|
EDITORIAL Another
year has come and gone, and another volume begins. This January 11 marked the fortieth anniversary of Walter van der
Kamp’s first work, The Heart of the Matter which, although it bore a
copyright of 1967, was not finished until that day in 1968, as attested to by
the signature on his “Foreword.”
Walter’s booklet marked the start of the modern geocentric movement, the
like of which has not been seen since Tycho Brahe’s work in the last quarter of
the sixteenth century. Between Brahe and
Walter’s seminal booklet, geocentrism’s apologists were rife with scientific
absurdities such as the flat earth and the small universe. Typically, they insisted that the sun was
less than a thousand miles above the earth.
It was totally beyond their ken to realize that at 1000 miles high, on
the first day of summer, the entire polar region north of Spitzbergen, an
island north of Russia, would still be in perpetual darkness and New Zealand’s
night would last about a month. This
sounds as absurd now as it did back in the 1600s or 1830. January 26 marked both the tenth anniversary
of Walter’s death, and my 33rd spiritual birthday. With
the observation of Walter’s death, we also lament the passing of another
pioneer. Dr. Bolton Davidheiser, who
passed away last August. One of the
pioneers of the modern Creationist movement, Dr. Davidheiser at long last
became a geocentrist. I shall miss his
correspondence and his well thought-out questions. Over the years he contributed to the geocentric cause by, for
instance, his investigation into the NASA missing day story. Dr. Davidheiser exposed the story for the
fiction it is. In this issue we present
a short article that Dr. Davidheiser wrote on the necessity of creationism to
faith in the Scripture. In
this issue, we conclude the series of articles on the Star of Bethlehem. Although we covered the star in the previous
issues, it still contributes to this issue’s attempt to date the birth of
Jesus. In researching this topic I was
amazed at the overwhelming evidence that exists for the birth of Christ
occurring in 2 B.C. I discovered that
many of the problems attributed to the 2 B.C. date are actually not problems
for it but for the 5 B.C. or earlier date.
People who heard of the problems simply presumed that they applied to
the 2 B.C. date, too. Using
the Internet, I found that many more resources are now available than were
available the last time I wrote about the Star of Bethlehem ten years ago. My first article, written in 1980, used
papers and books that referenced original materials in other languages. Now, many of these are posted on the
World-Wide Web. We
close with “Panorama.” We start with
some material pertaining to the second article of the series on time. The linguistic aspect of a theory about time
must reflect how we perceive and think.
In the course of the “Panorama” piece, we look at how people think and
how they process the data and information they receive from their senses. In the course of considering that, I trace
the path of thought that led to the discovery of the firmament. That
note is followed by one on the axis of evil.
The axis of evil is a preferred direction in space, a direction that
seems to draw the galaxies around us into it as if it were the vortex of a drain. It is considered evil for that reason and
for its violation of the cosmic principle; that every place in the universe
should appear as if it is in the center of the universe. The axis of evil is so vast that it can
serve as a landmark to establish one’s place anywhere in the universe. It is the cosmological principle that is
invoked against geocentricity, and it is also the foundation of the General
Theory of Relativity. Finally,
we present a note that shows that nearby objects are not necessarily more
advanced in age than very distant objects.
Stellar and galactic evolutionary theories require that the further away
one looks from earth, the younger, less evolved the galaxies should appear. Basically, this means that more distant
objects should average bluer in color than nearby galaxies once their color is
corrected for their redshift. The
theory contradicts the evidence enough that astronomers cannot use the evidence
in support of the evolutionary theories.
This presents evidence for both a recent creation and for a geocentric
cosmos. **************************** Quotable
Quote In the Ptolemaic theory the apparent motion of the planet on the celestial sphere was taken as the planet’s real motion. Copernicus’ great contribution lay in pointing out that one can explain this observed motion by means of a heliocentric theory in which the planets revolve around the sun. Although Copernicus introduced the heliocentric theory of the solar system, he still found it necessary to introduce about 40 epicycles to account for the observations, but he considered this a great improvement since Ptolemaic theory contained more than 240 such epicycles. —Motz & Duveen, 1966 Essentials of Astronomy, p. 135 The truth of a matter is not determined by how many people believe it. —Anonymous |