Einstein to the Rescue?
It seems to me that the author of this quote, Dr. Carl A. Zapffe, though bent on pleading his own cause, with these remarks may well be skirting a more promising approach in astrophysics. With regard to the General Theory as such: suppose the facile analogy of space as the frictionless surface of an expanding balloon, with all celestial bodies whirling around on it, to have value. Then Russell’s metaphysical dilemma still stands. Einstein, in a haughty illusion “observing” the Universe from a transcendental observatory, only immaterially existing inside his skull, prophecies that if we will just join him there “on high” we shall see how there is nowhere a hold on the curved Heaven. Yet what if there really is an Almighty God looking at His creation from a nth dimension, and revealing in His Message to mankind that He has on this “balloon” established the Earth in such a way that it cannot be moved?… Who of us here below can do more than believe the one or the Other?
In the present context I am satisfied with the undeniable actuality that though the STR presumably allowed the astronomers to escape from a geocentric bugbear – and a daunting argument from design behind it! – the GTR has been compelled to declare the Earth-centered model “as good as anybody else’s, but not better”.(49)
There are, however, for a skeptic wary of buying a pig in a poke, a few reflections that will cause him to take Einstein’s cure-all for the problems, sketchily paraded in the foregoing, with a little less than total conviction.