Tides, Faith, and a 300-Year-Old Resolved Debate
In a pointed rebuttal, an engineer and researcher takes aim at arguments that invoke natural phenomena to defend faith-based explanations of the world. The specific example under fire is the use of tides as a rhetorical device—a choice that, the author notes, carries an ironic historical weight.
Galileo’s own attempt to explain the tides through a heliocentric model was famously suppressed by the church. His "Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea" (1632) was censored and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, where it remained until 1835. Though that model was itself flawed, Newton’s subsequent theory of universal gravitation—published in the Principia—provided an accurate, physics-based account of ocean dynamics under an inverse square force within a mere fifty years.
The scientific debate was effectively closed more than three centuries ago, the author argues. A supernatural explanation for the tides was long ago discarded in favor of a successful, physically grounded model. To challenge a non-supernatural worldview by invoking this particular example, the piece concludes, is to ignore a history that undermines rather than supports the position it is meant to defend.
