Geocentrism

[evolvedForm]

It's my understanding that Galileo was persecuted by the Church for advocating Copernican Heliocentrism, because it went against the bible's Geocentrism. So I'm wondering how biblical literalists reconcile this very minor discrepancy.

Also, Genesis 2 verse 7 seems to say that the sky separates two bodies of water. How is this explained (away) by literalists?



ps. sorry if this has been hashed over before.

[BTirish]

A caveat: this reflects my understanding of some of the issues surrounding Galileo and the Church, but it's by no means a specialized area of study for me.

Galileo was not persecuted (if that's the word one insists on--he was put under house arrest, not much else) simply for advancing a heliocentric model of the universe. He was confrontational and suggested on his own that his heliocentric theory gave reason for calling into question the authority of the Church. Instead of simply advancing a scientific theory, he dabbled in theology and was treated as someone advancing theological errors. One might disagree with the Church for punishing errant theologians, but it's false to say that Galileo was punished just for advancing a scientific theory. He pretended to be a theologian, and so he was treated like a theologian.

In any event, the real issue with Galileo's model is that it's incorrect. It fails to save the appearances (a point brought up by the Church, at the time, in its rejection of Galileo's view) by positing a heliocentric solar system with circular orbits. Galileo presented good evidence for heliocentricism but failed to offer a model of the solar system that saved the observed appearances of the heavenly bodies. When Kepler formulated his laws of planetary motion (which involve elliptical rather than circular orbits) based on Brahe's observational data, the Church had no quarrel with his findings.

As for inconsistency between the account of the universe given in Genesis and scientific theories advanced by Galileo... Genesis describes a world that is basically flat. Almost no educated person in Western history, Christians included, thought that the world was flat. The claim that it was only after Columbus that the earth's roundness was popularly accepted is a myth invented by bad historians of the 18th or 19th century. So Christians long before Galileo accepted that not everything in the book of Genesis was to be taken literally concerning the physical structure of the universe. While geocentric models did dominate, these models were first advanced and accepted among pagan astronomers.