Rick DeLano

"we rejected the geocentric cosmos because of the elegance of Newtonian gravitation. It seems so obviously correct.....for a while."

If so, he is in perhaps good, but probably small company.

Yes, there are problems with Newtonian gravitation as Celestial Mechanics:

• as he noted, it breaks down on the level of spiral galaxies and any bigger one, which is hidden by the fudge factor "dark matter" (I suppose if it is a fudge factor, it is coffee fudge ... already noted research into dark matter is an excuse for consuming more on it on the expense of tax payers and to the profits of Java, Guatemala, Ethiopia and such like ...);
  
  
• on solar system level, it works perfectly (more perfectly than I recalled from class) for a two body problem, but for a many body problem, it is incalculable and depends very much on initial factors;
  
  
• as I noted myself, while it might work on a many body problem if initial conditions were just right, it does not prove this to be true, unless you also presume absence of voluntary movers (on this scale men would be out of question, but God and His angels would not be so): if I drop a pen from under my chin, and a physicist knows both the weight and the height of my chin and the gravitation where I am standing, he can even so not be sure to calculate what impact it will have when reaching the ground, since I could catch it with the other hand before it so impacts. Human agents are too weak to do corresponding things with celestial bodies, God is not, angels are not.

But as said, the company which really does appreciate Newtonian gravitation is select (that covers both good and small at the same time). To many, as I noted to Robert Barron yesterday, the real issue is aliens on Tatooine or Simlane having as much and as little a right as we to take their sense observations from on their planets for what you see is what you get or real geometry of movement in the universe.

That such aliens might not exist is not too bothersome for popular belief, since they could say "ok, but just saying, what if ...?" - Well, what if not? What if our earth is the only body regularly inhabited by people with biological bodies depending on it, while other bodies are moved by spiritual beings who are well aware they are moving along with the body : Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Mars, α Centuari?

Then that popular argument, much easier than Newtonian vectors, and popularised by Galileo, Fontenelle, Euler, simply fails./HGL

PS : had little time yesterday, here I link to the video by Barron and to the post with my comments on it collected:

Bishop Barron on Netflix’s “Unorthodox” and the Modern Myth of Origins
"Bishop" Robert Barron | 28.V.2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMGWuNxDOh0

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Barron on Esty
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2020/06/barron-on-esty.html

Added on Ember Friday, 5.VI.2020/HGL