You need pure magic holding Earth to the centre of the universe with no forces allowed to move it.
You then need more pure magic to explain why everything circles (and circle not orbit) Earth, in such a crazy motion such that it appears just like what you would expect if Earth actually orbited the sun and rotated on its axis.
There is no sane reason at all to believe in a GC universe.
If you walk upside down in relation to me, and if i walk upside down in relation to you, does it mean that we have to conclude (
despite the evidence) that the earth is flat, just because walking upside down is absurd notion?
So, if something is counterintuitive (at the first, or even second glance, maybe not on third, though) to you, it doesn't mean that it can't be true. Just because you don't understand something, it doesn't mean it isn't so. Just because you can't see something, it doesn't mean it isn't there.
The influential theologian and philosopher
Saint Augustine, one of the four Great Church Fathers of the Western Church, objected to the "fable" of an inhabited Antipodes:
But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the Earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the Earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the Earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled. For Scripture, which proves the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, gives no false information; and it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.
Tycho's parting challenge to
Rothmann to "
cite any text you have
from the holy oracles or their commentators that supports the Copernican
assertion" (VI, 186) is, on the one hand, a rhetorical ploy; indeed
Tycho adds immediately:
"I know this well enough that Augustine, the only one
you name, never conceded the annual or diurnal motion of the earth; not
being much of a mathematician, he questioned the very roundness of the
earth by denying the antipodes" (VI, 186)
On the other hand it is a big question as to which model is more counterintuitive to human mind, GC or HC model? Here is once short excerpt taken from one GC/HC discussion :
DP: On the geocentric model being “simpler”: Again, I have to disagree. The geocentrist doesn’t have just “one moving part” in his model. He still has to account for all the other motions and phenomena in the universe via the normal laws of gravity, so
moons orbit planets and planets orbit stars and the massive ones all spin on their axes and so on.
RS: Yes, but the geocentric system is still the simpler. Your system requires the Earth to rotate on its axis and to revolve around the sun. So right from the get-go you have a very fragile system, since a small spinning and revolving Earth is going to run into all kinds of problems with opposing forces that seek to slow it down, as opposed to a huge universe in the geocentric system that only has to spiral, but has enough momentum to do so without being appreciably curtailed by opposing forces.
Your sun then has to perform a similar task to your Earth, by revolving around the Milky Way and seeking to maintain its velocity amidst all the opposing forces it will encounter in that trip. The Milky Way itself is said to be revolving around another cluster of galaxies and/or expanding outward and thus it must be able to fight its way through all the opposing forces it meets. (And, we must add that, if the universe is expanding, then why aren’t the galaxies expanding internally but always stay the same size?)
IN ADDITION :
“Go out on a starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that the pre-Copernican astronomy is true. Look up at the sky with that assumption in your mind. The real difference between living in that universe and living in ours will then, I predict, begin to dawn on you.” ---
Clive Staples Lewis (1898 – 1963) - Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1966, p. 47
Hows your little model of our solar system coming along, with all planets orbiting the sun, except earth, with the sun orbiting earth?
The heliocentric versus geocentric debate did not originate with
Galileo, or even with
Copernicus or
Ptolemy. Long before
Galileo met his match with the Catholic Church, the battle was between the sun-centered model of the Babylonians and the earth-centered model of the Hebrews described in Genesis.
The Babylonians were avid astronomers who believed that the sun god controlled the world, and naturally the sun occupied the center of the universe. They discovered the
saros, which they used in predicting lunar eclipses. In fact, many centuries later the Greek astronomer
Hipparchus published a star catalogue taken from the Babylonians but written as if it were made from his own observations.
The next combatants were the Indian cosmologists versus the continuing Hebrew tradition, specifically from the book Joshua, although the Indians had both geocentrists and heliocentrists in their tradition.
By the time of the Greeks,cosmology was much more sophisticated as mathematics, philosophy, and experimentation were added to the debate.
Some evidence of heliocentrism is found in the Vedic Sanskrits, the main text of Hinduism and most likely the oldest surviving religious texts. The word “Veda” means“knowledge” and/or “sacred book.”
Subhash Kak writes:
“The theory that the sun was the ‘lotus’ [the central point] of the sky and that it kept the worlds together by its ‘strings of wind’ may have given rise to the heliocentric tradition in India.” The
Shatapatha Brahmana from the Upanishad era in the 9th century B.C., states:
“The sun strings these worlds, [the earth, the planets, the atmosphere], to himself on a thread. This thread is the same as the wind” (8:7:3:10). (Astronomy Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Astronomy, ed.,
Helaine Selin, 2000, p. 328).
Kak also points out, however, that
the earlier Indian astronomers adopted geocentrism:
“The concepts of śīghrocca and mandocca cycles indicate that the motion of the planets was fundamentally around the sun, which, in turn, went around the earth….The śīghrocca maps the motion of the planet around the sun to the corresponding set of points around the earth. The sun, with its winds that holds the solar system together, goes around the earth” (ibid ., p. 329).
The model in which the planets revolve around the sun but the sun revolves around the Earth would be the same model propounded by Tycho Brahe.As
Tycho Brahe said to Jewish astronomer
David Gans:
“Your sages were wrong to submit to the non-Jewish scholars. They assented to a lie for the truth lay with the Jewish sages” (
André Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: David Gans (1541-1613) and His Times, trans. by David Maisel, 1986, p. 218).