I didn’t make it to the First Annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism, held in South Bend, Indiana on the November 6 weekend. I was interested, and badgered some editors to expense the trip, but no one thought it worth their funds. Nor have I read the 1,048-page, two-volume book Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right by R. A. Sungenis and R. J. Bennett, published in 2007. (“Your world will be rocked,” promises the promotional material, somewhat missing the point of geocentrism.)
If you do any science writing you get on the mailing lists for this kind of thing. It’s amazing how many people see it as their life’s mission to disabuse us of some scientific theory or other. Creationists, who dispute the foundations of modern biology, are only the best-known of these dissenters. Publish a science book or write a few articles and you will soon find your mailbox clogged with letters and pamphlets clamoring to set you straight on the real truth about the natural world and the sinister conspiracies that seek to keep us deluded.
Though neither a geocentrist nor a creationist, I confess to a sneaking sympathy for these contrarians. I fancy that in some small way they help to keep science honest. What, after all, do we know? Outside the narrow realm of what the philosopher J. L. Austin called “medium-sized dry goods”—the kinds of phenomena whose size and duration are on the scales our senses evolved to cope with—we are in a
