In the 4th century BC, two influential Greek philosophers, Plato and his student Aristotle, produced the geocentric model.

Plato and Aristotle's combined both Anaximander and Pythagoras theories. 

World map according to Claudius Ptolomy:

Claudius Ptolemy presented his astronomical models in convenient tables, which could be used to compute the future or past position of the planets. This geocentric model served as the basis for astrological and astronomical charts for over 1500 years.

Ptolemy wrote in ancient Greek and can be shown to have utilized Babylonian astronomical data.

Nikolaus Kopernikus.

Copernicus died soon after publishing his findings, so there wasn’t a target for disagreeing political rulers to shoot at.  Assuming Copernicus had no connection to Aristarchus, he was the first to make this observation – which sparked a life and death threat to the powerful of that day.

That didn't stop thinking humans from using reason to consider what he wrote.

Those who have eyes to see - look.

Galileo Galilei witnessed that the Earth was not the center of everything... and paid for it for the rest of his life.

More to the point, he witnessed that Jupiter’s moons rotated around Jupiter... or more importantly still - that Jupiter's moons didn't rotate around the Earth.

Remember 200 years before Gallileo, Dante Alighieri had named heaven’s 18th through 20th rings to be Jupier’s, and that that was (commonly) readily accepted. 

LITERAL VS. FIGURATIVE CONFUSION:

Psalm 93:1 and 1 Chronicles 16:30 clearly read, “The world also is established. It can’t be moved.”, and Psalm 104:5 reads that, “the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.”, and with a grand finale of Ecclesiastes 1:5 stating that, “And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place.”  All of these have a clear and ironclad placement of our planet at the center of creation (which was still flat - in the standard assumption).

The church insisted that these moons followed complex rotation around that earth… that made them look like they rotated around Jupiter.

Enter the man with the first telescope strong enough to view planets and moons.

His observations did not line up with what those inside the church (with power) had declared to be God’s official position. 

His reward for this observation and appreciation of the wonders of creation's mysteries... was public slander, imprisonment, followed by house arrest for the rest of his life, because he wouldn’t lie about the truth he had observed.

He knew what he saw, and all the power of this world couldn’t change the fact that,

“and yet it moves”.

---

Everything he had written was banned, as well as anything he may write for the rest of his life. (Talk about a writer's block 🤐) Yet; we now protect a monument that holds Galileo’s detached middle finger.

Fitting.

The difficulty with forcing a choice between fact and scripture is that all answers deceive.

The answer is found in the Garden of Eden story. The enemy assured us, "you will not surely die...", and for those only intersted in the physical life... he was right. They didn't immediately die, but the broken world that followed highlights the figurative vs. literal definition of the word, "die". 

For those of us who have eyes; listen.

For those of us who have ears; hear.

Issac Newton

A foundational block in our scientific revolution was written by Sir Issac Newton. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) was first published in 1687, and laid the foundations of classical mechanics. This became the standard text for human's best understanding of how our world functions.

In a later memoir, Newton wrote:

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27)

The voyage began on 27 December 1831; it lasted almost five years. On the geologically new Galápagos Islands, Darwin looked for evidence attaching wildlife to an older "centre of creation", and found mockingbirds allied to those in Chile but differing from island to island.

This trip was the knowledge source of the development of the theory that all species of life have descended (over time) from common ancestors. 

Charles Darwin

Darwin's book was only partly written when, on 18 June 1858, he received a paper from Wallace describing natural selection. There was little immediate attention to this announcement of the theory; the president of the Linnean Society remarked in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any revolutionary discoveries. 

At the end of the book he concluded that:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet 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."

 

Summary of Darwin's theory:

Darwin's theory of evolution is based on key facts and the inferences drawn from them, which biologist Ernst Mayr summarised as follows:

• Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce, the population would grow (fact).
• Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size (fact).
• Resources such as food are limited and are relatively stable over time (fact).
• A struggle for survival ensues (inference).
• Individuals in a population vary significantly from one another (fact).
• Much of this variation is heritable (fact).
• Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce; individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce and leave their heritable traits to future generations, which produces the process of natural selection (fact).
• This slowly effected process results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time to form new species (inference).

Ball, P. (2011). Shipping timetables debunk Darwin plagiarism accusations: Evidence challenges claims that Charles Darwin stole ideas from Alfred Russel Wallace. Nature. online Archived 22 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine

Browne 2002, pp. 40–42, 48–49

Darwin 1859, p. 492

Albert Einstein

Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led him to develop his special theory of relativity during his time at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern (1902–1909).

In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power. Because of his Jewish background, Einstein did not return to Germany.

On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and recommending that the US begin similar research. Einstein, a pacifist, said he had never considered the use of what he studied scientifically being war machinery.

How could this be?

We know today that the earth is not the center of the universe, or even our solar system. We have pictures to prove it. And yet... God is still not scared. It's like he knew it all along. I AM is not a slave to our rules, or surprised by our discoveries. I guess that is what makes him holy, and why we killed him.

Today; many Christians demand that light and dark separated in a 24 hour timescale (as well as everything else in the other 1st creation days), even though day and night had not been separated until the fourth day of creation. 

I understand it's scary

(especially when your business and power are hinged on this "us" vs. "them" expertise)

However; our father is patient with our confusion. Like Copernicus offered (the first to present that the Earth might not be the center of everything), maybe there are parts of the Bible meant to be understood figuratively... and we only thought they were literal? 

The real rub is that in this fight, we make an idol out of the Bible.

Like the sticks with serpents on them made by Moses, we've taken a gift of God, and turned it into something we can control and monetize.

Our lack of faith in thinking that God is not beyond our knowledge and control has lead us to consider it is an act of faith to choose between math and God (effectively opposing Truth). 

The spirit of Truth is the identity Jesus gave to the Holy Spirit during his last teaching before death. I-AM could have made everything develop in a unknowable process, but he didn't.

We are on the side of Truth - or we're not on Christ's side.