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Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong
rollcall writes "'Galileo Was Wrong' is an inaugural conference to discuss the 'detailed and comprehensive treatment of the scientific evidence supporting Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe.' The geocentrists argue that 'Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the [Catholic] Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.' I, like many of you, am scratching my head wondering how people still think this way. Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
I hope there is live blogging from the conference.
Except that we can measure the acceleration of the earth (rotation around the sun is obviously not a strait line, and easily measurable). So... yeah, you don't actually get the same results when you do the math for a point decoupled to the solar system and earth. No one outside of physics learns relativity, despite it being 100 year old science. Some may learn "pigeon" relativity, but that's not really helpful.
Sorry. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 pretty much did away with literacy tests for voters. Sigh.
Maybe because the literacy tests had nothing to do with knowledge and everything about (white) cultural familiarity? The examiners even got to select who took the test and who didn't. What could possibly go wrong?
The summary should read:
Catholic] Church's historical position on the immobility of the Earth was not only scientifically supportable, but it was the most stable model of the universe
The Roman Catholic Church long ago accepted our current scientific understanding of the organization of celestial bodies.
Oh, and evolution through natural selection as well.
And one of its greatest thinkers believed that reason and faith were both equally valid ways to truth and not in conflict at all.
These nuts are in no way affiliated with official Roman Catholic Church positions. So let's just halt the Church bashing before we begin, ok?
Half of the site is one giant image, no site navigation, barely any styling, hardcoded CSS in the tags, Windows-only typefaces... Oh, and a meta tag saying it's built with FrontPage. And an @aol.com address.
This may not be Mosaic, but I'm sure they were taken aback when GeoCities folded and they had to move.
What does the claim that 17% of the population believe in a geocentric earth mean? Even assuming that there's no one in that population that is simply saying that for kicks, it seems probable that a large part are simply answering that way because they don't know anything either way and are just guessing. At some level that's not as bad as having people who actively believe in geocentrism. But at another level, that means that one should expect that around 34% are really ignorant and have of them just got lucky when asked. That's not good. However, I suspect that some of these answers really are just people messing with the polsters or not bothering to thing.
But one thing to note is that many of the geocentrists are religious. Not only is geocentrism common among Christians but there's a substantial fraction of ultra-Orthodox (charedi) Jews who are affirmatively geocentrist. This is especially common among the chabad chassidim who are often geocentrists because their guru, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, made pro-geocentrist comments and because they want to preserve the word of Maimonides as inerrant (of course some of these are the same sort of people who refuse kidney transplants because the Talmud says that one kidney is the seat of your good instincts and the other is the seat of your bad instincts. So we're not talking about highly enlightened individuals). There are however, some very disturbing studies by Alexander Nussbaum showing that even among modern Orthodox Jews, anti-science views are disturbingly common. See for example http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n03_orthodox_judaism_and_evolution.html .
However, one thing to note is that although the conference in question in the top post is Catholic, affirmative geocentrism is not nearly as uncommon among evangelical Protestants as one would hope. Indeed, it is common enough that Answers in Genesis, one of the world's largest young earth creatonist ministries, feels a need to have essays that talk about why Christians don't need to be geocentrists. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/geocentrism.asp . Incidentally, There's some evidence that anti-Copernican sentiment actually started in Protestants and only spread to Catholics a few years later. Thomas Kuhn discusses this in his excellent book "The Copernican Revolution" although my understanding is that more modern historians disagree with him on this point and many don't think that there is a strong case for anti-Copernicanism as an originally Protestant ideology.
Finally, note that there are still some flat-earthers out there although they are very rare. They aren't as uncommon in the Islamic world. See for example this segment on Iraqi TV http://haha.nu/interesting/iraqi-tv-debate-is-the-earth-flat/ . In the West there is still some flat-Earthism but it is often more conspiratorial than religious in nature. See http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/ although some of the people there are trolls, some are quite sincere.
No, actually, any periodic movement, including the movement of the planets, can be modeled mathematically. It doesn't matter if we measure the planets with radar, and know where they are within a few hundred kilometers. You are wrong, GP is right.
Qxe4
Let us remember that Doyle was a dupe of Spiritualism and believed in the physical existence of fairies. His stories and characters are probably not a good example.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Buddhism as a whole isn't particularly neutral on the subject of gods. Theravada Buddhism is all about ethical actions and meditation. Theravada doesn't really support anything supernatural, but they also insist on there being one and only one Buddha and his always being a little above even the most enlightened modern practitioner. By them, no one else gets to be a Buddha, just off the wheel of Karma by meditation. So while they claim not to have any gods involved, some of us feel they are making the historical Buddha into one. Mahayana Buddhists mostly believe in gods and lots of other things, but the goal isn't becoming a mere god, it's enlightening yourself and then all sentient beings. You can theoretically become a god in some Mahayana traditions, but you shouldn't want to, as that god may still be as far as you are right now from the real goal of enlightenment. Some Mahayanists also believe in demi-gods (who are in cool afterlives but often too busy being jealous of the full gods to seek enlightenment), and hungry ghosts, who by some accounts are descending to splinter into animal spirits and start the climb back. Then there's Vajrayana, which I can't describe much more succinctly than to say it holds the goal is enlightenment, but you will have to become Dr. Strange first. If Mahayana is supernaturalist with gods and 'other planes', Vajrayana is taking the gods and dimensions and psychic powers stuff to an ongoing TV series, with half a dozen successful spin-offs and lots of special guests and plot cross overs, and you have to learn the names of all the particles of the week to progress.
Zen, by the way, is mostly based on Mahayana teachings.
Who is John Cabal?
No, no it isn't. The nondeterminism in quantum mechanics is understood and circumscribed, and we absolutely can be exactly sure.
I am trolling