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Dialogue on Geocentrism and the Catholic Faith (Part 2)

 

Are Catholics required to believe in Geocentrism 

as an article of faith?

 

Gary Hoge

 

 

I must say that I did not ever think that I would believe something as ridiculous as geocentrism, for not that long ago I was convinced that evolution was a fact.

 

I’ve noticed that throughout your letter you seemed to link heliocentrism and evolution, as if they must necessarily stand or fall together. But don’t you think it’s possible that Copernicus was right and Darwin was wrong?

 

I have to say that my largest stumbling block to understanding Genesis 1-11 was evolution, and my largest stumbling block with special creation was geocentrism. Because if the scriptures were not literal with geocentrism, why were they with creation?

 

I must remind you again that Scripture does not intend to teach us how the planets and stars really move. According to Pope Leo XIII, “We must remember, first, that the sacred writers, or to speak more accurately, the Holy Ghost Who spoke by them, did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe).”¹ Therefore, it’s futile to say things like “if the Scriptures were not literal with geocentrism …” because that assumes that Scripture intended to assert geocentrism. But the Pope is quite clear that the authors of Scripture did not intend to teach us about “the essential nature of the things of the visible universe,” and that would obviously include the relative motion of the heavenly bodies and other arcane points of physics that are “in no way profitable unto salvation.”²

 

As for creation, though, Scripture does intend to assert that God created everything. These are two very different issues. Put simply, it doesn’t matter whether the earth goes around the sun or vice versa, but it does matter whether the earth and the sun “just happened” or whether they were created by an intelligent Creator.

 

Even the new Catechism reiterating constant tradition states that all senses of scripture are based on and presuppose the literal.

 

The Catechism also says that “in Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.”³ The literal sense of Scripture, then, is simply the meaning that was intended by the human author, and that meaning is not always the same as the literal, dictionary meaning of the words he used. For example, consider Matthew 26:43: “And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy.” What is the literal meaning of this verse? Does it mean what it literally says: that the disciples’ eyes were heavier than they usually were? No, because that’s clearly not what the author intended to assert. He intended to assert that the disciples were sleepy, and he used a common figure of speech to do so. Thus, the “literal sense” of this passage is: “The disciples were sleepy.”

 

My friend Mark Shea has written an excellent book about the four senses of Scripture. It’s called Making Senses out of Scripture: Reading the Bible as the First Christians Did. If you haven’t already read it, I suggest you do so. On page 170, Mark writes:

 

The Church teaches that to understand the truth of Scripture we have to have in mind what the author was actually trying to assert, the way he was trying to assert it, and what is incidental to that assertion. So, for instance, when the gospels say the women came to the tomb of Jesus at “sunrise,” they are not mistakenly asserting the truth of Ptolemaic astronomy or promulgating a dogma that the sun rises rather than the earth moving. The “error” of the gospels here is an illusion because the gospel writers are not making any particular truth claims about astronomy to be in error about. They are simply using human language in a human way.⁴

 

Similarly, when Jesus said that God “causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:45), isn’t it obvious that he wasn’t giving us a lesson in orbital mechanics, but was simply describing nature “in a human way” (the same way we still speak today) and using it to illustrate God’s goodness?

 

I take for granted that you see the foolishness and invidiousness of evolution, but am I wrong?

 

If you’re referring to materialistic evolution, I agree. Like all Christians, I am a creationist. I believe that God created everything out of nothing, and that he created all life on earth according to His own plan. However, only the broad outlines of that plan have been revealed; the inner mechanics of it remain a mystery. It’s possible that God created all life on earth instantly and directly, but I have no philosophical objection to the idea that he created it slowly and that he made use of secondary causes.

 

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Which, of course, raises the question of whether the physical properties of the world are the subject of Christian revelation. I submit that they are not. In 1992, Pope John Paul II said, “The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture. … In fact, the Bible does not concern itself with the details of the physical world, the understanding of which is the competence of human experience and reasoning.”⁵

 

Physical properties of the world:

 

1.  The existence of heaven and hell.

2. The incarnation.

3. The flood.

4. The creative act.

5. Jesus’ miracles.

6. The separation of the red sea.

7. The resurrection of Jesus.

 

And the list could go on for a very long time.

 

But none of those things are physical properties of the world. Heaven and Hell aren’t on earth, and the other things you described are historical events, not physical properties of the earth. I was referring to things like the earth’s diameter, mass, surface gravity, rate of rotation (if any), escape velocity, albedo, magnetic properties, and orbital parameters (if any). I repeat that “the essential nature of the things of the visible universe” is not the subject of Christian revelation and that God “did not intend to teach men these things.”

 

[According to Pope Pius XII in Divino Afflante Spiritu:]

 

Later on, this solemn definition of Catholic doctrine, which claims for these books in their entirety and with all parts a divine authority such as must enjoy immunity from any error whatsoever, was contradicted by certain Catholic writers who dared to restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture to matters of faith and morals alone, and to consider the remainder, touching matters of the physical or historical order as “obiter dicta” and having (according to them) no connection whatsoever with faith. Those errors found their condemnation in the encyclical Providentissimus Deus.⁶

 

Now skip down to paragraph 3 of Divino Afflante Spiritu and you’ll see that Pius XII reiterated and reaffirmed what Leo XIII had already said: “There is no error whatsoever if the sacred writer, speaking of things of the physical order ‘went by what sensibly appeared’.” Isn’t that exactly what Mark Shea wrote, above? In other words, even if heliocentrism is true it’s not an error when the authors of Scripture describe the sun “rising” and “setting,” because they weren’t trying to assert anything about the true motion of the solar system; they were simply using ordinary figures of speech. Therefore, our belief in the inerrancy of Scripture does not constrain us to believe in geocentrism. In fact, Pope John Paul II said that it was “mistake” to believe that “our understanding of the physical world’s structure [is] . . .imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.” As both Leo XIII (Providentissimus Deus, 18) and Pius XII (Divino Afflante Spiritu, 3) said, “the sacred writers … did not intend to teach men these things - that is the essential nature of the things of the universe - things in no way profitable to salvation.”

 

[According to Pope Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus, paragraph 15,] in the interpretation of Holy Scripture, it is not lawful to depart from the obvious literal sense, unless reason prohibits it or some necessity forces us to leave it.

 

True, but recall that the “literal sense” of Scripture means “what the author intended to assert.” According to Leo XIII, the authors of Scripture “did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language.” Therefore, when the authors of Scripture used phrases like “when the sun had set” (Gen. 15:17) they intended to assert simply that night had come, and therefore that is the literal sense of that verse. But you want to treat the Bible as if the authors of Scripture did seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, and as if they always described and dealt with such things in a strictly literal fashion. Well, if that’s the approach you want to take, then I think you should be consistent and acknowledge that 1 Samuel 2:8 teaches that the earth rests on pillars and Isaiah 11:12 teaches that the earth has four corners.

 

In paragraph 18 of Providentissimus Deus, the Pope sets forth a rule for reconciling Scripture with the physical sciences: “Whatever they can really demonstrate to be true of physical nature, we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scriptures.” I submit that heliocentrism has been really demonstrated to be true, and therefore we must show it to be capable of reconciliation with our Scriptures. Of course, the two are easily reconciled if we simply realize that the authors of Scripture “went by what sensibly appeared,” used “figurative language,” and described the world the same way we do today.

 

As for the quote from the pope [John Paul II], I think it is important to realize that he was addressing the Pontifical Academy of Scientists. Namely atheists.

 

What difference does it make who he was talking to? The Pope clearly does not agree with you that we are “forced” by Scripture to believe in geocentrism. In fact, he said that attitude was a “mistake.” And the encyclicals from Leo XIII and Pius XII make it clear why it’s a mistake: because the authors of Scripture did not intend to assert such things.

 

It is also important to note that popes have rejected heliocentrism as heretical – Paul V in 1616, Urban VIII in 1633, Alexander VII in 1664. Therefore it seems that we have a problem – pope contradicting pope. But I think that much of the problem degrades when we realize that Pope John Paul was not addressing the whole church, as were the other popes.

 

Actually, none of the popes you mentioned were addressing the whole Church either. But Leo XIII and Pius XII were.

 

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In his 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus, Pope Leo XIII wrote: “The unshrinking defense of the Holy Scripture, however, does not require that we should equally uphold all the opinions which each of the Fathers or the more recent interpreters have put forth in explaining it; for it may be that, in commenting on passages where physical matters occur, they have sometimes expressed the ideas of their own times, and thus made statements which in these days have been abandoned as incorrect.” (para. 19). That is certainly the case with respect to geocentrism.

 

I must disagree with your conclusion. Pope Leo XIII in this statement referred to “each of the fathers” not to the “common agreement of the fathers.”

 

The common agreement of the Fathers is significant in matters of Revelation; it is irrelevant otherwise.

 

I believe that St. Robert Bellarmine says it best:

 

Second. I say that, as you know, the Council (of Trent) prohibits expounding the Scripture contrary to the common agreement of the holy Fathers. And if Your Reverence would read not only the Fathers but also the commentaries of modern writers on Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Josue, you would find that all agree in explaining literally that the sun is in the heavens and moves swiftly around the earth, and that the earth is far from the heavens and stands immobile in the center of the universe.

 

Well, if you don’t have to accept a public statement from a pope, I certainly don’t have to accept the personal opinion of a Cardinal expressed in a private letter. Obviously, Bellarmine was wrong, and he misunderstood the significance of the fact that most of the ancients thought the figurative language in Scripture was a true description of the physical reality. If Pope Leo XIII was correct and the authors of Scripture did not intend to describe the physical reality, then those who thought otherwise were mistaken.

 

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Pope Leo XIII specifically stated that Scripture does not intend to teach such things. He wrote: “We must remember, first, that the sacred writers, or to speak more accurately, the Holy Ghost Who spoke by them, did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe), things in no way profitable unto salvation. Hence they did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even by the most eminent men of science. Ordinary speech primarily and properly describes what comes under the senses; and somewhat in the same way the sacred writers - as the Angelic Doctor also reminds us - ‘went by what sensibly appeared,’ or put down what God, speaking to men, signified, in the way men could understand and were accustomed to.”⁷

 

A very strong argument could be made that the pope was referring to geocentrism, but it is not stated.

 

If he wasn’t talking about geocentrism, what was he talking about? I can’t think of any other controversy regarding Scripture and the physical sciences that fits the pope’s description.

 

And other popes have explicitly condemned geocentrism as heretical.

 

I think you meant to say “heliocentrism,” not “geocentrism.” But no pope has ever condemned heliocentrism in such a way as to bind the Church to it. According to Dr. Jeffrey Mirus:

 

The declaration that Galileo’s propositions were heretical was never published as a teaching of the Church, and it was never intended to be such. It was intended and taken as the advice of certain theological experts who worked in the Holy Office, of value in a legal case, but hardly a norm of faith for the Church as a whole. Second, as noted earlier, Pope Paul V did not endorse this theological opinion, but rather ordered in an in-house directive only that Galileo be commanded to stop holding and advancing his own opinion. This action, then, stemmed from a judgment of prudence about the promotion of ideas which could not be easily reconciled with Scripture. Even as a private document, therefore, the declaration of heresy received no formal papal approval. Third, there is no evidence that Pope Urban VIII ever endorsed any public document which included the declaration of heresy, especially the sentence at Galileo’s trial. That no pope ever promulgated any condemnation of Galileo’s ideas removes the Galileo case entirely from discussions on the historical character of the Church’s teaching authority.

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It is clear, then, that not even the ordinary Magisterium has ever taught or promulgated the idea that the propositions of Copernican/Galilean astronomy are heretical or errors in faith. Thus it can in no way be claimed that “the Church” has taught that such views are heretical.⁸

 

This becomes clear when we consider the Church’s actions subsequent to the Galileo incident. In 1820, Canon Giuseppe Settele, a Roman professor of astronomy, wrote a book in which the truth of the Copernican system was taken for granted. According to Dr. Andrew Dickson White:

 

The Master of the Sacred Palace, [Filippo] Anfossi, as censor of the press, refused to allow the book to be printed unless Settele revised his work and treated the Copernican theory as merely a hypothesis. On this Settele appealed to Pope Pius VII, and the Pope referred the matter to the Congregation of the Holy Office. At last, on the 16th of August, 1820, it was decided that Settele might teach the Copernican system as established, and this decision was approved by the Pope.⁹

 

Pope John Paul II himself said that the debate over heliocentrism within the Church “was closed in 1820 with the imprimatur given to the work of Canon Settele.”¹⁰

 

[According to Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis:]

 

For some go so far as to pervert the sense of the Vatican Council’s definition that God is the author of Holy Scripture, and they put forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters. They even wrongly speak of a human sense of Scriptures, beneath which a divine sense, which they say is the only infallible meaning, lies beneath. Further, according to their fictitious opinions, the literal sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under the Church’s vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual. By means of this new exegesis the Old Testament, which today in the Church is a sealed book, would finally be thrown open to all the faithful. By this method, they say, all difficulties vanish, difficulties which hinder only those who adhere to the literal meaning of Scriptures.¹¹

 

I say that these statements by Pius XII support the geocentrism interpretation without any doubt.

 

Not quite. What Pope Pius XII was objecting to was the idea that it was okay if there were errors in Scripture as long as they weren’t in “those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters.” He correctly stated that there can be no errors in any part of Scripture. But he specifically stated (in Divino Afflante Spiritu, para. 3) that “There is no error whatsoever if the sacred writer, speaking of things of the physical order ‘went by what sensibly appeared’.” Therefore, even if heliocentrism is true it isn’t an “error” if the authors of Scripture use words like “sunrise” and say things like “the sun had set,” and their use of such language does not require us to believe that heliocentrism isn’t true.

 

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St. Bellarmine was indeed a geocentrist (as was just about everybody back then), but in April 1615, he wrote a letter in which he said: “I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.” I submit that it has now been truly demonstrated that the sun is at the center of the solar system. And because, as Pope Leo XIII explained, Scripture doesn’t intend to teach us about such things one way or the other, there’s no good reason to insist on geocentrism.

 

I find it unfortunate that this one line was taken out of context from the entire letter. But let us deal with this line and assume that geocentrism is false, how do we “proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary”?

 

We explain them exactly the way Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII said: they are figurative descriptions of what sensibly appears. From our perspective, the sun appears to rise up into the sky, so the authors of Scripture described it that way. I really don’t see why that’s so difficult to understand. When the newspaper says that “sunrise” will occur at 6:00, it really doesn’t take a great exegetical effort to reconcile that statement with the newspaper’s presumably heliocentric worldview.

 

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You’re conflating two distinct things: Copernicanism and theological liberalism. It’s true that most liberals are Copernicans, but so are most Fundamentalists. There’s simply no cause-and-effect relation here. Scripture is infallible in what it intends to assert. Pope Leo XIII tells us that Scripture doesn’t intend to assert anything about the essential nature of the physical universe. Rather, it’s authors simply described what they saw, just the same as we still do today when we use terms like “sunrise” and “sunset.”

 

It is clear that the door that Darwin entered in through was Copernicus.

 

I doubt that, but even if you’re right, so what? It’s still possible that Copernicus was right and Darwin was wrong.

 

There is a grandeur in this view of life [, that is, evolution], with its several powers, having been original breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this plane has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by the Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle of Life)

 

[That is] the last sentence [of the book]. Darwin knew what he was doing, do you?

 

I’m afraid you’ve lost me. Because Darwin (like everyone else in the 19th century) believed that the earth goes around the sun, that proves … what?

 

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That’s admirable, but geocentrism is not an article of the faith; the Eucharist is. Further, because we Catholics claim that transubstantiation is not discernible to the senses, science (which can only measure things that are discernible to the senses) can’t “prove” anything about it one way or the other.

 

The Copernicus system explains the data, no doubt. But as St. Bellarmine said, “it is sufficient for mathematics” but it “is a very dangerous thing by injuring our holy faith and rendering the Holy Scriptures false.”

 

Well, either Bellarmine was wrong, or Popes John Paul II, Pius VII, Leo XIII, and Pius XII were. Personally, I agree with Leo XIII: Holy Scripture does not intend to teach us such things. I also agree with Pius XII that it is not an “error” if the authors of Scripture describe the world as it appears to the naked eye, especially since we still do that today. And since it’s not necessary to insist that geocentrism must be true in order to preserve the inerrancy of Scripture, I see no theological reason to reject or explain away the overwhelming evidence that the earth really does go around the sun.

 

Part 1, Part 2