Religion or Atheism? An open forum.

[denuseri]

A sidebar on the origens of the Geocentric model since some may find it informative:

The geocentric model (also known as geocentrism, or the Ptolemaic system), is the theory, that our planet is the center of the universe, and that all other objects orbit around it.

This model served as the predominant cosmological system in many ancient civilizations like Greece and Egypt.

It also predates the advent of Christianity.


As such, most scientists (philosophers and astrologers etc being the early scientists) assumed that the everything circled the Earth, including the noteworthy systems of Aristole and Ptolemy.

Two commonly made observations supported the idea that the Earth was the center of the Universe.

The first observation was that the stars, sun, and planets appear to revolve around the Earth each day, making the Earth the center of that system. Further, every star was on a "stellar" or "celestial" sphere, of which the earth was the center, that rotated each day, using a line through the north and south pole as an axis. The stars closer the equator appeared to rise and fall the greatest distance, but each star circled back to its rising point each day. At least from the observations they were able to make at the time.

The second common notion supporting the geocentric model was that the Earth does not seem to move from the perspective of an Earth bound observer, and that it is solid, stable, and unmoving.

In other words, it is completely at rest.

The geocentric model was usually combined with a spherical earth model by ancient Greek and medieval philosophers.

It is not the same as the older belief that the earth was flat which was never widely accepted by anyone as anything other than a myth associated with the uneducated.

However, the ancient Greeks believed that the motions of the planets were circular and not elliptical, a view that was not challenged in the west before the 17th century through the synthesis of theories by Copernicus and Kepler.

The astronomical predictions of Ptolemy's geocentric model were used to prepare astrological charts for over 1500 years.

The geocentric model held sway into the early modern age, but was gradually replaced from the late 16th century onward by the heliocentric model.

Even though the transition between these two theories met much resistance, it did not meet it from only the Catholic Church (whose theologians I might add consulted many many learned men on the subject before deciding upon the issue) but also from those scientists who saw geocentrism as a fact that could not be subverted by a new, weakly justified theory.