Sungenis is Right About Geocentrism, But Not Everything Else

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Sungenis is Right About Geocentrism, But Not Everything Else · Creation vs. Evolution: Distant Starlight Problem Revisited

Robert Sungenis Rebuts Dan Olson's: "That Time Geocentrists Tricked a Bunch of Physicists."
17th Oct. 2021 | Robert Sungenis Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrzG6g3ed1c

I

6:54 It may be noted - I was promoting Geocentrism before the said works of Krauss and Barber, from 2001, on my then MSN Group Antimodernism. All MSN Groups went down February 2009.

Robert Sungenis Channel

There were a lot more people promoting it before you, and none of them were relying on angels to move stars and planets; not even St. Hildegard.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Robert Sungenis Channel What was her astrophysics? I bet it was not "gravitation + inertia = determines all movements" or similar.

What was her contribution to directly confronting the Distant Starlight problem proposed by Heliocentric / Acentric Evolutionists?

My point is, you have done good things in this subject, but as you mentioned some people before either of us, that means before you too.

And Riccioli was perhaps a Heliocentric, since you pretend the defenders of Geocentrism, none of them, relied on angels to move stars and planets?

Have you even learned Latin sufficiently to read an untranslated text by Riccioli or St. Thomas and at least get the gist of it?

Raghavar Voltore

Do you have any materials of yours that I can ready, like videos or blog post? And also why did your MSN groups went down?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Raghavar Voltore All MSN Groups went down in February 2009. We got notice back in October or November 2008, and I saved some, not all.

I do have blogs, link will be given next comment, otherwise seek the full list on "New blog on the kid" and in October 2021 "Ce que je fais dans la vie? J'écris"

[next comment]

New blog on the kid : Ce que je fais dans la vie? J'écris
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2021/10/ce-que-je-fais-dans-la-vie-jecris.html

II

30:14 "because the geocentric model shows stellar parallax, just as does the heliocentric model"

Disagreed. It certainly needs to show the phenomenon labelled as parallax, but it does not have to be in fact parallactic. Angelic movers could as easily perform "aberration X parallax X proper motion" of a fix star as all of it actual proper motion, as they can either alone perform, or direct forces of gravitation and inertia to help them perform, the movements of Tychonic orbits (typically spirograph patterns, if you abstract from the daily motion).

This is preferrable, since it does away with the distant starlight problem for young earth and young universe.

30:50 "because the whole star field, led by the Sun"

... is moving with one uniform motion, which is precisely what angelic movers would dispense the model from, and thereby from giving, by stellar parallax, even remotely an indication of how remote stars are.

We have no practical purpose, nor theoretic vested interest, in measuring distances of several light years.

While those "measured" directly by parallax are themselves too short to be important, their indirect upshot involves distances in light years beyond Biblical chronology. This is in the theoretic vested interest of the Bible's foes.

I don't say the model given by Sungenis et al. here wouldn't work. I am saying nothing forces a geocentric to have it need work, nothing really and truly proves it to a geocentric.

31:23 In response to that Physics professor from Illinois:

• Copernicus taken broadly certainly requires parallax, and Copernicus and Galileo taken as they presented it require a parallax different from the one we observe, since they agree with St. Thomas or me that fix stars are basically situated within a sheet around a globe, within an inner surface of a globe => parallax would be uniform in size;
• Tycho does not exclude the phenomenon described as parallax, but also does not require parallax to occur, and therefore does not require the phenomenon to be parallactic. With angelic movers (see St. Thomas) we have an alternative explanation of the phenomenon.

Robert Sungenis Channel

Angels do not move the stars and planets, and Thomas does not dictate how our universe works. There is no other Father or medieval that takes that position, and the church has never given any credence to it, nor has any theologian, scholar, council, pope or catechism.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Robert Sungenis Channel "Angels do not move the stars and planets,"

• 1) last time you argued this, you deduced it from "angel" meaning messenger - are you aware "stars" is also a Biblical name for these holy spirits? and that angels are nine orders, our guardian angels being the lowest one?
• 2) you have no scientific proof - astrophysics (in the broad sense) is unlike planar astronomy not observational science
• 3) it was not just the preferred option of St. Thomas Aquinas, it was not just at least one of the options of St. Augustine (whose other option was also not the kind of cause you classify as physical, but God moving them directly), it does not just have a very impressive namedropping in its favour by the Geocentric astronomer and Catholic priest Riccioli, it is also supported by Bible passages.

"and Thomas does not dictate how our universe works."

Neither do antithomists.

"There is no other Father or medieval that takes that position,"

Fathers, I don't know, the one I know being ambiguous as just stated about St. Augustine. Unless you count perhaps Minucius Felix or someone like that. But "or medieval" is ridiculous, considering the huge name drop by Riccioli. It goes on past Middle Ages to "Conimbricenses" that being Coimbra Jesuits. Riccioli gives first four alternatives and then picks this one precisely because it is the most common one. I took Latin at university, and my somewhat rusty mastery is adequate to read his Renaissance Latin. The book is scanned online.

"and the church has never given any credence to it,"

Are Job and the authors of Judges as well as Deborah outside the Church? I though "una est fides antiquorum et modernorum" but you may have missed that? What about Moses, forbidding to adore "the host of heaven" and Our Lord stating they are real legions of angels, in the context of his being able to summon twelve legions of them?

If you need a Church actual dogma - on the level of Adam instantaneously losing justice when sinning, Trent, Session V, one of the three canons of the decree on Original Sin - what the Hell are you doing towting Geocentrism which also is not on this level?

"nor has any theologian,"

Check that with the Coimbra Jesuits and obviously Riccioli himself will you?

Or, when Bishop Tempier condemned 219 theses, and these included "stars are sentient beings" and included "if an angel were not moving a specific star it would not be in any place in the universe" - why didn't he also condemn "angels move stars"? The fact is, he didn't!

"scholar,"

What was the position of Petrus Lombardus? Is he not sufficiently scholarly for you? Do you want scholars from Denzinger's generation or later? Again, what are you up to with Geocentrism? He didn't include the 1633 condemnation in Enchiridion whatever the full title was, nor did Bannwarth!

"council,"

Dito Geocentrism.

"pope"

Popes have a certain duty of staying aloof from questions that are freely disputed. And while angelic movers was more present than "God by direct fiat" or "stars are sentient" or "mechanic cause" (that one examplified by Kepler's appeal to magnetism and the one least favoured by Riccioli), some of the others are present too. Hence the question was actually disputed.

"or catechism."

Dito.

One more point. While this was generally so, the point about parallax with indirect conclusions from it pointing to light emitted 100 000 or more years ago, which is directly in denial of the Biblical chronology, was not yet an issue. You do not even bother to answer this, though this was my main concern from the day I embraced Geocentrism a few years before, after what I recall from your statements, you did so. That day being 24th of August 2001. The day before, I had been confronted with "Distant Starlight" in a debate on Creationism.

III

32:00 or just before : "If different stars were to show different amounts of parallax, that would rule out all of them being on one sphere, but still not really decide between Tycho and Copernicus." [Quote from the physics lecture at Illinois University, from 2004]

That's the point. Without "parallax" phenomenon being actual parallax, one can still have them on one sphere or between two fairly close ones. It's distance would be beyond the furthest distance measured by sunlight reflected by a planet's side, but it would not be measured by the phenomenon, unless it were in fact parallactic, rather than mislabelled as to cause.

Robert Sungenis Channel

The "point" is that parallax, as an undisputed observed phenomenon, can be shown by a geocentric model, and thus heliocentrism cannot be proved by parallax, which contradicts the common view held since Bradley in the 1700s and Bessel in the 1800s. Please don't make it more complicated than it has to be.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Robert Sungenis Channel The point is that your way of showing parallax can be showed by YOUR geocentric model which is not the only one.

While the phenomenon is undisputed the causality - and how appropriate the name "parallax" is - from here on is very definitely not so.

With "aberration" (Bradley) and "parallax" (Bessel) and "proper movement" all being an actual proper movement, for instance performed by angelic movers, we can get to a position of fix stars being:

• one light day up, all of them
• one light day up for the closest, two light days up for the furthest
• or anything between that

AND where beyond the fix stars, there is the Empyraean Heaven where Christ sits on a throne. This was common ground to Copernicus, Galileo and St. Thomas. This was common ground to St. Robert Bellarmine and to John Calvin. The latter only differed on whether Christ is also present by a miracle resembling somewhat bilocation, which He is.

By making only and uniquely accessible to your public the idea of your model of parallax, you are certainly countering Heliocentrism, but unfortunately not a certain other and more pernicious heresy, like "Heaven is not a physical place" - not to mention the Distant Starlight pseudo-problem for Biblical chronology.

By the way, the eschatological point of where we should be going, giving full local force to St. Thomas More's words (pointing at the Sun on the scaffold) "I'll be above that fellow" is perhaps after all more important than Biblical chronology, but the latter is not "optional" either.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Robert Sungenis Channel And obviously, we still have a point on the fact that you missed where the 2004 proceeding missed a possibility ...

Robert Sungenis Channel

@Hans-Georg Lundahl Of course. If you have angels moving things as if the universe were a Chinese Checker board, you can have them do anything you want. How convenient. But there is no evidence that angels move celestial objects. If you think just because Thomas says it then it must be true, well, that's not the way we do either theology or science. Thomas lived in a time in which they didn't know of either gravity or inertia or inertial forces and how they worked or where they came from. Now we do, and that says nothing against the Empyraean Heaven, since it still exists in the same place, and its called the Third Heaven. If you read my material you would see this, instead of taking a pot shot. As for why we don't have a distant starlight problem, that is not because angels carry light beams, but because the inertial forces of a rotating universe are greater the farther the radius from the earth, and our present science agrees that light can go way beyond C in such frames, just as my above video teaches. And if you think the universe has to be only one or two light days in radius, then you've given in to the myth about C being only 300K/sec, which you could only have gotten from Einstein. So why are you mixing Thomas and Einstein, and then faulting me for using science to explain celestial phenomenon?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Robert Sungenis Channel Let's break this down.

"Of course. If you have angels moving things as if the universe were a Chinese Checker board, you can have them do anything you want."

More like anything God wants, but in my own perspective, anything that will explain viewed phenomena.

"How convenient."

Yes. Explanations should be at least somewhat convenient, right?

"But there is no evidence that angels move celestial objects."

• 1) they are a great explanation for retrogrades and orbits adding up to spirograph patterns in the case of planets, and they are not a bad explanation for the complex viewed movement of stars which is analysed as "aberration X parallax X proper movement" if the analysis is wrong and it is all a proper movement;
• 2) x being evidence for y means y being a great explanation of x - in order to have a complete proof, we would need also to show other explanations are NOT great
• 3) your alternative view on parallax involves alpha Centauri, same size as sun, 4 light years away, moving not just in time but also in equal step with the Sun, not just for its daily motion, but for its annual too, and there is no evidence for that, and I don't see you providing even a weak explanation for it.

"If you think just because Thomas says it then it must be true, well, that's not the way we do either theology or science."

It's not the way I think, or do science, or do theology. But rather, if St. Thomas says it's true, it is perfectly licit, and I'd need heavy authority for rejecting it (like a papal infallible statement in 1854, not like Sungenis saying "it's now the way we ...") or otherwise an alternative that I have reasons to find attractive.

"Thomas lived in a time in which they didn't know of either gravity or inertia or inertial forces and how they worked or where they came from."

O U C H ... patronising St. Thomas like that is a bad move. He certainly did know inertia, though not "inertial movement" as it is part of his via prima, and he certainly did know Aristotle's theory of gravity.

"Now we do,"

O U C H again ... overestimating modern security of knowledge is also a bad move. From wiki an object at rest remains at rest, and an object that is moving will continue to move straight and with constant velocity, if and only if the net force acting on that object is zero - how do you propose to prove part two, the part St. Thomas "didn't know" namely continue to move straight and with constant velocity?

"and that says nothing against the Empyraean Heaven, since it still exists in the same place, and its called the Third Heaven. If you read my material you would see this, instead of taking a pot shot."

Your material has two characteristics : it's vast (so is mine, I recently counted 9242 posts on my present blogger account), and it's not for free. I also have no possibility now, nor had I in the past, to go over all of it from a zip file. When CMI refers to material ignored by the questioner or disputer, they usually link back to their older stories on the web.

"As for why we don't have a distant starlight problem, that is not because angels carry light beams,"

I never mentioned angels carrying light beams, though I'm not sure if it is false ... By what way is the light spread, and heat divided upon the earth? (God to Job, chapter 38, where, by the way, verse 7 is one of the proof texts for angelic movers, though it could equally be so for a theory Riccioli rejected, stars being animate). I mentioned the phenomenon of parallax not being parallactic (where angelic movers are one option more helpful than Newton, though not the only one). And stars therefore being fairly close.

"but because the inertial forces of a rotating universe are greater the farther the radius from the earth, and our present science agrees that light can go way beyond C in such frames, just as my above video teaches."

Our present science ... whatever that's worth.

I did not have time to watch all of the video before ending my comments at 32:00, so a time signature would be helpful.

"And if you think the universe has to be only one or two light days in radius, then you've given in to the myth about C being only 300K/sec, which you could only have gotten from Einstein."

I think it has actually been measured?

"So why are you mixing Thomas and Einstein, and then faulting me for using science to explain celestial phenomenon?"

Denying angelic movers offhand is not science. For an atheist scientist it looks like science because he's an atheist. Supposedly, you aren't.

Have you asked yourself what arguments swayed both Riccioli and probably at least some of his huge majority of authorities?

Robert Sungenis Channel

@Hans-Georg Lundahl It wasn't angels moving planets. Riccioli discovered that if he put the same elliptical orbits on the planets for Tycho's model that Kepler had put on the Copernican model, the two models had the same orbits and speeds for the planets, and therefore Kepler did not prove the heliocentric system. Notice that Riccioli used science to establish his truth. He knew elliptical orbits were correct, and then it was just a matter of applying them to the right model.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Robert Sungenis Channel Look here.

Pars posterior, tomi primi, liber nonus, De Mundi Systemate, Sectio secunda de motibus caelorum, caput I An Cali Aut Sidera Moueantur ab Intelligentijs, An verò ab intrinsecò a prpria Forma vel Natura. Pp 247 and following,

the edition
Bononiae : ex typographia haeredis Victorii Benati,
of the work, obviously,
Almagestum nouum.

I have a feeling you never read that, and that your Renaissance Latin is too slight or even non-extant to read that. I did, and my Renaissance Latin is to the level of understanding his reasoning. My D level (or fourth term) essay in Latin at University was on Desiderii Erasmi Opus de Conscribendis Epistolis. The reason for my failure in the first attempt was getting angry at Erasmus for ridiculing Byzantine court manners especially of the papacy, and my second try a few weeks later was graded "väl godkändt." I'm no longer sure if it was 90 or 91, but I am sure I did it. And also, after 93, while losing most of my Greek, I kept up Latin during crucial years with Roman Missal read at home, Vulgate NT and Psalms, Little office and personally chosen parts of Summa Theologica, editio Leonina, with footnotes from 19th C. My Latin, very definitely, is up to reading this.

The shape of the orbits had NOTHING to do with the conclusion of Riccioli. That it has with MY adherence to the conclusion, doesn't mean it had anothing to do with HIS.

His arguments are purely scholastic and theological, and he rejects Kepler's idea of magnetism as cause of orbits. Why? For the simple and to him sufficient reason that it is a non-living mechanistic cause.

The replacement of magnetism with inertia and gravitation, and the admission of Geocentrism would not have mollified his judgement on that point. Yes, true, he rejected Kepler's Heliocentrism too, but that is very far from the point of this chapter. Here the question is not in what orbits the celestial bodies move, but what makes them move.

He gives four alternatives, 1) movement by intrinsic elementar form (since he specifically mentions magnetism, gravity and inertia would fall here too), 2) movement by intrinsic form as an intellectual and perhaps even sensitive soul, 3) movement by direct Divine Fiat, 4) movement by angels, beings not the form of the stars, who move them, by the fiat of their will.

He also states that the question cannot be decided by empirical observation of the celestial bodies. He therefore wants the most probable alternative as to theological fitness. While he does not agree with St. Thomas, in a neigbouring section, that God by Divine Fiat each days moves the entire universe around (he prefers only celestial bodies moved around, and that by angels), he very much does agree with St. Thomas that each star or planet or comet or whatever else is moved by an angel. I'll try to post the link to the scan in Zurich Library next comment, but youtube sometimes collapses comments of mine including any link.

But meanwhile, you do not know what you are talking about.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

[separate comment for links]

Link to scanned book:
https://www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/pageview/194748
and to my post referencing this link:
New blog on the kid : What Opinion did Riccioli call the Fourth and Most Common One?
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-opinion-did-riccioli-call-fourth.html