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Protecting Faith from Pseudoscience: A Review of The Principle

by Guest Contributor | Oct 21, 2014 | The Faith | 13 comments
Protecting Faith from Pseudoscience: A Review of The Principle

Camille M. Carlisle is the science editor at Sky & Telescope magazine.

I was recently asked to review a new movie called The Principle, being released this month. The film, produced by Catholic theologian Robert Sungenis, uses science to raise the specter of geocentrism — the theory that Earth is at the physical center of the universe. With breathtaking cinematography and intellectual one-two punches, it paints a compelling argument that geocentrism might be right and the world’s scientists are willfully blind to the evidence.

Compelling, that is, if you know nothing about astrophysics.

If you do, you’ll soon see that the movie is a combination of science, bogus science, and conspiracy theory, tied up in a Gordian knot that would take much more than a blog to fully unravel.

The reason I’m writing about it in a Catholic blog is this: the movie has the potential to erode the scientific literacy of believers and convince nonbelievers that science and Christianity don’t mix. No doubt the movie’s creators are well intentioned. But good intentions make hell-bound paving stones. This isn’t me, a science journalist, merely ranting about the movie’s deplorable lack of fact-checking. This is me, a Catholic, worried about the error it will seed in the minds of God’s little ones.

Because in watching the movie and having a dozen pages of e-mail back-and-forth with the producer and publicist, one thing became clear: the movie’s creators do not understand physics.

Let’s take their argument about center of mass as an example. The movie correctly says that, according to Newtonian gravity, bodies in the solar system orbit around their common center of mass. What that means is that, technically speaking, Earth and the planets don’t orbit the Sun; rather, the Sun and planets orbit their common center of mass.

But the movie then tries to make the argument that, if Earth sits at the universe’s center of mass, then it wouldn’t move and everything — Sun, stars, our Milky Way galaxy, the cosmic web of galaxies and galaxy clusters we see in the universe — would rotate around that fixed point. In other words, Earth is stationary in a giant, rotating celestial sphere.

However, gravitationally, that just doesn’t work. First of all, the Sun has 99% of the solar system’s mass, and so the center of mass for our planetary system lies inside the Sun. Second, there’s no gravitational reason that Earth would sit still where it is. For example, Earth can’t be as close as it is to the Sun and not feel our star’s gravitational influence. Earth is made of matter: it has mass. It’s also a mere 93 million miles from the Sun — astronomically speaking, right on top of it. And the Sun is roughly 300,000 times more massive than Earth. Therefore, even if Earth were at the universe’s center, our planet would still not evade the Sun’s pull. Why? Because the closer two objects are to each other, the stronger the gravitational pull is. And Earth is just too close to the Sun.

In addition, decades of velocity measurements, radio observations, and many other lines of evidence show that our solar system sits in the outer-ish part of a spiral galaxy that’s rotating around a center that isn’t Earth. Observations also show that our galaxy is in a group of galaxies, and that this Local Group is on the outer edge of a giant supercluster. Geocentrism simply doesn’t match the empirical evidence. Nor is there any coherent theory of gravity that can both explain all our observations and put Earth at the universe’s physical center.

There are many other examples in the movie like this one. One that might catch you off guard is the work by astronomer John Hartnett, whose analysis of cosmic structure seems to reveal concentric spheres centered on us. However, as astronomer Tom Bridgman explains in his several blogs on this subject, this is a flaw in Hartnett’s analysis. (Bridgman’s blogs are quite technical — the man really knows his analytic techniques! — but if you want a hard science analysis I recommend reading his blogs on Hartnett’s work and on The Principle.)

The movie also argues against what it calls “patches,” things such as dark matter and dark energy that, it accuses, astrophysicists invoke to try to “save” their theories. But this is a shortsighted argument: it’s equivalent to saying that, since we don’t know everything about the universe, we don’t know anything. Yet however much distaste you might have for dark energy, something is making the universe’s expansion speed up. “Dark energy” is the filler word for that something, until we figure it out.

The Principle’s creators really seem to have it in for Einstein. This is a common problem for those not trained in modern physics. Many think that Einstein’s theory of gravity (colloquially called general relativity, or just GR) is esoteric nonsense. But if you’ve ever used GPS, you’ve used GR. According to GR, Earth creates a gravitational well in the fabric of spacetime. Because of that, time runs slightly slower on Earth than it does for the GPS satellites in orbit. (The delay is about 38 microseconds per day.) In order to use GPS, we have to account for relativistic effects. A world without GR is a world without Google Maps.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

But my biggest complaint is the movie’s underlying philosophical argument. The movie claims that moving Earth from the physical center of everything implies that “man means nothing,” that if the universe doesn’t revolve around Earth, we aren’t special.

This dichotomy is a materialist lie. As Stephen Barr brilliantly lays out in his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, we need to separate scientific results from the philosophy that uses them to make its case.

Too many people buy into the mantra that science disproves faith. Wrong. Materialism uses science to argue that faith isn’t true. We can just as easily do the opposite. (Read Barr’s book for more info.) The movie quotes prominent scientists such as Lawrence Krauss and the deceased Carl Sagan to set up this geocentrism-or-insignificance choice, but both of these men are infamous militant atheists. Of course they’re going to interpret scientific results as proving we aren’t special.

The sad thing is, The Principle buys into this dichotomy, too. The question you should ask yourself is, Why? Why does not being in the middle of everything mean we’re not special? Who said the two have to go together?

In fact, salvation history suggests the opposite is true: God picks the least and the lowly. The Jews were a tiny little people among great peoples: “It was not because you are more numerous than all the peoples that the LORD set his heart on you and chose you; for you are really the smallest of all peoples. It was because the LORD loved you and because of his fidelity to the oath he had sworn to your ancestors” (Dt 7: 7-8). Jesus Himself was from a backwater town in Israel. Heck, He picked fishermen as apostles. And think of the many saints who were not at the center of anything — the children of Fatima come to mind — yet He chose them. So why on Earth should we expect our planet to be the physical center of the cosmos? Is it not more amazing that we aren’t? Doesn’t it speak to God’s providence and love and tenderness, and the fact that He’s God and we aren’t?

Noted cosmologist Max Tegmark raises a useful point in the movie when he says, “We had this arrogance, and we got it knocked out of us. And we realized that we’re not the center of everything” — except we haven’t had it knocked out of us. Because if we had, we wouldn’t sin. Sin is (spiritually) putting ourselves at the center. That the weight of scientific evidence suggests Earth is not at the physical center of the solar system, the galaxy, or the local supercluster of galaxies doesn’t tell us anything theologically — ‘cause hey, it’s only physics, and physics only deals with physical reality, not metaphysics. But it wouldn’t hurt us to meditate on the point for a while.
http://truthandcharity.net/protectin...the-principle/