declaring that theorists from Copernicus and Galileo to Einstein and Hawking were wrong about celestial physics. Though much of it was difficult for mathematical mortals to follow, the presenters’ gambit was clear enough: Can anyone really prove the earth isn’t sitting still? That’s tougher than it sounds: Even though astrophysicists tell us that every body in the universe is in motion, it will always appear that the thing you’re on is standing still relative to everything else.
“If we’re saying that the earth is in the center of the universe and it’s not moving, that means Someone, with a capital S, put it there,” said the conference’s principal speaker and emcee, Robert Sungenis, founder of Catholic Apologetics International….
Some of the South Bend presenters have taken their certainty about what they see as literal biblical truth to hateful extremes far more consequential than dismissing Galileo: Sungenis has published a number of venomously anti-Semitic screeds that drew official church condemnation and have rendered him unwelcome in most mainstream Catholic circles.
E. Michael Jones, who also was at the gathering, has used his South Bend-based magazine Culture Wars to viciously denounce the “Jewish world view” and has expressed enthusiasm for many core Nazi ideas about Jews (a sampling of his magazine’s cover stories: “Judaizing: Then and Now,” “The Judaism of Hitler” and “Shylock Comes to Notre Dame”). Martin G. Selbrede, who also spoke, is vice-president of the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading think tank of the Bible-literalist Christian Reconstruction theology; the foundation has never renounced the racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views of its late founder, R. J. Rushdoony….
The best moments of the gathering came when 15 or so bright college students finally got to confront the purported experts at the end of the long day. The panel struggled with and occasionally mocked their questions and host Sungenis at times seemed to bristle at the students’ audacity.
If such an attitude is typical of all like-minded theorists, it’s easy to scientifically postulate that geocentrism is a lot of solar hot air.1
The summary of the seminar also captures the main features of the modern geocentrist movement. They’re a tiny group of extreme Catholics (sometimes called traditionalist Catholics) who reject most of the changes in their Church in the past few decades, including the pope’s apologies to Galileo and acceptance of modern science. As the article also states, they fall back to an even earlier phase of Church history, when antisemitism and persecution of Jews was one of their main habits (many Jews were tortured and executed by the same Inquisition that tried Galileo).
Their leader is a man named Robert Sungenis, who got a bachelor’s degree in religion from George Washington University and a master’s degree in theology from Westminster Theological Seminary. He calls himself “Dr.” Sungenis because he got a “doctorate” from an unaccredited online diploma mill that calls itself “Calamus International University,” incorporated in the Republic of Vanuatu. He began in a Catholic family, then converted to Protestantism as a young man, and then swung back to the extreme form of Catholicism in his later years. Sungenis attributes his conversion to geocentrism to reading the book Geocentricity by the creationist Gerardus Bouw in 2002. (Ironically, most of the modern creationists who are literalist about every other part of the Bible reject geocentrism.)
By 2006, he had become a major advocate of geocentrism; had self-published (with Robert Bennett) a three-volume book, Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right; and was running a website, www.galileowaswrong.com.2 The site is full of slick video clips, blog posts, and a forum promoting their ideas. One video audaciously claims that geocentrism is “the coming scientific revolution.” Just like creationist websites, it is full of attacks on scientists and scientific ideas, wild claims with only minimal fact-checking from anyone outside their community, and a distinct sense of paranoia that the entire world is against them because they are on to the truth.
Sungenis’s organization has done their share of stunts to please their following and thumb their nose at the rest of the world. In 2006, they offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could prove that the earth moves around the sun. Like most such contests by pseudoscientists, the conditions of the award are so restrictive that no one can satisfy them, and those who have successfully demonstrated heliocentrism have been rebuffed on one technicality or another.3
Their most outrageous stunt was a 2014 ambush film called The Principle. Using a different tentative film title and concealing their true motivations, Sungenis and executive producer Rick DeLano obtained interviews with numerous distinguished scientists, including Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Max Tegmark, Julian Barbour, and George F. R. Ellis, and they paid actress Kate Mulgrew (best known for her appearances on Star Trek: Voyager) to narrate it. They asked the right kinds of questions to make these scientists think that it was a genuine, honest documentary, let their guards down, and say things that could be edited to emphasize the uncertainty of science. These included questions about controversial topics like dark matter and multiverses as well as segments edited to sound like the scientists support geocentrism.
The physicists who were ambushed responded in no uncertain terms, according to Colin Lecher in an article in Popular Science:
Along with Krauss, at least two of the mainstream scientists who appear in the film aren’t so happy about it. Max Tegmark, a brilliant MIT cosmologist and science communicator, is spoken of admiringly by DeLano in the radio show. When I asked about his appearance in the film, Tegmark emailed: “They cleverly tricked a whole bunch of us scientists into thinking that they were independent filmmakers doing an ordinary cosmology documentary, without mentioning anything about their hidden agenda or that people like Sungenis were involved.” Ditto for South African mathematician and cosmologist George Ellis, a well-respected professor at the University of Cape Town who wrote The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking. “I was interviewed for it but they did not disclose this agenda, which of course is nonsense,” he wrote me. “I don’t think it’s worth responding to—it just gives them publicity. To ignore is the best policy. But for the record, I totally disavow that silly agenda.”4
This film’s deceptive tactics and the ambush interviews mirror the similar efforts of the “intelligent design” creationists in their 2008 film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Hosted by the obscure character actor and right-wing celebrity Ben Stein, it ambushed a number of distinguished scientists and skeptics (including my friends Michael Shermer, head of the Skeptic Society, and Eugenie Scott, then director of the National Center for Science Education) with questions that sounded odd to them at the time. Their responses were then edited to sound like there was a giant conspiracy to suppress intelligent-design creationism from discussion in the public arena. Expelled opened to universal bad reviews (except in the evangelical circles, where it was required viewing) and made so little money that eventually its production company went bankrupt in 2011. But it created a lot of fuss before it flopped, which was the whole point.
The same might be said of The Principle. It screened in only a few theaters starting on October 24, 2014, and as of 2015, it had grossed a measly $89,543, much less than it cost to make.5 But the film was expected to lose money; it had a different goal. As Colin Lecher explained,
Despite its absurdity, the mere fact that DeLano, Sungenis, and the rest of their crew were able to fund and execute a slickly produced film, and to cajole famous physicists to sit and chat for it, makes the geocentrist fringe startlingly real: people who believe in these ideas not only exist, but have the wherewithal to make a movie. There’s nothing simple about producing a film, much less one with some of the most technically-minded people on the planet. In DeLano’s case, he is (or at least was) apparently steadily employed, eventually on chummy terms with a respected production company, and seems intimately familiar with science, even though his interpretations of it are a minority view, to put
