The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [85]
I interrupted again. “Yet isn’t it true that Copernicus’s discovery—that the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth, but that the Earth revolves around the sun—quite naturally demoted humankind?”
Richards nodded wearily as if he had heard that comment a lot. “Let’s go back to the beginning,” he said. He stood, removed his jacket, and draped it over an unoccupied chair. Sitting back down, he continued.
“The story is that the ancients—Aristotle, Ptolemy, medieval Christians—all thought we were at the center of the universe, sort of the throne of the cosmos, the most important place that everything revolved around. Then Copernicus and Kepler came along and said they can explain the movement of the planets better by assuming that the sun is at the center and that the planets—including Earth—revolve around it. So we’ve been displaced from the center and removed from our position of privilege.
“This was the start of a long march of science that continued to demote us. Scientists later determined the sun isn’t at the center of the universe; that we aren’t at the center of the galaxy; and that the universe ultimately had no center, because scientists came to believe in the nineteenth century that it was infinite and eternal. You can see how this trend helped us to see ourselves as less and less significant, less and less at the center of things.
“So the Copernican Revolution came to represent the conflict between science and religion. Religious superstition maintained the Earth and humankind are the center of the universe, both physically and metaphysically, but modern science has disproved that.
“Humans have been stripped of their false sense of uniqueness and importance. While religious folk continued to insist there is something unique, special, intentional, and purposeful about our existence, scientists maintain that the material world is all there is, and that chance and impersonal natural law alone explain its existence.”
I was following along in full agreement. Richards’s assessment was entirely consistent with what I had been taught in school. But then he added the clincher.
“The problem,” he said, a slight smile playing at the corner of his mouth, “is that this historical description is simply false.”
SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
Richards’s claim startled me. “False?” I declared. “What do you mean? In what way?”
“Read Ptolemy, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler. Read Dante,” he said. “In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the surface of the Earth is an intermediate place. This was true in Aristotelian cosmology, which was Christianized in the Middle Ages. For Aristotle, the world was made of air, earth, fire, and water. Earth is heaviest, so it naturally falls to the bottom.
“So the Earth was not so much at the center as it was at the bottom of the universe. It was sort of the cosmic sump. It was the place where things decay and die. Everything above the moon was made of a different type of matter—quintessence—and God dwelled in the heavenly sphere outside the celestial sphere of the stars. Man was in an intermediate place.”
Gonzalez spoke up. “Dante then inverted these levels as you go the other way, down to hell,” he said.
“Exactly,” continued Richards. “You had nine levels going up toward God and getting closer to perfection, and then there were nine levels getting closer to absolute depravity, down to hell. Thus, in medieval cosmology, what we would call the center of the universe is Satan’s throne. That’s a very important point. If you imagine the center of the universe is Satan’s throne and that the Earth itself is the cosmic sump, then clearly this is not the stereotype that we’ve been given that the center of the universe prior to Copernicus was the preeminent spot.”
Gonzalez added: “The Enlightenment later retold the story by saying the church, because of its arrogance, put humans in the center.”
Richards nodded. “That’s the irony,” he said. “It was the Enlightenment that made man the measure of all things. When you really