What you are talking about are called inertial frames of reference in modern physics. If your frame of reference begins to accelerate, you will observe fictitious forces moving objects not attached to that frame. For example, it you have a hot cup of coffee sitting on the dashboard of your car and step on the gas, the coffee is going to slide into your lap. But relative to the earth, the coffee didn't move horizontally at all because no forces acted on it in that direction, even though from the point of view of your scalded lap, it looks like some invisible force pushed the coffee off the dashboard.
If the Church begins to teach geocentrism again, nothing will change. We'll have the same seasons, the same satellite TV, and the same Carl Sagan intoning about "billions and billions"
Yes, in Eistein's theory of general relativity, modern physics doesn't care where you place the center of the universe. You can make the tip of your nose the center of the universe, and as long as you keep your nose the center for all your calculations, you get the same answer as putting the center 100 million light years away from your nose.
So, what you say makes sense. It doesn't matter where you locate the physical center as long as you don't become dogmatic and literalistic about where the center is.
As for bringing out the spiritual meaning of the center, I believe someone in the middle ages said that God is a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere.
What happens in a frame of reference of a car is that a gravity field emerges and pushes the passengers to their seats, and the coffee to the edge of the cup. It might be more convenient to speak of acceleration, but the underlying reality is the same, -- the warped time/space.
Some of the comments and examples given here articulate very nicely some of the things that I feel and think about the relationship of science to the Scriptures, but have difficulty expressing.
It has been my personal experience that I was far more skeptical toward the Bible and far more inclined to try to find alternative explanations for certain things in it back when I was in high school. With every year of working in the sciences, from college through doctoral and postdoctoral work, I actually found myself more and more inclined to accept Scriptures at face value.
In no small part, it has been precisely because of my acute awareness of the limitations of both observation and explanation in the sciences. Since history is one of my avocations, I am always fascinated to read accounts written by scientific observers of both the recent and distant past. I particularly read with great interest observations that deal with my own particular little area of knowledge -- things that I know forward and backward and intimately, because people's lives depend on how well I understand it.
What I am working my way up to is that when I read the observations of my predecessors in my little field of expertise, I see the acuteness and accuracy of their observations. Being less dependent on technology, often their observations are far more precise than our own. I am astounded by their observations and even by the perceptiveness of their explanations for what they are observing.
They use different language and terminology, because their paradigm for making the explanations or for describing things are different. They certainly have different tools and technology for making observations, but because I live inside the same practical world that they do, I understand what they are talking about, and am awed at their perceptiveness. When one gives them a chance to speak in their own language, they are often far more scientifically accurate than a casual glance would give them credit for.
On the other hand, when I step outside my own area of expertise, and read something from an earlier era in some other area, it all too often sounds like ignorant voodoo. This is because I don't know enough about what they are observing to see past the differences of culture and time and recognize what they are talking about.
To steal annalex's example, I'm not going to take those ancient observations and paste them into a modern textbook, since by taking them out of their original context and trying to read them as though they were written today, they would appear inaccurate at best, nonsensical at worst.
And of course, I'm here talking about writings that were originally intended to be scientific in their day, which of course, the Scriptures never were. But that doesn't mean that observations contained within non-scientific works, taken in context, are necessarily without accuracy. This is aptly illustrated by annalex's description of his living in a hopelessly archaic geocentric world -- which I certainly also do, but would never have had the courage to say so with such boldness. :-)
But we tend to do just that! We place the physical, rational, etc. over spiritual. The worst error is when we cloak the physical, rational, with spiritual and present it as absolute truth.
The Fathers have argued that reason is not the way to reach or understand the spiritual, and that only through prayer, when "reason ceases and words fall silent" can we reach God.
If mankind, the Church especially, did not read into the Scripture "scientifically," Galileo's discoveries would have been hailed, as all science should be hailed, for giving us a more glorious idea of God's Creation. Nothing in the Scripture contradicts science when Scripture is read spiritually, and not literalistically or dogmatically, because the physical world and the spiritual world are separate, and mutually exclusive: science makes working models; Scriptures makes virtuous men.
What made Galileo's discoveries subject to "vehement suspicion of heresy" was precisely dogmatic and literalistic interpretation of the center.
But, in all fairness, this is easier said now then it was in Galileo's days, and I wonder how many of us would have sided with the Church, for the Old World Order was not without precedence and its own proofs.