Friday, May 19, 2017

The Geocentric Cosmology of the Bible

There are many passages in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament that shows that the authors assumed, and even explicated, a geocentric, not a heliocentric, cosmology.  Here is the commentary provided of one such passage from a modern leading advocate of the geocentric model:

Isaiah 38:7-8

7"This is the sign to you from the Lord, that the Lord will do this thing that he has promised:
8Behold, I will make the shadow cast by the declining sun on the dial of Ahaz turn back ten steps." So the sun turned back on the dial the ten steps by which it had declined.

Together these three passages (2Kg 20:9-12; 2Ch 32:31; Is 38:7-8) are important because they specify the same occurrence and treat it as a miraculous event. Not only was the event known in Israel, but the king of Babylon had also heard and thus sent envoys to make an inquiry of the "sign." Similar to the account in Joshua in which two or three witnesses are included in order to authenticate the event as a real occurrence, so here we have the authors of Kings, Chronicles and Isaiah all testifying to the same miraculous event, with a foreign king as an internal witness to the three narratives.

The passages are also significant because they demonstrate that, of the two possible means to turn back the time which was displayed on the sundial of Hezekiah, it is the sun that is turned back in its course, not the Earth which is retarded in rotation. Indeed, Scripture knows nothing about a rotating Earth in order for it to be considered an option in a matter of celestial adjustment. If the Earth were rotating, there would be little reason for the narrator not to mention that it had been retarded by ten steps, since such a rotational reversal would have been just as stupendous as turning back the sun in its course. In fact, considering the disturbances and vibrations a sudden reversal of the Earth's rotation would have caused, it would have been miraculous to mask such terrestrial effects than it would be for a curtailing of the sun's movement. (Robert A. Sungenis, Galileo was Wrong, the Church was Right, volume II: The Historical Case for Geocentrism [3d ed.; Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2007], 68)

Interestingly, the Book of Abraham presents a geocentric model of cosmology:


John Gee, William J. Hamblin, and Daniel C. Peterson, And I Saw the Stars--The Book of Abraham and Ancient Geocentric Astronomy