “the record of experiences undergone in a given religion.” God speaks through these books, but He is the God who is within us.
The books are inspired rather as one speaks of poetic inspiration; inspiration is likened to the urgent need felt by the believer to communicate his faith in writing. The Bible is human work.
In Pierres Vivantes the children are told that Genesis is “a poem” written once upon a time by believers who “had reflected”. This compilation, imposed on all catechism children by the French episcopate, exhales modernism on nearly every page.
[54]But do not imagine that…they have an unlimited respect for the inspired text. They even dispute that it is inspired in its entirety: “What is there in the Gospel which is inspired?
Only the truths that are necessary for our salvation.” In consequence, the miracles, the accounts of the Holy Childhood, the actions and conduct of Our Lord are relegated to the category of more or less legendary biography.
We fought in the Council over that phrase: “Only the truths necessary for salvation.” There were some bishops in favour of reducing the historical authenticity of the Gospels, which shows the extent to which the clergy is corrupted by neo-Modernism. Catholics should not allow themselves to be imposed upon: the whole of the Gospel is inspired and those who wrote it had the Holy Spirit guiding their intelligence, so that the whole of it is the Word of God, Verbum Dei. It is not permissible to pick and choose and to say today: “We will take this part but we don’t want that part.” To choose is to be a heretic, according to the Greek derivation of that word.
[55]Lefebvre also spoke about how the liberals disregarded the tradition and philosophy of historic Catholicism:
In this respect, the Modernists have got what they wanted and more. In what passes for seminaries, they teach anthropology, psychoanalysis and Marx in place of St. Thomas Aquinas. The principles of Thomist philosophy are rejected in favour of vague systems which themselves recognise their inability to explain the economy of the Universe, putting forward as they do the philosophy of the absurd. One latter-day revolutionary, a muddle-headed priest much heeded by intellectuals, who put sex at the heart of everything, was bold enough to declare at public meetings:
“The scientific hypotheses of the ancients were pure nonsense and it is on such nonsense that St Thomas and Origen based their systems.” Immediately afterwards, he fell into the absurdity of defining life as “an evolutionary chain of biologically inexplicable facts.” How can he know that, if it is inexplicable? How, I would add, can a priest discard the only real explanation, which is God?
[56]But what is Tradition?….Tradition does not consist of the customs inherited from the past and preserved out of loyalty to the past even where there are no clear reasons for them. Tradition is defined as the
Deposit of Faith transmitted by the Magisterium down through the centuries. This deposit is what has been given to us by Revelation; that is to say, the Word of God entrusted to the Apostles and transmitted unfailingly by their successors.
But now they want to get everyone inquiring, searching, as if we had not been given the Creed, or as if Our Lord had not come to bring us the Truth once and for all. What do they claim to discover with all this enquiry?
Catholics upon whom they would impose these “questionings,” after having made them “abandon their certainties,” should remember this: the deposit of Revelation concluded at the death of the last Apostle. It is finished and it cannot be touched until the end of time. Revelation is irreformable. The First Vatican Council restated this explicitly: “for the doctrine of faith which God has revealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention, to be perfected by human ingenuity; but has been delivered as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ (the Church) to be faithfully kept and infallibly declared….We cannot bring anything new into this field, we cannot add a single dogma, but only express those that exist ever more clearly, more beautifully and more loftily.”
[57]The argument that is pressed upon the terrorised faithful is this: “You are clinging to the past, you are being nostalgic; live in your own time!” Some are abashed and do not know what to reply. Nevertheless, the answer is easy: In this there is no past or present or future. Truth belongs to all times, it is eternal.
In order to break down Tradition they confront it with Holy Scripture, after the manner of the [liberal] Protestants, with the assertion the Gospel is the only book that counts. But Tradition came before the Gospel!
[58]All the Dogmatic Councils have given us the exact expression of Tradition, the exact expression of what the Apostles taught. Tradition is irreformable. One can never change the decrees of the Council of Trent, because they are infallible, written and published by an official act of the Church, unlike those of Vatican II, which pronouncements are not infallible because the popes did not wish to commit their infallibility. Therefore nobody can say to you, “You are clinging to the past, you have stayed with the Council of Trent.” For the Council of Trent is not the past! Tradition is clothed with a timeless character, adapted to all times and all places.
[59]The liberal Catholic is two-sided; he is in a state of continual contradiction. He would like to remain a Catholic but he is possessed by a desire to please the world.
[60]Do not let yourself be taken in, dear readers, by the term “traditionalist” which they would have people understand in a bad sense. In a way, it is a pleonasm because I cannot see who can be a Catholic without being a traditionalist.
[61]It is my contention that Fr. Robinson, insofar as he represents the SSPX, has abandoned the aforementioned teachings on Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium that Archbishop Lefebvre left to the SSPX. As his book outlines, the escape route Fr. Robinson uses to make his departure from tradition is his “reason,” that is, he has reasoned—through what he understands to be the “truths” of science—that he cannot hold Scripture as an authority on science or history; nor can he accept the Fathers and their consensus on these issues; and he has the right, through the same reason, to ignore what the medieval Magisterium decreed on these same issues.
Scientific Heresies and Their Effect on the Church [end of excerpt]
Conclusion
I hope that this response to Fr. Robinson will help him and his many followers to realize that their progressive creationist position is incoherent, and that the only coherent interpretation of Genesis 1-11 is the one adopted by all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching—one that accepts the literal and obvious sense of all of the statements made by Moses in the “sacred history of Genesis” regarding the fiat creation of all things by God, for man, in the beginning of time, the cosmic catastrophe of the Fall, and the subsequent divine judgment upon the world at the time of the universal Flood. According to this authentic, traditional Catholic understanding of the sacred history of Genesis, the
onus probandi, the “burden of proof,” remains on anyone who questions the literal and obvious sense of any of the historical statements made by Moses in Genesis 1-11, whether in regard to the timing of the creation period, the age of the universe, the position of the Earth in relation to the solar system, or anything else. The amazing reality is that at the dawn of the third millennium, there is more scientific evidence than ever before that confirms the literal truth of the sacred history of Genesis.
[62] We hope that Fr. Robinson and his followers will acknowledge this and join us in seizing this heaven-sent opportunity to re-evangelize the whole world on the foundation of the Catholic doctrine of creation, the foundation of our Holy Catholic Faith.
Hugh OwenAnniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, October 13, 2018References and notes
[1] Pope Leo XIII,
Arcanum divinae, V.
[2] Lucretius,
De rerum natura, Vol. L 181.
[3] St. Basil the Great,
The Hexameron, Homily 1, NPNF II, vol. 8, p. 53.
[4] St. Augustine,
City of God., 12:10.
[5] The Extant Fragments of the Five Books of the Chronography of Julius Africanus 3(1), On the mythical chronology of the Egyptians and Chaldeans,
www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf06.v.v.i.html[6] Theophilus of Antioch,
Theophilus to Autolycus, Book III, Chapters XVI and XVII.
[7] Lactantius,
The Divine Institutes 7:14, Of the first and last times of the world.
[8] St. John Chrysostom,
Homilies on Genesis, 10:7.
[9] St. Augustine,
The City of God, (London, Penguin Books, 1984), p. 504.
[10] Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Editor, Vol. 31, Descartes / Spinoza, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. Chicago, William Benton, Publisher, pp. 55-56.
[11] John Dewey,
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 997), p. 8.
[12] Blaise Pascal,
Pensees, 669, Sect. 4, No. 6.
[13] “The Council of Rimini was opened early in July, 359, with over four hundred bishops. About eighty Semi-Arians, including Ursacius, Germinius, and Auxentius, withdrew from the orthodox bishops, the most eminent of whom was Restitutus of Carthage; Liberius, Eusebius, Dionysius, and others were still in exile. The two parties sent separate deputations to the emperor, the orthodox asserting clearly their firm attachment to the faith of Nicaea, while the Arian minority adhered to the imperial formula. But the inexperienced representatives of the orthodox majority allowed themselves to be deceived, and not only entered into communion with the heretical delegates, but even subscribed, at, Nice in Thrace, a formula to the effect merely that the Son is like the Father according to the Scriptures (the words “in all things” being omitted). On their return to Rimini, they were met with the unanimous protests of their colleagues. But the threats of the consul Taurus, the remonstrances of the Semi
–Arians against hindering peace between East and West for a word not contained in Scripture, their privations and their homesickness–all combined to weaken the constancy of the orthodox bishops. And the last twenty were induced to subscribe when Ursacius had an addition made to the formula of Nice, declaring that the Son is not a creature like other creatures. Pope Liberius, having regained his liberty, rejected this formula, which was thereupon repudiated by many who had signed it. In view of the hasty manner of its adoption and the lack of approbation by the Holy See, it could have no authority. In any case, the council was a sudden defeat of orthodoxy, and St
. Jerome could say: ‘The whole world groaned in astonishment to find itself Arian” (Benigni, Umberto.”Council of Rimini.”
The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 9 Oct. 2018 <
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13057b.htm>.)
[14] Vatican Council I, Faith and Reason, Canon 3. The First Nicene Council’s dogmatic definition of the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ was ultimately reaffirmed by the First Council of Constantinople in 381. Since the work of Vatican Council I was interrupted by Italian revolutionaries, it is to be expected that its work will be completed in the future era of peace promised by Our Lady of Fatima and that this will include a definitive reaffirmation of the traditional dogma of creation and anathemas against the principal deviations from that doctrine.
[15] St. Maximilian Kolbe, Sketch: Feb. 17, 1941.
[16] The modern English version of this office is read daily at Brigittine Syon Abbey in Devon. Latin and Swedish texts of the Brigittine Lessons are published in Den heliga Birgitta och den helige Petrus av Skanninge,
Officium parvum beate Marie Virginis, ed. Tryggve Lunden (Lund, 1976), Acta Universatatis Upsalienisis: Studa Historico Ecclesiastica Upsaliensia 27-28; Latin Text, Sancta Birgitta,
Opera Minora II: Sermo Angelicus (
Revalationes XI), ed. Sten Eklund (Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksells, 1972); Middle English Text in the Myroure of oure Ladye, ed. John Henry Blunt (Early English Text Society, Extra Series, 29), Modern English Text in the
Word of the Angel, trans. John Halborg (Peregrina Publishing)
http://www.umilta.net/syon1.html[17] The Writings of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, Volume II, “Various Writings,” p. 2160.
[18] The Writings of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, Volume II, “Various Writings,” p. 1998.
[19] Ibid., p. 2282.
[20] As Bellarmine put it: “In Scripture there are many things which of themselves do not pertain to the faith, that is, which were not written because it is necessary to believe them. But it is necessary to believe them because they were written, as is evident in all the histories of the Old Testament, in the many histories in the Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, in the greetings of Paul in his Epistles, and in other such things” (
De controversiis, I, I, 4, 12, as found in Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, S. J.,
Opera omnia, cited in Blackwell’s
Galileo, Bellarmine and the Bible, p. 32).
[21] The 1633 sentence against Galileo stated heliocentrism was: “
è propositione assurda e falsa in filosofia, e formalmente heretica” (“an absurd proposition and false in philosophy and formally heretical”) cited in
Galileo E L’Inquisizione, Favaro, p. 143.
[22] Farewell to Reason, p. 260. He adds: “In 1982 Christian Thomas and I organized a seminar at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich with the purpose of discussing how the rise of the sciences had influenced the major religions and other traditional forms of thought. What surprised us was the fearful restraint with which Catholic and Protestant theologians treated the matter – there was no criticism either of particular scientific achievements or of the scientific ideology as a whole” (
ibid).
[23] Ibid., p. 125.
[24] Against Method, 3
rd edition, Verso, London, New York, 1975, 1996, p. 134.
[25] Speech given in Parma, Italy, March 15, 1990, titled: “The Crisis of Faith in Science,” partly reported in
Il Sabato, March 31, 1990, pp. 80ff, and in the
Corriere della Sera, March 30, 1990, and cited in
30 Days, January 1993, p. 34, and referenced also by Atila S. Guimarães in “The Swan Song of Galileo’s Myth,” published by
Tradition in Action, nd.
[26] The equation,
F =
GM1m2/r
2, says the Force of gravity equals the product of the gravitational constant multiplied by the larger mass and multiplied by the smaller mass, divided by the radius of the distance between the two masses, squared. The equation
F = ma says the Force on an object equals the mass of the object multiplied by the object’s acceleration.
[27] Newton’s
Copernican Scholium, December, 1684.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-principia/[28] Ernst Mach,
Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historich-Kritisch Dargestellt, Liepzig: Brokhaus, 1883. English title:
The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development, translated by T. J. Macormack, La Salle, Open Court Publishing, 1960, 6
th edition, p. 201. The seventh edition of Mach’s book was published in 1912.
[29] Ernst Mach,
Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historich-Kritisch Dargestellt, Liepzig: Brokhaus, 1883, p. 222. The original German reads: “Alle Massen, alle Geschwindigkeiten, demnach alle Kräfte sind relativ. Es gibt keine Entscheidung über Relatives und Absolutes, welche wir treffen könnten, zu welcher wir gedrängt wären….Wenn noch immer moderne Autoren durch die Newtonschen, vom Wassergefäß hergenommenen Argumente sich verleiten lassen, zwischen relativer und absoluter Bewegung zu unterscheiden, so bedenken sie nicht, daß das Weltsystem uns nur einmal gegeben, die ptolemäische oder kopernikanische Auffassung aber unsere Interpretationen, aber beide gleich wirklich sind” (Translated by Mario Derksen).
[30] A. A. Michelson and E. W. Morley, “On the Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether,” Art. xxxvi,
The American Journal of Science, eds. James D and Edward S. Dana, No. 203, vol. xxxiv, November 1887. Various scientists and historians admitted what this meant: “The problem which now faced science was considerable. For there seemed to be only three alternatives. The first was that the Earth was standing still, which meant scuttling the whole Copernican theory and was unthinkable” (
Einstein: The Life and Times, 1984, pp. 109-110); Even Michelson was astounded: “This conclusion directly contradicts the explanation of the phenomenon of aberration which has been hitherto generally accepted, and which presupposes that the Earth moves” (“The Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether,”
American Journal of Science, Vol. 22, August 1881, p. 125).
[31] Einstein gave a speech at Kyoto University, Japan, on Dec. 14 1922. In one part he stated: “Soon I came to the conclusion that our idea about the motion of the Earth with respect to the ether is incorrect, if we admit Michelson’s null result as a fact. This was the first path which led me to the special theory of relativity. Since then I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment, though the Earth is revolving around the sun” (Yoshimasa A. Ono,
Physics Today, 35 ( 8, 45 (1982)). We should add that “length contraction” (of Michelson’s apparatus) and “time dilation” became required artifacts of Special Relativity since a physical reason had to be given to explain why the motion of the Earth could not be detected.
[32] The New York Times, even though partial to Einstein, could not deny the results and thus described Michelson’s 1925 results as: “The register in the flight of these beams was an instrument known as the interferometer, which Professor Michelson has been perfecting for forty years. Through it was visible a white circle striped with vertical fine lines like hair drawn tightly across the face of an oval mirror. These were called interference fringes due to the fact that if the beams reached home at different times it would be recorded by a displacement of these lines. This displacement was shown in the experiment.” Despite the fact that a “displacement” or “ether drift” would immediately nullify Special Relativity, the
Times sought to protect Einstein and thus stated in its headline the contradictory words: “Michelson Proves Einstein Theory: Experiments Conducted with 5200-Foot Vacuum Tube Show Light Displacement: Ether Drift Confirmed” (
The New York Times, published January 9, 1925).
[33] For example: “There was only one other possible conclusion to draw – that the Earth was at rest. This, of course, was preposterous” (Bernard Jaffe,
Michelson and the Speed of Light, p. 76); “In the effort to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment…the thought was advanced that the Earth might be stationary….Such an idea was not considered seriously, since it would mean in effect that our Earth occupied the omnipotent position in the universe, with all the other heavenly bodies paying homage by revolving around it” (Arthur S. Otis,
Light Velocity and Relativity, p. 58.
[34] Farewell to Reason, p. 260.
[35] Quote taken from Hans Thirring’s, “Über die Wirkung rotierender ferner Massen in der Einsteinschen Gravitationstheorie,”
Physikalische Zeitschrift 19, 33, 1918, translated: “On the Effect of Rotating Distant Masses in Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation.” Philosopher and scientist Bertrand Russell puts it this way: “Whether the Earth rotates once a day from west to east, as Copernicus taught, or the heavens revolve once a day from east to west, as his predecessors believed, the observable phenomena will be exactly the same. This shows a defect in Newtonian dynamics, since an empirical science ought not to contain a metaphysical assumption [an absolute universe], which can never be proved or disproved by observation” (Bertrand Russell,
The ABC of Relativity, London, revised edition, editor Felix Pirani, 1958, pp. 13-14.)
[36] Antonio Favaro,
Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, vol. 12, p. 172.
[37] Compiled by Friedrich Herneck in “Zum Briefwechsel Albert Einsteins mit Ernst Mach,”
Forschungen und Fortschritte, 37:239-43, 1963. Facsimile of this June 25, 1913 hand-written letter of Einstein to Mach available in
Gravitation, pp. 544-545.
[38] See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force, “It is seen that the Coriolis acceleration not only cancels the centrifugal acceleration, but together they provide a net ‘centripetal,’ radially inward component of acceleration (that is, directed toward the center of rotation”). Download 08-26-2017.
[39] Per Wikipedia under “Coriolis force”: “As a result of this analysis an important point appears:
all the fictitious accelerations must be included to obtain the correct trajectory. In particular, besides the Coriolis acceleration, the centrifugal force plays an essential role.” (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force). Downloaded 08-26-2018.
[40] Proposition 43, Theorem 22, which was supposed to be the last page of his
Principia Mathematica but for some unknown reason was not included in the final edit. My thanks to George E. Smith of Tufts University for the granting of his essay for my use, titled:
Newtonian Relativity: A Neglected Manuscript, an Understressed Corollary, in email of August 8, 2015. Stephen Weinberg quotes Newton’s proposition from Smith with the comment: “If we were to adopt a frame of reference like Tycho’s in which the Earth is at rest, then the distant galaxies would seem to be executing circular turns once a year, and in general relativity this enormous motion would create forces akin to gravitation, which would act on the Sun and planets and give them the motions of the Tychonic theory. Newton seems to have had a hint of this. In an unpublished ‘Proposition 43’ that did not make it into the
Principia, Newton acknowledges that Tycho’s theory could be true if some other force besides ordinary gravitation acted on the Sun and planets” (Steven Weinberg,
To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, Harper Collins, 2015, pp. 251-252).
[41] “…il Concilio prohibisce esporre le Scritture contra il commune consenso de’Santi Padri” (
ibid., p. 172).
[42] “…trovarà che tutti convengono in esporre ad literam ch’il sole è nel cielo e sta nel centro del mondo, iimmobile” (
ibid.).
[43] “Nè si può rispondere che questa non sia material di fede, perchè se non è material di fede
ex parte obiecti, è material di fede
ex parte decentis” (
ibid.).
[44] Antonio Favaro,
Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, vol. 12, p. 172.
[45] “The Church’s Most Recent Attempt to Dispell the Galileo Myth,” in
The Church and Galileo, p. 354. Coyne’s reference to “both discourses” refers to Poupard’s “Address at the Conclusion of the Proceedings of the Pontifical Study Commission on the Ptolemaic-Copernican Controversy in the 16
th and 17
th Centuries,” Origins 22 (Nov. 12, 1992), pp. 370-375 in English, with the original in Après Galilée (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1994), pp. 93-97, and the actual address given by Pope John Paul II. Both speeches were given on October 31, 1992, with Poupard’s preceeding the Pope’s.
[46] Maurice Finocchiaro,
The Galileo Affair, pp. 232, 235, 236, as recorded in
Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, vol. 14, pp. 388-393.
[47] “an absurd proposition and false in philosophy and formally heretical,” cited in
Galileo E L’Inquisizione, Favaro, p. 143.
[48] In 1821, Canon Guiseppi Settele was granted an imprimatur for his book on heliocentrism, after it was approved by Pius VII, albeit in a suspicious and circuitous manner. The only means of obtaining an imprimatur was through the “Master of the Sacred Palace,” who at that time