http://apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=11&article=1151
Does the Bible Teach Geocentricity?
| by |
Bert Thompson, Ph.D.
Trevor Major, M.Sc., M.A. |
Q.
Does the Bible teach that the Sun revolves around the Earth, in contradiction to modern scientific knowledge on this matter?
A.
The medieval Catholic Church maintained that the Bible taught
geocentricity (i.e., that the Sun and planets revolve around the Earth)
as opposed to what we now know as the Copernican idea of heliocentricity
(i.e., that the planets all revolve around the Sun). This situation
began when Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria restated the ancient Ptolemaic
geocentric theory in the second century after Christ, and was able to
predict the motion of the celestial bodies with far greater accuracy
than the existing theory of heliocentricity. Somewhere along the line,
scientific dogma became enshrined in theological dogma, and passages in
the Bible were found to consecrate Ptolemy’s theory. According to the
theologians, man was the focus of God’s creative act, and therefore the
Earth must be the center of God’s creation. After all, if we were
dwelling on one average planet, rotating around one average star, in one
average galaxy in an infinite Universe, how could we be the sole focus
of God’s attention, and why should His only Son be sent just to this
middling planet, as the Bible suggests?
Needless to say, this revolution of thought provided great fuel for the
atheists, skeptics and agnostics. According to Paul Steidl:
The truths of God’s word and the work of Jesus Christ in no way depend
on our position.... If anything, our lack of a unique position in the
natural universe is only an illustration of the natural man’s lack of a
unique position before God (1979, p. 6).
In other words, the presence of our material selves in the material
Universe is not as important to God as our immortal souls. On the other
hand, it is difficult to doubt that God has placed our planet in just
the right place, and set it in motion in just the right way, to benefit
the survival of humanity.
Copernicus submitted his ideas in the early sixteenth century, stating
that geocentricity was incorrect after all. Some of Copernicus’ ideas
could not be defended scientifically, but science generally had little
to do with the attacks on this theory. Calvin, for instance, criticized
Copernicus by appealing to passages in Joshua and Psalms that supposedly
show the fixity of the Earth relative to the Sun. Galileo came along a
hundred years later and firmed up the Copernican theories with better
mathematics and with more accurate and numerous measurements. Unlike
Copernicus, Galileo was persistent, arrogant, and prepared to stand up
to the wrath of the Inquisition. Galileo’s assertion that the Bible
should be interpreted in light of man’s knowledge of the natural world,
and that Scripture should not have authority in scientific
controversies, did little to endear him to church leaders. Thus, rather
than being the case of “science versus the Bible,” it was “dogmatic
scientist versus religious dogmatism.” This, of course, is not all the
story; the remainder would be covered in a good history book.
One of the passages used to defend the biblical basis of geocentricity
was Joshua 10:12-14, and later references to the same event, in which
Joshua prayed, “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; And thou, Moon, in
the valley of Aijalon” (v. 12), that he might defeat the numerous armies
assembled against his people. God immediately answered Joshua’s prayer,
and in the following verse he wrote: “And the Sun stood still, and the
Moon stayed.” Keil and Delitzsch have suggested that either the day
appeared long to the warriors of Israel because of the greatness of the
task they performed (i.e., defeating the enemy), or that God
miraculously caused the day to be lengthened so the Lord’s army could
perform its task. The former is consistent with similar language in
other parts of the Old Testament, and the latter explanation is totally
consistent with God’s infinite power over the Universe (1982,
2:106-112). In any case, as Joshua goes on to say in verse 14, “there
was no day like that before it or after it.” Thus, whether miraculous or
not, to say that these verses teach that the Earth continues to stand
still, and that the Earth is the center of the Universe, is both a gross
misinterpretation and a misapplication of the verse. This passage does
not teach geocentricity, despite Calvin’s claims to the contrary.
In addition to Joshua 10, Calvin used Psalm 93:1 in defense of
geocentricity. The verse simply suggests that the Earth is stable, and
cannot be moved, but is it trying to say that the Earth is totally
motionless in every sense? As the passage is primarily concerned with
God’s majesty and power, it is more likely that the psalmist is saying,
“Who but God could move the Earth?” Besides, the Earth is set in an
unchanging orbit around the Sun, all the while rotating at a steady
speed on a fixed axis.
Psalm 19:6 is a passage that often is cited as another example of
Scripture teaching pre-Copernican astronomy. In this verse, the Sun is
said to move, rather than the Earth, and therefore is said by some to
imply that the Sun revolves around the Earth. There are many other
verses in the Bible that talk about the Sun “going down” or “rising up.”
This hardly should be surprising, however, since events in the Bible
often are written in accommodative or “phenomenal” language—i.e., the
language used to express phenomena as man sees them. Even today we teach
our children that “the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west,” and
astronomers and navigators use the Earth as a fixed point for purposes
of simple observation, expressing distances and directions in relation
to it. The weatherman on the evening news often will state that the Sun
is going to “rise” at a certain time the following morning and “set” at a
certain time the following evening. Why does no one accuse him of
scientific error? Because we all are perfectly aware of, and understand,
the Copernican view of the solar system, and because we likewise
understand that our weatherman is using “phenomenal” language.
In addition, scientific foreknowledge could be claimed from Psalm 19:6
if a more literal interpretation was applied in the following way.
Astronomers now know that the Sun moves in a gigantic orbit around the
center of the Milky Way galaxy; traveling at 600,000 miles an hour it
would take the Sun 230 million years to make just one orbit! It also is
believed that our galaxy is moving with respect to other galaxies in the
Universe. The Sun’s going forth is indeed from one end of the heavens
to the other. In any case, there is no way to substantiate the claims
that the Bible teaches geocentricity, or that it promotes any other
anti-scientific concept.
REFERENCES
Keil, C.F. and F. Delitzsch (1982 reprint),
Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans).
Steidl, Paul (1979),
The Earth, the Stars, and the Bible (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed).
