Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [23]
If this is our natural way of viewing the world, then it should occasion no surprise that every time we make a naive judgment about our place in the Universe—one untempered by careful and skeptical scientific examination—we almost always opt for the centrality of our group and circumstance. We want to believe, moreover, that these are objective facts, and not our prejudices finding a sanctioned vent.
So it’s not much fun to have a gaggle of scientists incessantly haranguing us with “You’re ordinary, you’re unimportant, your privileges are undeserved, there’s nothing special about you.” Even unexcitable people might, after a while, grow annoyed at this incantation and those who insist on chanting it. It almost seems that the scientists are getting some weird satisfaction out of putting humans down. Why can’t they find a way in which we’re superior? Lift our spirits! Exalt us! In such debates science, with its mantra of discouragement, feels cold and remote, dispassionate, detached, unresponsive to human needs.
And, again, if we’re not important, not central, not the apple of God’s eye, what is implied for our theologically based moral codes? The discovery of our true bearings in the Cosmos was resisted for so long and to such a degree that many traces of the debate remain, sometimes with the motives of the geocentrists laid bare. Here, for example, is a revealing unsigned commentary in the British review The Spectator in 1892:
[I]t is certain enough that the discovery of the heliocentric motion of the planets which reduced our earth to its proper “insignificance” in the solar system, did a good deal to reduce to a similar but far from proper “insignificance” the moral principles by which the predominant races of the earth had hitherto been guided and restrained. Part of this effect was no doubt due to the evidence afforded that the physical science of various inspired writers was erroneous instead of being infallible,—a conviction which unduly shook the confidence felt even in their moral and religious teaching. But a good deal of it was due only to the mere sense of “insignificance” with which man has contemplated himself, since he has discovered that he inhabits nothing but a very obscure corner of the universe, instead of the central world round which sun, moon, and stars alike revolved. There can be no doubt that man may feel himself, and has often felt himself, a great deal too insignificant to be the object of any particular divine training or care. If the earth be regarded as a sort of ant-hill, and the life and death of human beings as the life and death of so many ants which run into and out of so many holes in search of food and sunlight, it is quite certain that no adequate importance will be attached to the duties of human life, and that a profound fatalism and hopelessness, instead of new hopefulness, will attach to human effort …
[F]or the present at least, our horizons are quite vast enough …; till we can get used to the infinite horizons we already have, and not lose our balance so much as we usually do in contemplating them, the yearning for still wider horizons is premature.
WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay