Geocentric Anyone?

My friend Richard over at DangerBlog made a nice little post on the debate between young Earthers and old Earthers. I think I would add from a literary perspective that the first few chapters of Genesis are clearly mythological and just as clearly true in a strictly literal sense. Not until the Greeks did anyone try to divorce mythology from truth and turn their myths into nice stories designed to teach deeper lessons. So I believe in the Judeo-Christian creation myth and its literal trueness as ardently as a Babylonian believed the story of Utnapishtim and the flood. The only difference is that the Christian story is true while the competing mythologies only contain elements of truth shrouded and jumbled in a confused hodge-podge.

But all that aside, the real purpose for this post is to interact with the comparison often made between the young Earth theory and the geocentric theory that prevailed prior to Copernicus. The argument goes like this: "The Bible seems to say that the cosmos were created in six literal 24 hour days, but this may be merely poetic language. After all parts of the Bible seem to indicate a geocentric universe, and how embarrassing it was for the church to defend the geocentric theory in the face of clear empirical evidence to the contrary."

As my favorite rhetorical method is to swallow the reductio, I'd simply like to defend the "embarassing" geocentric theory. No one should be embarrassed by medieval astronomy. Medieval astronomers were able to predict and hypothesize about celestial events with amazing accuracy. Often we hear anthropologists and scientists praise the Aztecs for their accuracy in astronomical predictions or the ancient Egyptians. Somehow the standard changes when the Christian church of the Middle Ages is thrown in even though the level of accuracy is just as high if not higher. Ah me...it's not embarrassing that the Aztecs and Egyptians did not hold to Copernican astronomy but it's shameful that the Europeans did not.

In her commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy Dorothy Sayers had this to say about medieval cosmology.

It is well to remind ourselves that, apart from the incidental inaccuracies of observation and measurement due to a lack of instruments of precision, the Ptolemaic [geocentric] view of the universe is neither more true nor more false than our own: it is merely another way of describing the same phenomena. Its truth, however, is of a different kind from ours. The difference is like that between a realistic perspective drawing and a map. In the one, all the geometrical facts are falsified; the lines which we know to be parallel are made to meet; it is a faithful presentation of what we actually see. In the other, all the geometrical facts are adhered to, but the view presented is one we can never see so long as we keep our feet on the earth. The first picture corresponds to our observation; the second is reached by inference.

Although, of course, the "machinery" of the rotating spheres with their deferents and epicycles bears no closer relation to objective fact than do models of the atom made of little rotating balls, yet, as seen from the Earth, the movements of the heavenly bodies do trace precisely such patterns as the medieval astronomers described. We find it more convenient to take an imaginary stand at some point outside the Solar System and describe the motions from there, so that we can see the whole arrangement laid out as on a plan. For many practical purposes, however, we still use the Ptolemaic vocabulary, turning on our car-lights half an hour after "sunset", and not after "solar horizon-rise"... The Ptolemaic universe is the universe we recognize, as we recognize a photograph or picture of the house in which we live. It is inferior to the Copernican in that its mathematics, even when corrected by modern knowledge, would be too complicated for ready calculation; but it is superior as a description of what the Heavens have to show us, because it is a direct transcript of the observed phenomena.