Check this guy out, LMAO. I couldn't even put together the right adjectives to describe just how stupid what I just watched was, apparently the Earth is not rotating or has any motion in space around the sun. I figured you guys might get a kick out of it.
Well really, it's possible to conceive of a frame of reference where the earth is stationary. It just makes the math involved in the physics really, really complicated. It also mucks up our "theory" about gravity a little bit.
I watched the first two minutes and laughed my ass off. I suppose that at some point the video tells us exactly what Bible verse says that the Earth isn't rotating. The most recent portions of the Bible were written prior to about 300 AD. They didn't even know that the Earth was round then, much less whether or not it rotated. But yeah, damn evil Satan-worshipping scientists.
There is no facepalm worthy of this idiocy. This is poor Biblical study, very poor. I doubt this lad has even heard the words Biblical Hermeneutics.
The most recent portions of the Bible were written prior to AD 100. It's also not a singular book. It's a collection of 73 books with varied authors and varied intents. As for the earth being round? Eratosthenes of Cyrene correctly calculated the circumference of the Earth in 240 BC with less than 2% error from the actual value. The ancients were far smarter than many give them credit for.
Indeed, our ancestors had some of the best minds of all time. And they managed to do all this without the technology we use all the time. In regards to the idiocy of this video, the Ptolemaic ideals this man believes were not held by the Church until 200 years after Christ when Claudius Ptolemy was able to predict the motion of the celestial bodies with greater accuracy than the existing theory of heliocentricity. The ancients already believed the sun was the center when Jesus and Paul walked the Earth. The church, like everyone, assumed then that geocentricity was correct and interpreted the Bible from the perspective it was correct. When Copernicus discovered the truth the Church's main objection was that he was unable to prove scientifically every point he made. Galileo finally firmed up Copernicus's ideas but made the mistake of mixing theology with his theory and challenging the power of the Church which angered the Church. If Galileo had better people skills and left his religious thoughts out the Church wouldn't have had much of an issue. Geocentricity is a disproven scientific theory, not a Biblical doctrine.
Many influential members of the Church were in favor of Galileo's astrophysical ideas. Copernicus was a faithful Catholic, it must not be forgotten. He was not persecuted for his scientific theories - and he pre-dated Galileo. And we didn't like Kepler, sure - but only because he was a Protestant. We were fine with his physics.
I'll get to the video after I cover comments in here. The big problem is that we can prove that we are not in an inertial reference frame, since we can, while staying on earth, detect the rotation. This could be done even if in a sealed room, as I'll get to a bit later. They knew the earth was round. It's really easy to prove, and Obi-Zahn covers this already, but the shape of the Earth is really simple. Anyone living near a coast could watch boats go off into the distance, and for the most part, there was also some understanding that the earth's shadow played a role in lunar eclipses. The idea that people (or at least anyone going back to the Greeks) thought the earth was flat is entirely made up. Heliocentricity was not the existing theory and was replaced by geocentricity. Geocentricity was the predominant view for the Greeks and Romans, but you can find individual Greeks who suggested that a heliocentric system was correct, they just couldn't prove it. And the Greek understanding of parallax meant that the one test the Greeks had for determining motion indicated that, as far as they could tell, the Earth wasn't moving. A heliocentric system only became remotely popular after Copernicus, it's just that he wasn't the first person to suggest it. And even he wasn't really right. When the Bible was being written, the view of the vast majority was that it was a geocentric system. 3:30 The video claims that as soon as something isn't in contact with the earth it loses all momentum. Vivec is right to mock this as stupid. Moronic helicopter demonstration - if anyone tried this with remotely any integrity, they'd drop a penny in a moving car. At 60 mph, as soon as you let go of the penny, it should stop moving forward and shoot out the back of the window as the car goes 60 mph through it. This person has zero idea what they're talking about, however. It's also worth pointing out, I feel, that if you want a demonstration that it's moving, the coriolis effect's ability to show up on things like sniper shots is rather easily shown, as that's a necessary correction for long range shots. Flight times... for some reason he thinks he's on to something with Quito to Kampala, but I can't find any airlines that fly between those two cities. To use two cities that actually have flights between them, Chicago and Rome are at nearly the same latitude. Chicago to Rome is a flight of either 9 hrs 5 min or 9.5 hours, depending on the route. The return flight is 10 hrs 40 min. So, shocker of shockers, he's wrong on multiple levels here. I'm goign to say this person also has the worst taste in music ever. It makes me wish for the death of the innocents. And at 16 minutes, the video stopped working. I consider this my luck. So as a final point, a Foucault pendulum proves the rotation anyway, so we're done here.
Assume the model helicopter is a point particle in vacuum.... OK, I couldn't stand to watch this for more than a few minutes, so I don't have much to contribute. Though I did do a bit of googling to figure out why this person claims the Bible calls the earth motionless and found these: 1 Chronicles 16:30: “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable.”Psalm 104:5: “Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken.” I'm assuming the people who penned those verses (a) had read and enjoyed Discworld, and (b) didn't live on any major fault lines.
My God... he's proven the Earth immobile using a model helicopter. Now, show me again the falacy of evolution through the use of an Easy-Bake oven.
Well the Earth is firm, immovable. We are set in our rotation of the sun, if we weren't firm and immovable in our rotataion we'd be hurtling through the blackness of space. The same with the next verse, but the Psalms are poetic as well. And there were already earthquakes in history when that was written, so the writer knew there were earthquakes, he's likely being poetic or saying the Earth isn't going to go fly off somewhere.
That's not really true, though. First of all, the very nature of both rotations and revolutions is motion, so to say that is an example of being immovable doesn't make any sense. You're massaging the definitions so much you've actually got something meaning it's opposite. Beyond which, things are fairly constantly causing the earth to deviate from that orbit and change that rotation, like the moon and Jupiter. And something big enough interacting the right way and the earth would totally end up hurtling off into space.
A set motion, we don't even feel it. So to someone in that time period the Earth would seem firm and unmoving. The Earth is firm and immovable in that we are not like an asteroid or comet that hurtles past us. We stay in our rotation, if we moved from our rotation we would either burn up or freeze, we are at just the right distance. And nothing has yet knocked us out of our orbit and sent us hurtling off into space, and I highly doubt it ever will. Not because it's not possible, it's completely possible, it just won't happen as I believe God will make sure we are firm and unmovable in our rotation.
