With Brian Holdsworth on Galileo Affair

The Galileo Affair Doesn't Bother Me
Brian Holdsworth | 31.I.2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk_NbaXm6Lw

I

2:55 I am sorry, but you are remaking the Church like St. Robert Bellarmine and Pope Urban VIII in your image.

There was no sworn loyalty to "the scientific establishment" as there could be for one Robert Barron, to give a robber baron perversion of St. Robert Bellarmine (yes, Robert Barron knows I call him the robber baron of theology, and if he ever converts to YEC and Geocentric and accepts Pope Michael, I'll conclude St. Dismas prayed for him).

Now, if you did a school project research, you probably already know there were two trials.

One by St. Robert where a book was the suspect, Galileo was invited as ... well, expert witness to defend his thesis. The other under Pope Urban VIII.

To St. Robert, the paramount importance was the book of Joshua. To the Pope, the principle was "God was free to make the world anyway He liked, and He was free to make it look to us anyway He liked".

From God being truth and not a spiderlike thing in Matrix, we could perhaps conclude from that principle, that if God made the universe look geocentric to us, then He probably also actually made it geocentric.

As you present St. Robert and Pope Urban as docile pupils of the astronomic specialists, you are helping to argue their legitimate successors should extend the same favours to an Evolutionist and Big Bang scientific establishment now as to the Geocentric one back then. This is rot.

II

4:04 I'd like to note, the kind of parallax that Galileo and St. Robert were discussing in the first process is still missing.

Both agreed the stars are in a sphere - or if you find it clearer, a spheric shell.

If there is a parallax from Earth moving around Sun, all of the spheric shell should be showing a uniform parallax. Pisces should be smaller in August-September than around February-March before and after the Sun hides them. And Virgo should be smaller in February-March than around August-September before and after the Sun hides her. The ratio of observed angular distances should vary by comparable amounts.

The result should tell us what the distance of each and all stars is to the Sun in the centre.

However, the parallax or so called parallax observed in the early 19th C. instead tells us, if parallactic, if Earth moves, that stars are different distances, alpha Centauri closer than Vega, Vega closer than Sirius and so on.

On the other hand, if angels move stars, the diversity of parallax in alpha Centauri, Vega, Sirius, could be the diverse "dance steps" in which angels move them.

So, if Earth is still, alpha Centauri, Vega and Sirius definitely are moved by angels - and if their "parallaxes" are really parallaxes, and Earth is moving, the universe is arguably more like a beehive than a shell enclosing comparatively few moving objects.

There are two problems if one assumes it is earth moving:

• if the universe is quasi an infinite beehive, where is the "heaven" in which God is adored by angels and where the risen bodies of the blessed will be;
• parallax would be just the first step in assessing stellar distances, but step after step lead to assessments like furthest seen stars being 13 billion lightyears and some more away from us, meaning they would have started shining those rays towards us 13 billion and some years ago - contradicting the Biblical timeline.

III

5:52 "even though his conclusion was mostly right"

What if it wasn't?

"he hadn't proven it"

Has anyone else since?

I'll remember hearing of Heliocentrism in a physics class - the physics teacher was a dear man to me, a son of a missionary, I considered him a fellow Christian (I was protestant back then) and I had been delving into the Galileo affair perhaps partly as a geek looking into encyclopedias.

I was also a Young Earth Creationist. So, I asked the physics teacher, how do we know Heliocentrism is true?

Well, the observed orbits very well fit the orbits calculated from Newtonian theory (which apparently didn't account for anything other than the Sun being in the centre, now Sungenis and a physicist from Croatia are challenging that : Earth could be caught in the gravitational centre even if not constituting it), given the masses of the planets.

In 2001, after debating on Distant Starlight problem (initial response = Kent Hovind's "very skinny triangles" - one would be hard set to triangulate even alpha Centauri from just observing parallax against clock times and objects on earth, actually one isn't even doing that, and to stars 13 billion light years away, it's not "hard set" it is impossible).

Well, what after that debate? I went to an old books' shop, turned a few pages in an astronomy manual from 1980 (it included distinct informations on parallax, aberration, proper movement), and said to myself : "this is what I am looking for". Obviously I bought it.

Next day, St. Bartholomew of 2001, I am a convinced Geocentric.

Two observations, from the astronomy book, the largest observed proper movement (Barnard's star) is 10 arc seconds a year, while largest parallax is 0.76 arc seconds for alpha Centauri. Well, as I had no problem with angels moving stars and therefore no problem with circular proper movements - since "parallax" could be a proper movement in physical reality (though one behaving different from that observed for Barnard's star), parallax doesn't confirm Earth moving like lack of parallax would damn the theory.

The other one is, we don't have direct weights of the masses of bodies in the solar system. We can't tell the solar system to stop for our convenience, then put the Sun in a scale and then put it back and ask the solar system to resume. All we are supposed to know about the masses are known only from deductions from the orbits - so, in deducing a mass from an orbit and then deducing a concord between mass and orbit from that deduced mass, you are in a circulus in demonstrando.

Exit the idea Heliocentrism was proven after Galileo. Exit very definitely.

IV

Second half of the video:
I agree 99%. The one quibble is, you present it as if, had Galileo presented his work as still doubtful, it would have got a pass.

In fact, he got the advise to portray it as a mathematical hypothesis. But we are not dealing with the modern distinction of "interesting hypothesis" vs "proven standard theory". We are dealing with supposition, unreal but for the sake of simplifying a demonstration, as opposed to a theoretic statement about physical reality.

AND the stance about physical reality of Geocentrism owed more to the Bible than to either Ptolemy or Aristotle.