Though educated people in antiquity knew (contrary to today’s flat-earthers) that the earth was round, most believed, and with good reasons, that the earth sat immobile in the center of the universe and that all the stars and planets orbited it. After all, the earth sure doesn’t feel as if it’s moving, and birds don’t get blown back when they fly, and dropped rocks fall straight down, which makes no sense if the earth were in motion. Meanwhile, the sun sure looks as if it’s orbiting us.
Along with all this sensory evidence, the science/philosophy of Aristotle had come to dominate Western thought. And because Aristotle taught that the earth did, indeed, sit immobile in the center of the cosmos, and that the stars and planets did, indeed, orbit it, the church had not only incorporated this error into its theology but deemed it heresy to believe or teach otherwise.
However, in 1543, along came Nicholaus Copernicus with his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”), in which he argued that—despite how things look and feel, and despite what Aristotle (known as “The Philosopher”) and the Roman Church taught—the earth orbited the sun, and not the other way around. Today, of course, we take all this for granted, but back then this thinking was dangerous (Copernicus died right after his book came out), as Galileo Galilei was to learn less than a century later.
But there’s something more consequential here than the Vatican’s ignorant dogmatism about cosmology (it finally admitted Galileo was right, three centuries later). Beginning with Copernicus, who evicted the earth from the center of the cosmos, to Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lippershey who, in 1608, used lenses to magnify distant objects, to the James Webb Space Telescope, which can capture the light of objects 13.5 billion light years away, we now know that far from being geographically the center of anything, our earth orbits a medium-sized star in a minor arm of the Milky Way, one of about two trillion galaxies. (Who hasn’t seen those t-shirts with an image of the Milky Way with the words “You are here” and an arrow pointing to a spot on it?)
As our telescopes improve, and as an infinity of new galaxies farther and farther away are stamped into our consciousness, shrinking us more and more in contrast to the cosmos—how has the Christian narrative fared?
No wonder, then, that many believe in “The Copernican Principle,” the idea that earth is nothing special nor holds a privileged position in the cosmos. It’s just one of trillions of planets and stars, and a rather small planet at that. Worse, this smallness has only been magnified by the James Webb Space Telescope, whose images of endless galaxies millions, even billons, of light-years away can shrivel us up with the sense of our own apparent insignificance amid a creation so vast that the water and fat in our brains, even braided into 86 billion neurons, can’t imagine it. Because our daily existence deals with distances at most in the thousands of miles, we can barely contemplate a single light year (5,878,625,370,000 miles), and so what do we do with twenty or so billion?
As our telescopes improve, and as an infinity of new galaxies farther and farther away are stamped into our consciousness, shrinking us more and more in contrast to the cosmos—how has the Christian narrative fared?
“The sheer improbability of the whole nexus of events,” wrote Richard Tarnas, “was becoming painfully obvious—that an infinite eternal God would have suddenly become a particular human being in a specific historical time and place only to be ignominiously executed. That a single brief life taking place two millennia earlier in an obscure primitive nation, on a planet now known to be a relatively insignificant piece of matter revolving about one star among billions in an inconceivably vast and impersonal universe—that such an undistinguished event should have any overwhelming cosmic or eternal meaning could no longer be a compelling belief for reasonable men.”[i]
Or, instead, deducing expressions of God’s love from the natural world on earth, reasonable men can see from the vastness of the cosmos an even more powerful expression of that love. That is, they can see a love so great that it spans billions of light years, and reaches past billions of galaxies, in order to embrace us with heaven’s greatest gift: Jesus Himself. The One who spread out all that space and who kindled all these galaxies in it to begin with (John 1:1-3; Col. 1:16-18) sacrificed Himself on the cross for us shriveled up little beings here. And this is what Tarnas dubbed “such an undistinguished event”?
Contrary to the Copernican Principle, the mere fact that we are so small and the universe so big reveals the extent of divine love. And every new cluster of galaxies found, and every additional light-year patches of cosmic real estate discovered, testify only more to a love so great that we should bow in submission and gratefulness for what we, surely, have not earned.
[i] Tarnas, Richard. Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 305.
