Is the Bible Geocentric or Heliocentric?
It is argued both ways. Personally, I think you could stick a pin anywhere in the universe and make it the center. You simply record the movements of the stars from that point. If that is the case, you could put the pin in either the Sun or the Earth.
Up until the 1500s, the geocentric view prevailed. It was Copernicus who brought forth the theory of heliocentric at just the right time when men were putting their faith in materialism. I do not believe that absolute motion can be determined from inside a closed system. Only the relative motions in relation to an object such as the Sun or Earth. When they calculate space travel trajectories, they must figure from a fixed, non-moving earth. Man’s world is all relative.
The growing awareness of man’s minuscule place in the cosmos has furthered the impairment of religious belief. In Christendom we may date the beginning of the decline from Copernicus (1543). The process was slow, but by 1611 John Donne was mourning that the earth had become a mere “suburb” in the world, and that “new philosophy calls all in doubt”; and Francis Bacon, while tipping his hat occasionally to the bishops, was proclaiming science as the religion of modern emancipated man. In that generation began the “death of God” as an external deity.
Lessons in History: Will & Ariel Durant
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