Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [22]
The Pope does, though, go on to add:
The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was in some way imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scriptures.
Here indeed considerable progress has been made—although proponents of fundamentalist faiths will be distressed to hear from the Pontiff that Sacred Scripture is not always literally true.
But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? As soon as we admit that there are scriptural mistakes (or concessions to the ignorance of the times), then how can the Bible be an inerrant guide to ethics and morals? Might sects and individuals now accept as authentic the parts of the Bible they like, and reject those that are inconvenient or burdensome? Prohibitions against murder, say, are essential for a society to function, but if divine retribution for murder is considered implausible, won’t more people think they can get away with it?
Many felt that Copernicus and Galileo were up to no good and erosive of the social order. Indeed any challenge, from any source, to the literal truth of the Bible might have such consequences. We can readily see how science began to make people nervous. Instead of criticizing those who perpetuated the myths, public rancor was directed at those who discredited them.
OUR ANCESTORS UNDERSTOOD origins by extrapolating from their own experience. How else could they have done it? So the Universe was hatched from a cosmic egg, or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother god and a father god, or was a kind of product of the Creator’s workshop—perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. And the Universe was not much bigger than we see, and not much older than our written or oral records, and nowhere very different from places that we know.
We’ve tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we’ve not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious.
Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity. It contrasts starkly with the childishness and narcissism of our pre-Copernican notions.
But why should we want to think that the Universe was made for us? Why is the idea so appealing? Why do we nurture it? Is our self-esteem so precarious that nothing short of a universe custom-made for us will do?
Of course it appeals to our vanity. “What a man desires, he also imagines to be true,” said Demosthenes. “The light of faith makes us see what we believe,” cheerfully admitted St. Thomas Aquinas. But I think there may be something else. There’s a kind of ethnocentrism among primates. To whichever little group we happen to be born, we owe passionate love and