Dave Armstrong's Blog, page 67

Robert Sungenis Opts for Personal Attack Because I Refuse to Wrangle With Him Over Geocentrism and a Supposedly 10,000-Year-Old, Non-Rotating Earth

[Hulton Archive/Getty Images ]
Astronaut James Irwin salutes in front of the landing module of Apollo 15 in August 1971.

Asked what he believed about the lunar landings, Robert Sungenis stated on my site: "I do not know whether they were real or fake."

[Robert Sungenis' words will be in blue]

I'm one of the few Catholic apologists who has always tried to stay out of all the continual controversies that seem to surround Bob Sungenis, whether regarding his beliefs about Jews or his eccentric views on cosmology (and also issues such as anthropomorphism and whether God can change and whether He has emotions, and so forth). I have courteously disagreed with him, but I haven't attacked his person. He himself confirmed this in a Q&A from his website in December 2004 (and I haven't acted any differently since then):

First of all, Dave, I didn't include you in the quote about the "darker side," because to my knowledge you haven't posted anything which makes slanderous accusations against geocentrists, least of all anything that makes someone who holds the view look like a derelict who walks around with an aluminum hat. . . . The same for Steve Ray. We've had our disagreements, but he has always been a gentlemen [sic]. . . . Let me close by saying this: My main disagreement with you and the aforementioned apologists is not the opposition to geocentrism. I understand why someone would have honest disagreements with it, since they simply don't have all the facts at their disposal. What I am against is the slander that issues forth from such opposition.

Sungenis' decision to attack me publicly at this juncture is yet another ugly instance of Catholic so-called "traditionalists" deciding to blast a fellow Catholic apologist like myself, who devotes his time defending Holy Mother Church. It's a factious spirit, and I only expose it in order to condemn the divisiveness and unethical nature of it: not to engage in more nonsense and energy-zapping, fruitless controversy. Enemies of the Church will already exploit and mock and make fun of this because they love to see Catholics disagree (fallaciously thinking that this proves something negative about the Church). That will probably occur no matter what I do, so I might as well make known my opinion that I utterly condemn this kind of worthless polemical and personal attack.

In our last go-around, at the urging of an associate of Bob's (Rick DeLano), I decided to remove some posts from my blog, dealing with some of this, so as not to get into it and cause further controversy. I was trying to show good will and charity to Bob, but apparently that doesn't count for much in his eyes, as he has now decided to publicly attack me. Thus I join the ranks of several Catholic apologists that he has chosen to publicly disparage (Mark Shea, Karl Keating, et al).

Previous to this post, the only thing about Bob I had on my site was a paper entitled, Exchanges With Robert Sungenis on Geocentrism and Perceived Personal Attacks. Bob had written:

It is plain from the way you phrased your objection that you were out to make me look like a nut. Many others have said the same, and with the same intent.

I went on to explain at great length (involving much tedium of little or no interest to anyone else) that this was not my opinion, and that I simply disagreed with Bob. He can believe whatever he likes about the earth and whether it rotates; how old it is, etc. Others will disagree with him as well, and this ought not be the cause for personal attacks or disparagement of someone's Catholicism. That is the line that ought not be crossed. I haven't questioned his Catholicism, and he shouldn't question my commitment to the magisterium of the Catholic Church. But alas, now he has done so.

Moreover, Sungenis wants to make a matter of infallibility a thing that is assuredly not (geocentrism). That's why he feels so strongly about the issue, because he believes it is the infallible teaching of the Church; therefore, that individual Catholics are required to accept the view, and that apologists should defend it alongside transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

The present "stink" is (far as I can tell) all a result of my decision not to engage him on the issue of geocentrism. It's not something I wish to devote any time to. I am accountable for how I spend my time under God (i.e., stewardship). It's my life and my abilities that I am trying to devote to what I feel is most important at any given time. That is between myself and God (and those I am directly accountable to, such as my publishers, The Coming Home Network [that I work for, part-time], etc.), not between myself and Bob Sungenis, or any other apologist or critic of mine, who wants to dictate to me how I ought to spend my time. But Bob doesn't buy that. Therefore, he wrote in the above go-around:

I take such comments seriously, and you shouldn't make them unless you intend to be serious about them, which means defending what you glibly criticize, instead of saying that I should talk to someone else if I want to argue about geocentrism.

I am under no obligation to debate at extreme length (which is what any debate with Bob involves) anything and everything I may make a passing comment about. If Bob Sungenis doesn't like that, he can lump it. I have referred people to other exchanges where this was done (particularly my friend Gary Hoge's replies to him on these matters -- Bob has stated that Gary was a complete gentleman in his replies). See:

Scientific Disproof of Geocentrism (Ken Cole, with four replies by Sungenis and four counter-replies from Cole) [2nd alternate URL]

As the Universe Turns: Is it physically possible for the whole universe to orbit the earth? (Gary Hoge)

Why the earth can't be the center of mass of the universe (+ Part II) (Gary Hoge vs. Robert Sungenis)

Debate between Gary Hoge and Robert Sungenis on Geocentrism

In the combox of one other post ("'No One's Perfect': Scientific Errors of Galileo and 16th-17th Century Cosmologies Rescued From Inexplicable Obscurity"), we were treated to the ramblings and jeremiads of a close Sungenis associate, Rick DeLano. He came onto my site like gangbusters, repeatedly insulting me and lecturing one and all about how ignorant about True Science (and liberal, etc.) we were if we didn't accept geocentrism. I was curious about his own scientific education, in light of his polemics. I had to ask him about four times, but at length he finally admitted, "I am a tenth grade dropout."

This seems to be one annoying Sungenis "method": sending out his bulldog associates to do his bidding for him. So we have DeLano's ravings on my site, and now we have one James B. Phillips, who came onto a combox of mine, announcing the new paper Bob was writing: critiquing my stated positions on the Galileo affair: setting the stage for the latest hoped-for pseudo-controversy and tempest-in-a-teapot. I replied:

I have neither time nor desire to interact with this. I know Bob's position, and disagree with it. My own position regarding Galileo has been laid out in several papers and in my new book on science.

If Bob wants to start critiquing me now, let him do it if he must. I've deliberately stayed out of all the internal conflicts between him and other apologists / Catholics, and he knows this. I don't think it is wise or prudent for him to start writing against my positions now, but I also believe in free speech, so he is free to do as he wishes.

I am also free to decide how to spend my time, and I choose to do so in defending Christianity and Catholicism in particular against the charges of atheists, not misguided accusations of fellow Catholics that I have inaccurately presented things.

It seems that the latest salvo (that I shall cite below) is not even the first public attack against yours truly. In a tract called "Mark Shea and the Cosmological Ostriches" (PDF), linked to on Bob's web page, Galileo Was Wrong, I was savaged as well (without ever being informed of the posting so that I might reply if I had wished to do so):

Then, of course, we have Mr. Armstrong to follow suit with his desire to obfuscate the
issue even more and do the same dance as Mr. Shea into the depths of demagoguery . . .

. . . like Mr. Shea, Mr. Armstrong has no education in science and thus he doesn't know what he is talking about. Ironically, like Mr. Shea, Mr. Armstrong writes detailed books on how Catholics should accept Catholic tradition against the Protestants who believe in Sola Scriptura, yet when it comes to the Church's almost two millennium tradition that teaches geocentrism, suddenly Mr. Armstrong loses faith in the Church and believes that cameras sent up by godless scientists prove that the Church of the 17th and 18th centuries was being led by the Devil instead of the Holy Spirit. That's what I call an "embarrassment." Of course, Mr. Armstrong doesn't bother telling us where HE thinks crop circles come from, but it's ok to ridicule Sungenis for making a suggestion as to their origin so that people don't believe they came from aliens. . . . perhaps Mr. Armstrong also believes in aliens who make crop circles. It wouldn't surprise me, since Mr. Armstrong will apparently accept anything that NASA tells him. . . .

If people would only read what we have to say and stop being brow-beaten by the likes of Mark Shea and David Armstrong, we could easily show that the Holy Spirit has never abandoned the Church and we can put our trust back in the magisterium, and in Tradition and Scripture.

Bob is disturbed that I am inclined to accept what NASA tells me about science. This makes perfect sense, I reckon, since on my site (in the exchange referred to at the top) the following skepticism regarding the authenticity of the moon landings is documented:

Jordanes had stated earlier in the combox thread that he didn't think you asserted that the moon landings were faked. Someone ("Pete") produced "documentation" that you did believe this. I find this to be insufficiently documented, as it was based on "gossipy"-type hearsay from a former associate, and from a post on a hostile website. So if you think the lunar landings actually happened, I'd be happy to hear you clarify that, so that it can be stated as a matter of record on my blog that this is an unjust charge against you.

I do not know whether they were real or fake.

He expanded his "lunar skepticism" to 9-11 as well in his piece, "Response to Jared Olar":

As for my right to be an agnostic about the moon landings, I'm certainly not the first and won't be the last. Any intelligent person who has studied the issue is going to have doubts as to whether the United States had the capability to put a man on the moon in 1969 when, for example, the processing power of a 1969 computer was less than one-tenth of that in a typical cell phone of today, especially when the U.S. was at the height of the Cold War and was still stinging from the Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957, and especially when the ability to fake a moon landing in a hidden studio was well within the talents of Hollywood technicians. My suspicions are only heightened when I see Neil Armstrong holding an American flag on the moon and suddenly a gust of wind forces the lower part of the flag to move up to the upper part of the flag. Any fool knows there is no wind on the moon. You can see this video on the Internet and in the documentaries made of the moon landings. [see one lengthy critique of this theory] Yes, and I might as well tell you so I can beat Mr. Olar to the punch: I also believe 9-11 was an inside job and that the Muslims had nothing to do with it, and I maintain this belief along with several thousand other intelligent scientists, engineers, military personnel, airline pilots, firemen and the like who, from their expertise in this area, are thoroughly convinced that we have been sold a bill of goods by our government.

I'm obviously part of this nefarious conspiracy, myself, being named Armstrong . . .

On his own site, Bob wrote:

Accordingly, an earth of approximately 10,000 to 15,000 years old agrees with much current scientific evidence on a number of fronts.

He also states in another article:

. . . our model holds that the universe rotates around the earth once per day, hence the aether also rotates around the earth once per day, and thus, all the objects we see from earth are rotating with the aether. [and he believes that the earth doesn't rotate]

And (I confess this is my favorite) in a recent article (7-21-10) Bob presented a lengthy section entitled "Dinosaurs Co-Exited With Humans."


And again, he has also stated (9-14-10):

If the earth is motionless in the center of the universe then the Big Bang is not possible. . . . The point in fact remains that a central and immobile Earth was, and is, the simplest and best answer to account for the equi-distribution of all objects, energies and forces we see surrounding us in the universe, everything from gamma rays, X-rays, the cosmic microwave background radiation, quasars, galaxy distribution, etc.

Bob's latest salvo now (his first full-length public article in which I am the primary target) is entitled "David Armstrong Teaching Falsehoods About Galileo in The One-Minute Apologist." It is displayed on his Galileo Was Wrong web page: the first article in "The Feature Articles" section, and is also linked at his main site (Bellarmine Theological Forum). Bob sent me a PDF before he posted it.

As I said, I have no interest in debating what I consider to be an altogether ludicrous position: held by virtually no scientists of any repute. I am only documenting the personal attacks in the paper (of the same sort that Bob decries and detests when others direct them towards him -- and that I join him in condemning). These are excerpts so I won't include ellipses (. . .). Line breaks thus indicate a break in the text (bolding is my own):

In his short two-page article from his new book, The One Minute Apologist, Mr. Armstrong tries to deal with some of the more common objections to the Catholic Church's treatment of Galileo. Unfortunately, he not only gives a grossly biased and unscholarly treatment of the issue, he also stoops to telling flat out falsehoods.

The other problem is this: Dave Armstrong, like every other Catholic apologist who wants to insist that the Catholic Church was wrong in its official teaching that the earth was motionless in the center of the universe, has to keep playing the show-stopping "infallibility" card to answering the critics. Although it may provide a temporary escape from being further scrutinized, it is always at the cost of consigning all non-infallible doctrines taught by the Ordinary Magisterium for the past 2000 years into the category of interesting but not necessarily true, and certainly not binding. If the Tradition, the Scripture and the canonical decrees against Galileo and heliocentrism are not to be regarded as true and binding, then why should any other non-infallible teaching of the Catholic Church? We can just pick and choose what we want to believe. As you can probably guess, this kind of dismissive apologetic will eventually destroy the Catholic Church, not help it, yet it is the only apologetic that the Dave Armstrongs are willing to use. God forbid that they should question the status quo of modern science.

. . . Mr. Armstrong, because he is an ardent evolutionist . . .

This is sheer nonsense. I have nothing on my site (with over 2500 papers) stating any such thing. In fact, I am an agnostic on the entire matter (as I stated in a recent discussion I had with eleven atheists, who invited me to defend the Christian view). I believe that there is a lot of hooey in standard Neo-Darwinism (especially of the materialist variety). I don't believe that the evolutionary theory is sufficiently accounted for by the facts of science as we know them, alone, and that if it is the true explanation for the variety of life, it is because of divine intervention either at various times or in some ongoing sense. I believe in intelligent design: particularly as explained by Catholic biochemist Michael Behe. All Christians, of course, believe that God is the Creator. His method of creation is another matter entirely.

If Robert Sungenis thinks I am so in league with materialist, secularist evolutionist thought, then perhaps he can explain why I was repeatedly trashed and personally insulted in my Dialogue on Materialist Evolutionary Theory and Intelligent Design. This has been on my website or blog for almost eight years. If Bob had troubled himself to actually document my views instead of imputing them to me he would have seen this statement of mine in the same dialogue:

I am basically an agnostic on the subject of macroevolution and the grand theory (and I am a Catholic). I fully accept microevolution, the old earth (of course), and uniformitarianism. If the current evolutionary theory as a whole (Darwinian or otherwise) is true, I believe it must involve design and God somewhere along the line. My principle objection, in other words, is to materialism or naturalism. I don't believe it has been scientifically demonstrated that matter alone has the inherent capability to organize itself into the existing universe, according to what we know of the laws of science, and observations and scientific experiments.

Skepticism used to be highly regarded amongst a certain strain of intellectuals, generally hostile to theism in general and Christianity in particular. But now that Darwinian evolution is the reigning orthodoxy and dogma, anyone who dares question it at all has to be "whipped" and burned at the stake of so-called "progress" and "scientific fact."

But Bob knows better than all that. He has a remarkable ability to see inside of people's minds and come up with the things that the person is himself unaware of! I say I am not an "ardent evolutionist." I stated as much on my site almost eight years ago. But Bob Sungenis has stated otherwise (with no documentation whatever), so that settles it! Why would I dare to disagree with his description of the inner workings of my mind?

Unfortunately, Mr. Armstrong's historical analysis turns into a ridiculous historiography from which no Catholic could ever get the truth. By the looks of it, my guess is that Mr. Armstrong probably spent "one minute" analyzing the Galileo issue before he decided to write down his thoughts in his new book.

So Mr. Armstrong, who tries so hard in all his other apologetics books to show that the Catholic Church was guided by the Holy Spirit, must now admit that the Holy Spirit decided to abandon the Church when the Church concluded that heliocentrism directly impinged on the veracity of Scripture. . . . As such, Mr. Armstrong is not really an "apologist" for the Catholic Church. He's an apologist for popular science. He has accepted popular science as his infallible dogmatic truth, both in its teaching of heliocentrism and evolution, and it is this golden standard by which he judges the Fathers, the popes, the cardinals and the catechism of the Catholic Church.

And so goes the desperate excuse of "it wasn't infallible!" that every Catholic apologist falls back on today to answer the Galileo issue, when in reality all they have done is irreparablely [sic] undermine the Catholic Church by calling into question every doctrine she has taught for 2000 years that has not used the venue of the extraordinary magisterium for its dissemination. How sad.

But this is what I invariably find among Catholic apologists when dealing with the Galileo issue – when it is to their advantage to be detailed and specific, they spare no words; when it is to their detriment, they simply refuse to reveal the proper or complete information. They've been able to use this hit-and-run apologetic for many years without being discovered, but that time has come to an end with the revelations we are making public. This is the kind of shoddy historical analysis that Catholic scholars have been perpetrating on their Catholic audiences for the last couple hundred years. Why? All because they shun the embarrassment of having to support the idea that the sun revolves around the earth, . . . They have thrown their lot in with popular science as their infallible guide to the universe, . . . If they would only study the science, they would find that true science supports geocentrism and actually disfavors heliocentrism. As it stands, however, few if any of the major Catholic apologists will read the science supporting geocentrism. I've sent them my books free of charge, but they refuse to read them. . . . I'm sure they will answer to God for their negligence.

I must say that I don't feel so badly about disagreeing with Robert Sungenis, concerning geocentrism and the permissibility of belief in theistic evolution, since I'm in very good company. He feels perfectly entitled to disagree with the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, (as well as Pope John Paul II) on the question of the supposed young earth and evolution, and on whether the latter was condemned by the Church "de fide." The pope says no; Bob says yes, and he is fool enough to think that we ought to accept his word simply because he says it, rather than believe that the pope knows better than he about what the Church teaches and doesn't teach, and permits as a belief and doesn't permit:

I stand by what I said, and I will even make it clearer and stronger in my follow up: Evolution is a heretical view of cosmogony due to the de fide statements from the magisterium given to us over 650 years that deny evolution and affirm ex nihilo creation. Those de fide statements are found in Lateran Council IV and Vatican Council I. . . .

As for whether we can criticize Pope Benedict for listening to the "vast majority of (expert) scientists," we can do so if Pope Benedict has made a concerted effort to ignore the other scientists in the world who have shown that evolution is impossible. Unfortunately, Pope Benedict has decided to ignore the alternative evidence and give more credence to evolution, just as John Paul II did. I know from various colleagues who talked with Cardinal Ratzinger, face to face at the Vatican. The Cardinal was presented with scientific evidence on stratigraphy showing that the geologic column was not created over millions of years but was made over a matter of months, but he simply rejected the evidence and sided with the status quo of evolution, and he did so by his own private judgment, even though he has no scientific credentials. That is what I am talking about, David. I don't make my accusations lightly.

(Question 296: "Are you being too harsh on Pope Benedict regarding evolution?")

This is, of course, arrogance and (purely Protestant) private judgment to a truly ridiculous degree (a thing sadly common among many Catholics who label themselves so-called "traditionalists"), and is its own refutation. In acting in this ludicrous fashion, Bob shows himself not a whit different in approach from Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521: standing there defying the Church and thinking he knew better than Holy Mother Church. Bob Sungenis has often fallen into the same exact error as Luther and the early Protestants.