Dogma and the Universe
This post is partly in response to a blog post on Evolution News from a couple of years ago, recently recycled here (and prompted by a recent post at the Sensuous Curmudgeon).
Self-appointed spokesmen for science often use the enormous size of the cosmos, with its billions of galaxies, as a club to beat up on Christianity. They say people in the Western tradition had to wait for modern science to grasp that the universe was huge, and had to shed historic Judeo-Christian views to do so.
Not true.
The author, self-appointed spokesmen for ID, Mike Keas, cites an essay that CS Lewis wrote in 1943. CS Lewis is something of a hero to a lot of Christians, and it is interesting to note he utter rejected creationism! However, this essay is on another subject.
Keas says:
C.S. Lewis in his 1943 essay “Dogma and the Universe” demolished Nye’s way of thinking. Lewis begins with an analogy.
Lewis' essay can be found here (it looks like it was scanned, and contains some errors that I will try to correct; apologies if I introduce my own). This post will be responding to that essay, rather than Keas post.
The Ancients Believed The Universe Was (Relatively) Small
Lewis argues:
In popular thought, however, the origin of the universe has counted (I think) for less than its character — its immense size and its apparent indifference, if not hostility, to human life. And very often this impresses people all the more because it is supposed to be a modern discovery — an excellent example of those things which our ancestors did not know and which, if they had known them, would have prevented the very beginnings of Christianity. Here there is a simple historical falsehood. Ptolemy knew just as well as Eddington that the earth was infinitesimal in comparison with the whole content of space. There is no question here of knowledge having grown until the frame of archaic thought is no longer able to contain it. The real question is why the spatial insignificance of the earth, after being known for centuries, should suddenly in the last century have become an argument against Christianity. I do not know why this has happened; but I am sure it does not mark an increased clarity of thought, for the argument from size is, in my opinion, very feeble.
Lewis is just plain wrong here. Ptolemy had a very different view of the universe to Eddington.
Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) had a modern understanding of the universe; the earth orbiting the sun at a distance of 93 million miles, the sun but one star of billions in the galaxy, and the galaxy being but one of many. He was, by the way, the first to speculate that stars work by nuclear fusion.
The is very different to Ptolemy (c.100–c.170), who believed the earth was at the centre of the universe, and that the planets and stars are fixed to nested spheres around the earth.
Ptolemy believed the outmost sphere - and hence the size of the universe - was about 80 million miles away. Eddington believed the nearest star is 6000 million miles away.
From Wiki:
... Ptolemy goes beyond the mathematical models of the Almagest to present a physical realization of the universe as a set of nested spheres,[41] in which he used the epicycles of his planetary model to compute the dimensions of the universe. He estimated the Sun was at an average distance of 1,210 Earth radii (now known to actually be ~23,450 radii), while the radius of the sphere of the fixed stars was 20,000 times the radius of the Earth
When Lewis says the "spatial insignificance of the earth" has been "known for centuries", he is flat out wrong.
It was certainly not known about in Ptolemy's time. It was from the Renaissance era when the idea that the earth rotated the sun started to gain traction. But even then, the belief was that the sun was stationary - that was the new centre of the universe. And a universe presumably not significantly bigger than Ptolemy's 80 million miles.
The idea that our sun is but a star like any other only became apparent in the eighteenth century, and not until Friedrich Bessel in 1838 did we get the first good estimate of the distance to another star, and hence the proof that they are comparable is size and brightness to the sun. This is also the first time the vastness of the distance was appreciated.
I find it hard to believe anyone considered our solar system to be less than special before that, a mere 105 years before Lewis was writing.
What If God Existed?
Lewis argues:
When the doctor at a postmortem diagnoses poison, pointing to the state of the dead man's organs, his argument is rational because he has a clear idea of that opposite state in which the organs would have been found if no poison were present. In the same way, if we use the vastness of space and the smallness Of earth to disprove the existence of God, we ought to have a clear idea of the sort of universe we should expect if God did exist. But have we? Whatever space may be in itself — and, of course, some moderns think it finite — we certainly perceive it as three-dimensional, and to three dimensional space we can conceive no boundaries. By the very forms of our perceptions, therefore, we must feel as if we lived somewhere in infinite space.
So what if there was a God, and he created the earth as a special place... What would we expect it to look like?
We only need to look at Genesis to see what people in ancient times believed - a flat world with a solid dome. Earth was very much the centre of this universe; the sun, moon and stars merely lights adorning a dome. This is the universe that "the very forms of our perceptions" indicates, not the infinite that Lewis would have us believe.
And here is Christianity's downfall. What we would expect - if Christianity is true - is the universe of Genesis. A universe created for man, a universe where man can live pretty much anywhere, a universe when the centre is man's abode.
This is in stark contrast to the reality; that we live on an insignificant planet, orbiting an insignificant star, one amongst billions in a galaxy, itself merely one in billions, in a universe where over 99.9999999% of its volume would lead to death within minutes.
What Of Other Planets
Lewis goes on to explain Christianity is fine with lots of other intelligent races and none at all.
If the universe is teeming with life, this, we are told, reduces to absurdity the Christian claim—or what is thought to be the Christian claim—that man is unique, and the Christian doctrine that to this one planet God came down and was incarnate for us men and our salvation. If, on the other hand, the earth is really unique, then that proves that life is only an accidental by-product in the universe, and so again disproves our religion. Really, we are hard to please.
While I would agree that the earth being unique is not of itself an issue to Christianity, I think the former argument has merit. If there are other races out there, did Adam's sin and the Fall affect them? I do not think it makes any sense to say it did, and so presumably these other races are not the sinful creatures mankind is. Did Jesus's crucifixion save all alien races from sin?
There is a reason creationists are so adamant there is no extra-terrestrial intelligence - they know it is not compatible with scripture.
Does Size Matter?
However that may be, it is certain that the whole argument from size rests on the assumption that differences of size ought to coincide with differences of value: for unless they do, there is, of course, no reason why the minute earth and the yet smaller human creatures upon it should not be the most important things in a universe that contains the spiral nebulae. Now, is this assumption rational or emotional? I feel, as well as anyone else, the absurdity of supposing that the galaxy could be of less moment in God's eyes than such an atom as a human being. But I notice that I feel no similar absurdity in supposing that a man of five feet high may be more important than another man who is five feet three and a half—nor that a man may matter more than a tree, or a brain more than a leg. In other words, the feeling of absurdity arises only if the differences of size are very great.
It is not so much size, as specialness.
The difference between the two men is of no consequence. But the difference between a world that is a few thousand miles across, compared to a universe that is billions of light years across is one of scale.
And a consequence of the scale is specialness. If all the universe is a world a few thousand miles across, then that world is special. If there are countless billions upon billions of such worlds, then any one is not special. The former has more value than the latter; the latter is of less significance than the former.
To put it in Christian terms, who was more important to the human race; Adam or that guy you saw waiting for a bus the other day. Adam is special because he was the only one. That guy at the bus stop is just one of seven billion people. Of course, he is special to himself and his family - just as the earth is special to us - but in he grand scheme of things he is as insignificant as our planet is in the galaxy.
Lovecraftian Horror
We Suck
I am insignificant … I am just another speck of sand. And the Earth really in the cosmic scheme of things is another speck. And the sun an unremarkable star … And the galaxy is a speck. I’m a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.
Nye’s audience laughed approvingly, no doubt because they believed that “I suck” really means religion (which teaches that we don’t suck) sucks.
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