Reply To: Science and Astronomy in the Torah

In The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928) by Hans Reichenbach, a disciple of Einstein (at the University of Berlin, where Einstein first taught relativity), he demonstrates that all the following concepts are clearly shown possible from a scientific point of view:

1. The earth stands still and the sun revolves around it,

2. The sun stands still and the earth revolves around it,

3. Both are revolving around a certain point.

There is no way to prove which of the above is correct or preferable.

In the second century BCE, Ptolemy perfected Aristotle’s construction of how the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth in circular orbits with additional rotation around certain points on these orbits. About 1600 years later, Nicholas Copernicus made a revolution in astronomy by describing the Earth as going around the sun. A little later, Johannes Kepler described the orbits as elliptical, and by a century after that, Isaac Newton had reinforced this picture with his law of gravitation. In the 20th Century, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity eliminated the idea of absolute space and absolute movement.