What's happening to the creationist "Dr" Sungenis?

I'm wondering what's going on these days with those creationists who believe that the universe turns around them. They are called geocentrists and it seems that one of their chieftains is "Dr" Robert Sungenis. I have no idea what his motives are (other than sheer idiocy) to claim that the Earth is still. I became aware of this species last year, when I said "damn! I missed the conference" and then posted about them here, here and here.I was fortunate enough to attract the attention of "Dr" Sungenis who kindly wrote to me:

Takis, Robert Sungenis here. Here's a good way to prove your point: since you are a "professor of science," give us just one proof of heliocentrism, and we'll go away. Promise. Make sure the proof is one that can hold up under scrutiny, because we are going to run it through scientific rigor to make sure you're right and then post it on your blog. By the way, the earth is round. Perhaps you can start your proof from there. Looking forward to hearing from you.

 When I pointed out to him that his label "Dr", well, is not quite what it says,

I took a look at your credentials here and here. You tried to study in accredited institutions but you were rejected. You then found a non-accredited institution, Calamus Extension College, which offers degrees (by correspondence) on such crackpottery subjects as Holistic Studies, Homeopathy, Contemporary Spirituality, Regression and Reincarnation Studies (!!!), Parapsychology, Metaphysics, Hypnotherapy, Healing Studies, Transpersonal Psychology (including reincarnation, psychosynthesis and spirit release), Esoteric Studies, and Consciousness Studies, among others. Every possible bogus subject is mentioned. I have never seen a place offering so much junk altogether. You got your PhD from this institution in 2006 on geocentrism. Your credentials are not just zero, but negative: anyone who comes in contact with subjects such as the ones mentioned above is probably brain-damaged. Despite the very likely fact that you do not know elementary algebra, you have the guts to speak about Relativity in relation to your theological claims. How can anyone understand, not relativity, but even elementary Euclidean geometry, with a degree from Calamus Extension College? Impossible!

he stopped talking to him. Imagine, a degree from Calamus Extension College who is used as evidence of one's ability to support elementary Newtonian mechanics concepts. As I said, impossible. Show me one person from Calamus Extenstion College who can solve a first order linear differential equation in one dimension, and I'd be really surprised.

Yesterday, I watched a little video from youtube, where Sungenis and another religious guy attack one another because they are both Christian, but each claims that the other person is not the right kind of Christian. At some point, the other guy tells Sungenis "you believe whatever the Catholic church tells you". "Yeah", replies Sungenis, "because that is the authority". From the whole dialog, it appears that Sungenis just bows to whatever the Catholic church tells him, because, in his words, it is an established authority for 2000 years. He says that he"has the "right pedigree" [sic] (by being a member of an authority organization), whereas the other Christian does not (because he only reads the bible).

Finally, I'd like to point out the interesting review of a talk that Sungenis gave. The review is by Flora, but I first saw on Gem Newman's Winnipeg Skeptics page,

Galileo was wrong. Vive la Bible! [Part II]

Several months ago, I posted something cynical about a conference organised by geocentrist creationists. It is unbelievable that such idiots can exist. Religion and irrational thought produces all kinds of vegetables. Unfortunately.

The particular movement is headed by a certain Robert Sungenis, who believes that

physics and the Bible prove that the sun and all the planets orbit the Earth and that the Earth does not rotate. In support of his beliefs, Sungenis published the book Galileo Was Wrong in the hope that people will "give Scripture its due place and show that science is not all it's cracked up to be."

This guy lives in the US where he can find lots of similarly-minded deluded morons who "believe" that the earth is still and the centre of the Universe. There are other idiots who believe that the earth is a few thousand years old. Others, believe that the earth is flat. Others believe that the people who wrote the Quran were engaged in embryology. The amount of stupidity in this world is unbounded.

I was reminded of this nonsense this morning, thanks to James B. Phillips who posted the following in my blog:

James said...

Childish name calling is the typical caliber of those who offer their non-substantive denigrations of geocentrism. Often they mock religion in general and Christianity in particular -- the very same people who make a god of and place their materialistic blind faith in science which has a history of making countless errors.

Most moderns who reject geocentrism do so out of an ignornance of the true science involved and or because they are philosophically pre-disposed to refuse to accept the possibility of a God who not only has placed our earth at the center of the universe, but who actually has the entire matererial universe go around that heavaenly body which Jesus Christ lived on in the flesh some 2000 years ago.

See www.galileowaswrong.com and galileowaswrong.blogspot.com.

James B. Phillips 

The reason that the world is full of problems is because there are uneducated, deluded, irrational individuals like the aforementioned individuals. They pose a threat to civilisation itself because they can easily attract supporters who are ready to believe anything irrational as a substitute for possible real problems. People use irrational behaviour as a drug. And these people are as dangerous as drug dealers. Perhaps more so.

Making fun of geocentrists (and flat-earthers)

I admit it I find it amusing to be making fun of "scientists" who are trying to prove stupid things. What is extremely interesting is to see the responses of them and their followers. My favourite crackpots are the self-proclaimed geocentrists. Their head is someone called Robert Sungenis who paid some money to a place called Calamus Extension College offering degrees (by correspondence) on Holistic Studies, Homeopathy, Contemporary Spirituality, Regression and Reincarnation Studies, etc.,  and obtained a PhD in geocentrism!

Armoured with the panoply of such advanced studies, he started a mission: to prove that the Earth does not rotate and that it is fixed at the centre of the Universe!

He has even written a "scientific" book titled Galileo Was Wrong described in this way:

Galileo Was Wrong is a detailed and comprehensive treatise that demonstrates from the scientific evidence that heliocentrism (the concept that the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun) is an unproven scientific theory; and that geocentrism (the view that the Earth is in the center of the universe and does not move by either rotation or revolution) is not only supported by the scientific evidence but is admitted to be a logical and viable cosmology by many of the world's top scientists, including Albert Einstein, Ernst Mach, Edwin Hubble, Fred Hoyle and many more.

I admit that I secretly enjoy seeing the reaction of those lunatics. I wrote about them before, and did manage to attract the attention of Sungenis himself. But when I pointed out his qualifications he kept silence. I, too, would be ashamed to be associated with Calamus Extension College.

Map of the Square and Stationary Earth, by Orlando Ferguson (1893)

There used to be many people believing that the Earth is flat (i.e. approximable by a manifold with zero curvature). I quote from wikipedia on their beliefs at the beginning of 20th c.:

Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who in 1906 took over the Christian Catholic Church, a Pentecostal sect that established a utopian community at Zion, Illinois, preached flat Earth doctrine from 1915 onwards and used a photograph of a twelve mile stretch of the shoreline at Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin taken three feet above the waterline to prove his point. When the airship Italia disappeared on an expedition to the North Pole in 1928 he warned the world's press that it had sailed over the edge of the world. He offered a $5,000 award for proving the Earth is not flat, under his own conditions. Teaching a globular Earth was banned in the Zion schools and the message was transmitted on his WCBD radio station.

Unfortunately, they have been in rapid decline ever since.  They established a Flat Earth Society in 1956 and made some hilarious remarks:

The idea of a spinning globe is only a conspiracy of error that Moses, Columbus, and FDR all fought… If it is a sphere, the surface of a large body of water must be curved. The Johnsons have checked the surfaces of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea without detecting any curvature.

Nowadays, there is a certain Daniel Shenton who proclaims that nobody has proved that the world is not flat:

I haven't taken this position just to be difficult. To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of proof has been met yet.

Flat Earth: A 1922 illustration from the Swedish and Norwegian magazine Allers Familj-Journal.

Silence from creationists

In this older post, and its followup, I received several insteresting responses from creationists like Robert Sungenis and his supporters. The particular brand of creationists told me that they do not believe that the Earth is flat, but they believe it doesn't move and that it is the center of the Universe. They are called geocentrists.

I mentioned here that their beliefs are based on biblical passages.
For a complete (?) list of biblical passages upon which these fellows base their beiefs see here.

Talk origins has posted a very comprehensive list of all creationistic claims. It is huge, but it is interesting to take a look to see what kind of absurd things people will come up with if they can't think independently. Here are some notable claims. See the above link for more:

Bible says the sun goes around the earth.
Relativity shows geocentrism is true.
The universe is 6,000-10,000 years old.
The earth is 6,000-10,000 years old.
Noah's ark has been found.
Intelligent design theory is scientific.
Mankind has existed essentially unchanged for billions of years.
Design requires a designer.
Complex organs couldn't have evolved.
Evolution does not explain language ability.
Humans have stopped evolving.
The second law of thermodynamics prohibits evolution.

Galileo was wrong. Vive la Bible!

Damn! I missed the conference. It took place on 6 November 2010. Just a couple of weeks before my visit to the U.S. Otherwise I would have gone to learn the truth: the Earth is at the center of the Universe, as proven by scientific experiments (e.g., reading the Bible carefully in ancient Hebrew).

http://galileowaswrong.com/galileowaswrong/

According to Dr. Robert Sungenis,

Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.

The consequences are amazing. One of them is, surely, that aliens will reach us soon, since we are the center of the Universe and they surely are looking for it too.