something like Linde’s Cosmos is true, there is—amazingly—still another devastating deprovincialization awaiting us.
Our powers are far from adequate to be creating universes anytime soon. Strong Anthropic Principle ideas are not amenable to proof (although Linde’s cosmology does have some testable features). Extraterrestrial life aside, if self-congratulatory pretensions to centrality have now retreated to such bastions impervious to experiment, then the sequence of scientific battles with human chauvinism would seem to have been, at least largely, won.
THE LONG-STANDING VIEW, as summarized by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, that “without man… the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final end” is revealed to be self- indulgent folly. A Principle of Mediocrity seems to apply to all our circumstances. We could not have known beforehand that the evidence would be, so repeatedly and thoroughly, incompatible with the proposition that human beings are at center stage in the Universe. But most of the debates have now been settled decisively in favor of a position that, however painful, can be encapsulated in a single sentence: We have not been given the lead in the cosmic drama.
Perhaps someone else has. Perhaps no one else has. In either case, we have good reason for humility.
Chapter 4.
A Universe Not Made for Us
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
What a beautiful sunset,” we say, or “I’m up before sunrise.” No matter what the scientists allege, in everyday speech we often ignore their findings. We don’t talk about the Earth turning, but about the Sun rising and setting. Try formulating it in Copernican language. Would you say, “Billy, be home by the time the Earth has rotated enough so as to occult the Sun below the local horizon”? Billy would be long gone before you’re finished. We haven’t been able even to find a graceful locution that accurately the Heliocentric insight. We at the center and everything else circling us is built into our languages; we teach it to our children. We are unreconstructed geocentrists hiding behind a Copernican veneer.[6]
In 1633 the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo for teaching that the Earth goes around the Sun. Let’s take a closer look at this famous controversy. In the preface to his book comparing the two hypotheses—an Earth-centered and a Sun-centered universe—Galileo had written,
The celestial phenomena will be examined, strengthening the Copernican hypothesis until it might seem that this must triumph absolutely.
And later in the book he confessed,
Nor can I ever sufficiently admire [Copernicus and his followers]; they have through sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over what sensible experience plainly showed them…
The Church declared, in its indictment of Galileo,
The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both psychologically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.
Galileo replied,
The doctrine of the movements of the earth and the fixity of the sun is condemned on the ground that the Scriptures speak in many places of the sun moving and the earth standing still… It is piously spoken that the Scriptures cannot lie. But none will deny that they are frequently abstruse and their true meaning difficult to discover, and more than the bare words signify. I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.
But in his recantation (June 22, 1633) Galileo was made to say,
Having been admonished by the Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth was not the center of the same and that it moved… I have been… suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the center of the same, and that it does move… I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the same errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church.
It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo’s work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.
Pontifical disquiet with modern science has ebbed and flowed since the time of Galileo. The high-water mark in recent history is the 1864 Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX, the pope who also convened the Vatican Council at which the doctrine of papal infallibility was, at his insistence, first proclaimed. Here are a few excerpts:
Divine revelation is perfect and, therefore, it is not subject to continual and indefinite progress in order to correspond with the progress of human reason… No man is free to embrace and profess that religion which he believes to be true, guided by the light of reason… The Church has power to define dogmatically the religion of the Catholic Church to be the only true religion… It is necessary even in the present day that the Catholic religion shall be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship… The civil liberty of every mode of worship, and full power given to all of openly and publicly manifesting their opinions and their ideas
