This is a long rant. Hope this is of interest to someone...
Question 22: Cosmology: A Circle or Sphere?
In a separate topic, I had started talking about issues related to reading the pamphlet "What the Bible Really Teaches", I had started off the discussion based on some observatins about its discussion of the destruction of Babylon. Even prior to the discussion of Babylon’s fate in “What the Bible Really Teaches”, there was already something in the narrative tone and rhetorical questions that had set my teeth on edge. On pages 20-21 it was posited:
“The Bible is scientifically accurate. It even contains information that was far ahead of its time …At at time when there were wrong ideas about the shape of the earth the Bible referred to it as a circle or sphere (Isaiah 40:22). The Bible said that the earth ‘hangs on nothing’ ( Job 26:7). Of course, the Bible is not a scientific textbook, but when it touches on scientific matters, it is accurate. [And in anticipation of any doubts:] Is this not what we would expect of a book from God?”
This exposition is by no means scientific, but quite the contrary. The supposed picture of the earth is based neither on reasoning or observation and inconsistent with the body of scientific writing employing such from the time of Ptolemy and his contemporaries to the present day, no matter whether they were right or wrong in their results. Isaiah 40:22 was probably not written by Isaiah at all, but an anonymous observer of pre-Cyrus Babylon a century and a half later. Since the NWT translates this as “there is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth the dwellers in which are like grasshoppers”, its translators obviously made a decision between “circle” and “sphere” and opted for the former. B ut when this is compared to the JPS TaNaKh, “It is He who is enthroned above the vault of the earth”, one can just as well argue that Isaiah is not speaking specifically about the earth, but the sky, “spread out like gauze , stretched like a tent.” And t his is hardly what science discovered two millennia later.
In the book of Joshua, beside battles associated with entities determined by archeologists to have been vacant for previous centuries (e.g., Jericho and Ai), in order to defeat the Amorites thoroughly (Joshua 9:12-14)” Joshua said,
‘Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and moon, you too, over the Vale of Aijalon.’ And the sun stood still, and the moon halted, until the people had taken vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of the Just? The sun stood still in the middle of the sky and delayed its setting for almost a whole day.”
Since we now are aware that the Earth rotates and the sun remains largely fixed in celestial space, was this event described correctly?
But on the other hand, as the Psalm 104:5 records in the JPS Hebrew-English TaNaKh:”He established the Earth on its foundation so that it will not totter”. Or more prosaically in the Hebrew Testament of the NWT: “He has founded the earth upon its established places; it will not be made to totter to time indefinite , or forever.” – many more words than the Hebrew - whether time indefinite and forever are the same, I will not venture there. In the New Jerusalem Bible Psalm 94:1-2 reads
Yahweh is king, robed in majesty, robed is Yahweh and girded with power.
The world is indeed set firm, it can never be shaken, your throne is set firm of old, from all eternity you exist.
Should we not understand that the Earth does not rotate, precess or nutate? Never did and never will? Or should we simply take our cue on astronomical definitions from theocrats five hundred years ago or today?
On February 19, 1616, the Inquisition asked a commission of theologians, known as qualifiers, about the propositions of the heliocentric view of the universe. On February 24 the Qualifiers delivered their unanimous report: the idea that the Sun is stationary is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture..."; while the Earth's movement "receives the same judgment in philosophy and ... in regard to theological truth it is at least erroneous in faith." At a meeting of the cardinals of the Inquisition on the following day, Pope Paul V instructed Bellarmine to deliver this result to Galileo, and to order him to abandon the Copernican opinions; should Galileo resist the decree, stronger action would be taken.
Reconciliation (1928) p. 14
…man sees that the earth occupies a place of great importance in God’s plan and purposes and that in his due time every creature in heaven and in earth will be brought into one grand harmonious whole or unity. To this effect the inspired witness of Jehovah wrote:
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“Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself: that in the dispensation of the fullness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him.”—Eph. 1: 9, 10.
The constellation of the seven stars forming the Pleiades, appears to be the crowning center around which the known systems of the planets revolve even as our sun’s planets obey the sun and travel in their respective orbits. It has been suggested, and with much weight, that one of the stars of that group is the dwelling-place of Jehovah and the place of the highest heavens; that it is the place to which the inspired writer referred when he said: “Hear thou from thy dwelling place, even from heaven” (2 Chron. 6:21); and that it is the place to which Job referred when under inspiration he wrote: “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?”—Job 38: 31.
The constellation of the Pleiades is a small one compared with others which scientific instruments disclose to the wondering eyes of man. But the greatness in size of other stars or planets is small when compared with the Pleiades in importance, because the Pleiades is the place of the eternal throne of God. For a like reason the various groups of stars, greater in size than the planet earth, must in the eyes of …
- Joseph Rutherford, President of the WatchTower and Bible Tract Society, Reconciliation
In 1953 the doctrine about Alcyone and the Pleiades was discarded:
Some[???] attribute striking qualities to these constellations or star groups and on the basis of such they then offer private interpretations of Job 38:31, 32 that amaze their hearers… when viewed scripturally they are completely without foundation. (The Watchtower 1953 November 15 p. 703)
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From my home library: Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, Volume III, Taurus (constellation) descriptive notes, p. 1880.
Studies of the proper motion [shift in position in celestial sphere over time] of the Pleiades led in 1846 to one of the most curious misinterpretations in the history of astronomy. J. H. von Maedler at the Observatory of Dorpat, finding that the members of the Pleiades showed no motion relative to one another, rashly concluded that the cluster and Alcyone in particular, represented the fixed center of the entire stellar system. The notion that Alcyone was the “central sun” of the universe gained some popularity, but became entirely obsolete within a few decades as actual knowledge concerning the structure of the galaxy became available.
A brief history of observation
The Pleiades are among those objects which are known since the earliest times. At least 6 member stars are visible to the naked eye, while under moderate conditions this number increases to 9, and under clear dark skies jumps up to more than a dozen. The cluster was first examined telescopically by Galileo, who recorded more than 40 member stars. It was an early subject for astronomical photography, being first photographed by Paul and Prosper Henry in 1885.
The cluster was the final entry, as M45, in an early modern astronomical catalogue by Charles Messier, 1771, Paris (Table of nebulae and star clusters, which have been discovered between the fixed stars over the horizon of Paris; observed at the Marine Observatory).
In 1846 Johann von Maedler of the Estonian Dorpat Observatory, an eminent lunar cartographer, had been measuring the motions of the various Pleiades stars. Finding that they showed no relative motion within the cluster, he concluded that they were at the centre of the Galaxy, and Alcyone was the star at the center of the known universe. For a brief period, until this erroneous argument was exposed, the Pleiades were the subject of intense public debate and much baseless speculation.
The Bible seems to show that God's throne in heaven is in what we call the north, very likely near the stars called the Pleiades (Job. 38:31).
-The Golden Age (later Awake), May 16, 1928 p. 540.
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I had thought this doctrine had been trashed with the passing away of Russell, but evidently Rutherford was still enticed by it. Rutherford’s words were composed in the midst of the 20 th century with the nature of stars better understood. Alcyone was a bright young star in a young cluster surrounded by dust, but non-descript at modest distance within our non-descript galaxy – in a universe that could be measured and observed by light’s radiating out from objects billions of light years away; from a creation moment now seen as 13.7 billion years ago. Nor is this cosmos static, for we can observe stars dying and in the midst of formation; even to the level of detail of forming planets. No introductory astronomy student – if he understood anything of Hubble, Einstein, Red Shift, Max Planck or Hawkings - would accept that the creator God resided in a court described by Job near a star several hundred light years away. The whole vision is cult whacko by now, yet it resided uncontested as Jehovah Witness doctrine until the 1950s.
There are errors in reasoning in both science and philosophy – or if you will - religion. But the notion that Russell and Rutherford latched onto was as suspect as the pyramid speculations that originated as well in the mid 19 th century. That Rutherford could believe and write to the effect that God lived by the star Alcyone shows that he was hopelessly out of touch with the astronomy and physics of his day. The notion was questionable eighty years before even when there were no notions of how to perform stellar Doppler measurements (Kirkhoff’s laws and Seicchi’s observations of line spectra were as yet unknown); no parallax measurements for stars of that distance were available; nor were other “candlesticks” of distance available such as variable star measurements. There were no notions of stellar heat sources, heat transfer and ages; no concept of where the center of the galaxy was or the fact that there were galaxies; only a rudimentary idea of what the speed of light implied about stellar and universal distances. No notion of quantum mechanics… But all of these concepts were bursting around Rutherford in the 1920s, making the physical model of the universe from which he drew his inference utterly absurd.
Among the successes of Johann Maedler’s astronomical career were detailed maps of the moon and Mars plus a body of celestial observations and models which were used by his successors. I see no evidence, however, that he claimed God lived at Alcyone. Responsibility for propagation of that BELIEF rests with Russell and Rutherford. Ignorant as they were of astronomy and physics they had no way to evaluate Maedler’s fundamental claim, other than to quote and INTERPRET Bible verses and then to claim their “results” authentic based on their Biblical extraction. The result is more like using the Bible as a drug to fan one’s passions or imaginative speculations.
It is strange to think that in the cavalcade of astronomical science between the time of Lagrange, Laplace and Fourier to the era of quantum mechanics and relativity in which worked and wrote Einstein, Schroedinger, Planck, Heisenberg, Hubble, Eddington and Chandrasekhar, after the discovery of the discrete and continuous spectra of stars and Doppler effects.... that of all the babies in the astronomical and astrophysical adoption crèche, Charles Taze Russell chose to adopt pyramidologist Charles Piazzi Smythe and with Joseph Rutherford chose joint adoptive custody of lunar cartographer and Johann Maedler. Certainly they would not adopt the Italian priest Seiichi who had done work on solar and stellar spectra, or Belgian cleric Lemaitre who while examining Einstein’s relativity work provided first physical arguments for the Big Bang - that would be too much of a concession to ecumenical thought. But at least this illustrates a more sophisticated debate within other areas of the Christian community. Judging by the contributions and visibility of people like Gassendi, the course had quickly altered after Galileo’s trial ;and in the mid 20 th century Pope Piux XII was sending Lemaitre messages of encouragement ( Lemaitre in reply recommended that he back off from any endorsement and let the process of science proceed as objectively as possible).
An initial issue with the 16 th century Copernican proposition was not the shape of the earth ( sphere or circle), nor had it been since the time of Ptolemaic Greek astronomers in Egypt observing solar elevation variations with latitude. It was a question of whether the Earth or the celestial sphere moved or not and whether the “vault of heaven” was like a tent pin-pricked with holes through which light radiated from perhaps an ethereal region beyond. Early review of Copernicus admitted to the simplicity of solar system motions with his new heliocentric perspective, but no one could identify any shift in parallax ( viewing angle) in any of the stars overall. It was a scandalous shortcoming that could only be reconciled if the stars were very, very distant and very, very bright. By the 1840s when Maedler made his observations of the Pleiades 400 light years distant, this had been well established. The closest stars in the course of six months shifted their line of sight, at most, an arc second – hence the measure of distance parsec: 206,264 times the distance from the earth to the sun or about 3.26 light years (180/ π x 3600). Maedler’s observations do not address parallax – and he certainly could not have attained a measure of about 100 th of an arc second. Finding the stars with near arc second parallax was over a century’s search for needles in a haystack. And since Maedler did his observing prior to the development of astronomical spectroscopy, it is doubtful whether he could have determined any Doppler or radial shift in his Pleiades studies.
Closer to home, had Rutherford or Russell had their fingers or noses to the wind, they might have heard of the work of Henry Norris Russell (with Ejnar Hertzsprung) and Henrietta Swann Leavitt who in those same years leading up to 1914 published respectively a system for scattergraph diagrams of stellar color and brightness and the identification of a class of variable stars (Cepheids) that helped map out the local depth of the universe. When Cepheids could be found at great brightness at the edge of parallax measurement and then with brightness (and same period) at the edge of distinct “detectability” in nebulous objects such as the Magellanic Cloud or the Andromeda Galaxy, the local cosmos now stretched out to hundreds of thousands and then millions of light year extent. In other words, light from objects in creation had set out on their journeys to earth in ages orders of magnitude earlier than what Taze Russell and Rutherford were raving about. Armed with comparisons of HR charts representing various clusters of stars in the sky, evidence would later come in about how these objects would sustain themselves for even longer periods. How they were born, how some died and some were still being formed.
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