The following letter was sent on 23 August, 1988 to Robert Doolan, the editor of Creation Ex Nihilo magazine, the Australian creationist organ:
The article entitled "Does the Earth Really Move" in the June-August 1988 issue of Creation Magazine (page 8), is an interesting example of the misconceptions that surround the modern geocentric movement. Typical of such misconceptions is the statement in the feature panel entitled "What do Geocentrists Believe?" (page 10) where it is claimed that the "geocentrists...have an annual conference in the United States." There is no such "annual conference" of geocentrists anywhere in the world, let alone the United States. To date the Tychonian Society has organized only one conference, in 1978, which was held at the Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. Contrary to what readers of Dr. de Young's article might infer, it drew a number of top-notch participants from all over the world. Among the physicists attending were two from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference even drew telephone participation from two California physicists, one of whom at that time worked at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Space will not allow a detailed refutation of Dr. de Young's claims, but let it be noted that objections based on the Coriolis effect, center of gravity and centrifugal effects are all adequately answered in a 1977 paper by Barbour and Bertotti.1
Dr. de Young submits pictures of earth taken from the moon as evidence of earth's rotation. Such an approach assumes that the opposite side of the earth could only be seen from the moon if the earth rotated; but if the universe, carrying the moon with it, rotated about the earth, the moon would also see the other side of the earth. In other words, if Dr. de Young can claim that photos of the moon prove the rotation of the earth, then geocentrists can equally claim that they prove the rotation of the universe.
Other points of confusion in Dr. de Young's paper include a failure to distinguish the concepts of "rotation" and "revolution," as is done in the "Centre of Gravity" section; and the confusion of rotational motion with translational motion as is implied by the "faster than light" argument. By contrast, note that Dr. Thomas Barnes' model of the electron has implicit in it the idea that the electron's equator is rotating with a speed in excess of the speed of light. The geocentrists' claim is no different.
All the physics arguments are moot to a Christian when it comes to the Bible. Modern geocentrists do not use Psalm 93:1 as a proof text for geocentricity at all. Ecclesiastes 1:5 and Joshua 10:13 (not verse 12) are seminal because in those verses it is the Bible's Editor who speaks. To excuse the language as being the "language of appearance" (p. 12) is tantamount to calling the Editor a liar. After all, this means that we did not know the "truth" of the matter until Copernicus. Dr. de Young writes that God, in Joshua 10:13, "might have said that the ‘earth instantly decelerated its rotational angular momentum to zero!’ But then, few people could understand Scripture at all." True, such phraseology might be a little obscure, but to extend deYoung's argument to the absurd, God could also have written the exact integral equations expressing the retardation of the earth's rotation and its subsequent acceleration 24 hours later. That would be even more obscure. On the other hand, if geocentricity is false, why did God not simply start Joshua 10:13 with the words: "And the earth stopped her turning until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies?" Is that not easier to understand than many other passages in scripture such as are found in Job chapter 38, for example? God is not above writing hard-to-understand things.
In response to my letter, editor Doolan wrote on November 7, 1988 that "I passed your letter on to Dr. DeYoung, but have not yet heard back from him." I had sent a copy to him, too, at the same time as I'd sent the original to editor Doolan. So deYoung received at least two copies. No reply: and none expected.