Does the Bible “Teach” Geocentrism?

Does the Bible “teach” geocentrism? I’m glad that Joel Watts is taking the time to argue the case that it does.

But I’d like to suggest that that’s not the best way to phrase the question. The Biblical literature was entirely composed in contexts where geocentrism was accepted as true, and it is worth noting that at the very least it never challenges geocentrism directly or explicitly. If something is written in a context in which X is assumed to be true, and it says nothing to contradict X, should it be assumed that the author probably accepted X as true?

It is important not to only ask “Does the Bible explicitly emphasize this?” nor “Can the Bible can be made to seem compatible with what we have since learned?”, but “What would the Bible have been understood to mean to its original hearers and readers?”

If we ask the latter question, then the answer is that the Bible may not “teach geocentrism“, but only for the simple reason that geocentrism was so much taken for granted that it could be treated as a given, a universal assumption, and thus there was no need to “teach” it.

The same is probably true of spontaneous generation.