Why would God bother with a tiny planet like Earth?

More myth-busting:

Did the medieval church persecute scientists?

Various atheistic websites often portray the Middle Ages as the ‘Dark Ages’, where a backward Church persecuted scientists. However, this was the period where spectacles, mechanical clocks, and the blast furnace were invented; universities were founded across the UK and Europe; Dante wrote the masterpiece Divine Comedy and Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales; Giotto di Bondone painted his masterpieces; Western music was invented; the great Gothic cathedrals were built; and the first carnivals were held involving whole towns.¹

It’s notable that even some atheists oppose this dishonesty. For example, Australian skeptic Tim O’Neill is scathing about such arguments:

“It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked up these strange ideas from websites and popular books. The assertions collapse as soon as you hit them with hard evidence. I love to totally stump these propagators by asking them to present me with the name of one—just one—scientist burned, persecuted, or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any.”²

They often come up with Galileo—laughable, since he lived at the same time as the KJV was being translated, centuries after the Middle Ages, and his main opponents were the scientific establishment. So the only remaining excuse is that the evil Church had persecuted them so well that no one was brave enough to practise science. O’Neill responds:

“By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists—like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa—and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents usually scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong.”

Actually, for real persecution of scientists, try the fanatically anti-Christian French Revolution. The ruling National Convention guillotined the great founding father of chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794).³

References and Notes

1. Esolen, A., Professor of English at Providence College, Were the Middle Ages Dark? Prager University videos, February 2014.
2. O’Neill, T., The Dark Age Myth: An atheist reviews God’s Philosophers, strangenotions.com, 17 October 2009; bold in original.
3. An apocryphal story has the condemning judge say, “The Republic has no need for scientists.”

Earth at the centre of the universe

Another supposed refutation of biblical Christianity is the discovery that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. As above, Neil Tyson claimed that this was virtually unknown in 1599. This was an inexcusable blunder; the best known founder of geokinetic (earth-moving) ideas, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543),¹ had published over half a century previously. Furthermore, the Gregorian calendar, adopted in 1582, was “based on computations that made use of Copernicus’ work”, as pointed out by leading philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996).² Copernicus certainly didn’t see his ideas as anti-Christian, because he was a canon of the church.

Copernicus’s ideas were then popularized by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and they accepted them before 1599. As early as 1597, Galileo wrote to Kepler, “Like you, I accepted the Copernican position several years ago,” and Kepler replied suggesting collaboration and coming out publicly. However, the main problems were that their view contradicted the scientific establishment of the day, which taught the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic view that the earth was at the absolute centre of the universe.³ Galileo saw his geokinetic view as compatible with the Bible,⁴ and Kepler was a devout Lutheran who claimed to be “thinking God’s thoughts after Him,” and saw no conflict between his astronomy and the Bible. He also calculated a creation date of 3993 BC—he, like the others, would be called a ‘young-earth creationist’ today!⁵

Copernicus’s medieval predecessors

The above scientists should be well known, even to Tyson. Not so well known, although they should be, were their medieval predecessors.⁶ Long before Copernicus, in the late Middle Ages, several clergy-scientists had safely proposed geokinetic ideas. E.g. the French priest and scientist John Buridan (c. 1300– after 1358), also a notable logician who solved various versions of the ‘Liar Paradox’,⁷ seriously considered geokinetic ideas.

Ironically, a major reason was precisely the relative tininess of the earth that atheists have claimed was a modern discovery. That is, Buridan proposed that it would be more elegant if the tiny earth rotated rather than the vast cosmos revolved around it. Ph.D. historian of science James Hannam says:

“Like many medieval Christians, Buridan expected God to have arranged things in an elegant way, always allowing that he could do as he pleased. However, although there was a presumption towards elegance, you still had to check the empirical facts to see if God really operated this way.”^8,9

Buridan also refuted scientific objections, such as Ptolemy’s claim that a moving earth would produce a massive wind. The answer lay in Buridan’s concept of impetus, essentially the same as the modern concept of momentum, and anticipating Galileo’s idea of inertia and Newton’s First Law of Motion by several centuries.¹⁰ That is, the earth would impart an impetus to the air, which would move along with it, so we would not notice it. Buridan compared it with being on a smoothly moving river boat: the boat shares its motion with everything on it, so passengers can forget they are moving. And if they looked outside at an anchored boat, they could easily think that the other boat was the one moving.

Buridan’s student Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–1382), a bishop, mathematician, and physicist, refined this further. He argued that the earth would impart an impetus to everything on it—air, water, and projectiles—so they would share the earth’s rotation as well. Oresme also realized that many of the biblical passages that were later hijacked to support dogmatic geocentrism were equivocal. That is, they used the earth as a convenient reference frame because it reflected everyday perception, that is, “by saying that this passage conforms to the normal use of popular speech just as it does in many other places … which are not to be taken literally.”^11,12 Hannam says:

“What Oresme had done was prepare the groundwork. He refuted most of the objections to a moving earth two centuries before Copernicus had suggested that it might actually be in motion.”⁸

References and Notes

1. Copernicus, N., De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), 1543.
2. Kuhn, T., The Copernican Revolution, p. 125, Harvard University Press, 1957.
3. See also Sarfati, J., Galileo Quadricentennial: Myth vs fact, Creation 31(3):49–51, 2009; creation.com/gal-400.
4. Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615.
5. Batten, D., Which is the recent aberration? Old-Earth or Young-Earth Belief? Creation 24(1)24–27; creation.com/old-young.
6. The emininent French physicist/thermodynamicist and historian/philosopher of science Pierre Duhem (1861–1916), documented this a century ago in his 10-volume Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (The System of the World: History of cosmological doctrines from Plato to Copernicus),1914.
7. E.g. a one-person liar, “What I am saying is false”; a two-person liar where Socrates says, “What Plato is saying is true” and Plato says “What Socrates is saying is false”; and other even more elaborate ones. See Hughes, G.E., John Buridan on Self-Reference: Chapter Eight of Buridan’s Sophismata, Cambridge University Press, 1982.
8. Hannam, J., God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, Icon Books, ch. 12, 2010.
9. See also Statham, D., Helpful in places, confusing in others (review of Hannam, God’s Philosophers), J. Creation 24(2):31–34, 2010.
10. Graney, C.M., Mass, speed, direction: John Buridan’s 14^th-century concept of momentum, The Physics Teacher 51(7): 411–414, October 2013 | doi:10.1119/1.4820853.
11. Oresme, N., Le Livre du Ciel et du Monde (The Book of Heaven/Sky and the World), 1377; Hannam, God’s Philosophers, ch. 12.
12. Oresme was bothered by Psalm 93:1, “the world is established; it shall never be moved.” However, the same Hebrew word for ‘moved’ (טוֹמ môt) is used in Psalm 16:8, “I shall not be moved.” Since the Psalmist was not in a straightjacket, the word clearly refers to faltering rather than physical movement. Hannam also thinks that if there had been evidence for the earth moving, then Oresme would have addressed this verse as he had the other allegedly geocentric-only passages.