On February 13 Catholic World Report carried an interview with me about my latest book, The New Geocentrists. The interviewer was Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic World Report and of Catholic Insight. He asked five questions, which I answered by e-mail.
My book deals chiefly with a scientific theory and the people who promote it, but it was religion that prompted me to write the book. I probably wouldn’t have bothered if the people I profile had stuck to science, quirky as their views are, but they have shrouded their scientific assertions in the claim that the Church has taught, infallibly, that geocentrism is true and that Christians must subscribe to it.
The new geocentrists’ claim could lead to an unhappy result, I told Olson. They “hold themselves out as experts not only in science but in religion. They attempt to position themselves as authorities, and more and more people are accepting them as such. The result is that people end up subscribing not just to bad science but to bad religion. The danger is that eventually, when these people realize the scientific errors of geocentrism, they will conclude that truth is to be found neither in science nor in religion.”
In other words, by pushing geocentrism, its proponents could end up producing agnostics.
The whole interview—Olson’s questions and my answers—comes to just 840 words, but it has generated well over 1,000 comments. Some comments are longer than the entire interview. So far, the comments tally about 200,000 words, compared to 80,000 words in my book.
Many of the comments are informative, many entertaining, many puerile. (My own contributions to the exchange fall into the first two categories, of course.) One comment, given by various people in various forms, has struck me as particularly off base. It is the complaint that geocentrism is too unimportant to write about when there are bigger issues to tackle. Why, they wonder, am I “wasting” my time with such an inconsequential issue when the whole world is falling apart?
Here is how one woman put it:
“Why don’t you use your valuable time to target the real problems in the Church—the frighteningly modernist prelates who are planning the demise of Catholicism as we know it? You really should use your time and considerable talents for matters of greater import, given the grave situation in the Church today.”
She said this in a dozen posts and in a dozen phrasings. Other commenters joined her. I appreciate their solicitude for me. They want to make sure I put my time to best use. But are we obliged to deal only with the most important things—whatever they are—all the time? I don’t think so.
A few months ago I met a lepidopterist. He spends his time studying and collecting moths. All I know about moths is that they gather around porch lights, but this man has devoted his life to them. Are there more important areas of study in biology? No doubt, but I am glad that there are people who study moths. It would be a less interesting world if only the Top Ten things were studied while countless “unimportant” things were ignored. All truth is good and worth knowing, even if we’re not the knowers.
There are people who do nothing but write about “frighteningly modernist prelates who are planning the demise of Catholicism as we know it.” There are others who write about other religious topics. To each his own. I never will write catechetical materials for children, but I am glad that some people have. I have no interest in writing about certain abstruse areas of biblical exegesis, but I delight that some people do. I see no reason to use a crude, utilitarian calculus that insists that Catholic writers should write only about issues that affect, or will interest, large numbers of people.
In any college writing program, the first instruction is to “write about what interests you.” No instructor says, “Write only about the Top Ten.” Sometimes a writer will be drawn to write about one of the Top Ten—whether in religion or in some other field—but usually his theme will be one that is of little interest to most people. There is nothing wrong with that, except in the eyes of ideologues who imagine that those whose interests differ from theirs are wasting their talents.
I suspect there is a subtext to the complaint levied against me. It’s not just that I’m not writing about some people’s pet topic. It’s that I am writing about a topic they want me to stay away from. They clothe their insistence in concern for my welfare, but their real concern is for their own beliefs, which they don’t want challenged. People who have no stake in geocentrism might say, “He’s wasting his time,” but they’d follow it up with “Who cares?” They wouldn’t write multiple comments, trying to scare me off.
In years past, when I wrote about other topics not in the Top Ten, these same people didn’t offer their advice. They didn’t say I was wasting my time, no matter how narrow the topic. Did I write about something literary or historical or artistic? Fine, but now I have criticized a view to which they subscribe, and they want me to back off. Perhaps they don’t feel up to defending geocentrism (or suspect it may have no adequate defense) and would feel more comfortable if no one challenged the theory. I can understand that.
I just don’t understand why some people waste their time telling me I’m wasting my time.