The new geocentrists regularly huff that I, supposedly, will not debate them. This isn’t true. Back in January of 2014 on their Facebook page the geocentrists challenged me to debate and I accepted that challenge on that same page:
I’m all for a public, moderated, written debate with each installment posted at each of our sites. Normal debate format: begin with a formal resolution, opening statements, cross examination, closing remarks. Word count limit instead of time limit. There have been a number of very effective and informative debates done in that way. I’m sure we can hammer out a resolution around whether the Catholic Church proposes an immobile earth to the faithful as a matter of divine revelation (the link to this posting is here, but they apparently have subsequently pulled this thread down.)
Only after I posted this acceptance did the geocentrists suddenly stipulate that only an oral debate would be acceptable. Since then they’ve gone to the even more ridiculous extreme of insisting that a written debate isn’t a debate at all. This won’t fly, if only because some years ago Sungenis’s associate Mark Wyatt proposed just such a formal written debate on a different topic (see here) and Sungenis accepted (see first reply here). So the current stance that a formal, written debate isn’t a “real” debate simply won’t bear scrutiny.
My position is that oral debates often generate considerably more heat than light, being prone to reduction to grandstanding and rhetorical tricks rather than being a sober evaluation of truth. Unmoderated written discussions in online forums often suffer from the same problems. And so I have proposed instead a public, moderated, written debate with each installment posted at each of our respective sites. This would be presented in normal debate format: a formal resolution, opening statements, cross examination, and closing remarks. There would be a word count limit instead of a time limit. I advance the following resolution:
“The Catholic Church does not propose that the Earth is the immobile center of the universe to the faithful as a matter of divine revelation.”
I will take the affirmative.
